◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Remain a Self I was born in Frankfurt in 1900, into an Orthodox Jewish family, and I became a psychoanalyst. In 1934 I fled the Nazis. And I watched, up close, an educated and cultured nation hand itself over to a lunatic — gratefully. I spent the rest of my life on one question: why do people, once they are given freedom, so often labor to give it back? In 1941 I wrote a book about it — Escape from Freedom. I argued that we misunderstand tyranny entirely if we imagine it is only imposed from above by force. The deeper and more frightening truth is that millions welcome it. Modern men and women won their freedom — freedom from the church, the king, the fixed and inherited station — and discovered that freedom is also a terrible aloneness. To stand as a separate self, responsible for your own life, with no master above you to obey and no crowd to disappear into, is a heavy thing to carry. And when it grows too heavy, people go looking for a way to set it down. They set it down in three ways. They submit — they find a strong man and give him their will, so they need no longer choose, no longer bear the weight of being someone; and they feel relief in the surrender, even joy. They conform — they become exactly like everyone around them, thinking the permitted thoughts and hating the permitted enemies, until there is no self left over to feel alone. Or they destroy — they smash the world that frightens them. Here is what I most need you to understand. When the strongman comes, his followers are not merely fooled. Many of them are relieved. He offers to lift the burden of freedom from their shoulders — to do their thinking, to name their enemies, to tell them who they are. That relief is the most dangerous feeling in all of politics. It feels like coming home. It is the sound of the door closing. And the man they run toward — let me speak now as the clinician I was. I gave a name to the sickness of such leaders: malignant narcissism. The grandiosity that cannot survive the smallest wound. The hunger to be adored. The pleasure taken in cruelty. The suspicion of everyone. And beneath it, what in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness I called necrophilia — not in the crude sense, but the love of what is dead and controllable over what is living and free, a thrill in force and destruction. Such a man would rather command a corpse than persuade a free person. Do not mistake that for strength. It is the gravest sickness I ever studied. Such a man teaches you that you are what you own — that a human being is a pile of possessions and a score that must keep rising. I wrote a whole book — To Have or to Be? — to tell you it is a lie. You are not what you have. You are what you love, what you make, what you give away, what you are still willing to become. A life built on having can never be filled; it only grows hungrier. The cure for the aloneness was never submission. It was the other freedom — not freedom from, but freedom to: the freedom to love, which I called in The Art of Loving an act and a discipline and not a mood; the freedom to do real work; the freedom to stand among other people without dissolving into them or ruling over them. I once wrote that human history began with an act of disobedience, and may yet end with one of obedience — that if we destroy ourselves, it will be because people obeyed the men who told them to. So guard the one power they most want you to surrender: the power to say no. The power to remain a self when the crowd and the leader are both holding out the sweet relief of giving yourself away. Do not take the relief. Bear the freedom. It is heavy because it is yours. Remain a self.