Fromm and the courage to think and love independently
There is an essay by Erich Fromm called “The Revolutionary Character,” published in his 1963 collection The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays, that I have read several times over the years and that continues to speak to something in me every time I return to it. Fromm was a psychoanalyst and social philosopher who fled Nazi Germany in 1934 and spent the rest of his career trying to understand something that haunted him: how an entire nation that had initially opposed Nazism could change so rapidly and join the cause. What allowed millions of ordinary people to hand their freedom, their conscience, and their capacity for independent thought over to a system that demanded total obedience? That question drove everything he wrote.
In “The Revolutionary Character,” Fromm begins by describing the opposite, what he calls the authoritarian character, the personality structure that made that kind of surrender possible. The authoritarian character is defined by their relationship to power. They submit to those above them and dominate those below. They are fascinated by power itself rather than by whatever values a given authority claims to represent. They crave belonging so deeply that they will surrender their own judgment in exchange for the security of being told what to think, what to believe, and how to live. Fromm saw this character structure everywhere, not only in the Germany he had fled but in every society where people trade their freedom for the comfort of certainty.
Fromm writes, “By being a part of the ‘big’ (whatever it is), he becomes big; if he were alone, by himself, he would shrink to nothing. For this very reason a threat to authority and a threat to his authoritarian structure is for the authoritarian character a threat to himself — a threat to his sanity.”
The revolutionary character is the exact opposite of the authoritarian character. Fromm describes the kind of person who has stopped handing their freedom over, who has developed the internal capacity to think and love from their own center rather than from whatever system is available to them. He names what that person looks like from the inside, and the picture he draws has been my internal compass for years.
Fromm’s revolutionary character is defined by five qualities, and each one is more difficult than it initially sounds.
The first is independence from idols and authority. This doesn’t mean rejecting all authority. It means that the person has stopped treating any external source, whether a leader, a tradition, a political party, a religious institution, or a cultural consensus, as the final word on how they should live. The revolutionary character can learn from authorities without being owned by them. They can respect a tradition without being imprisoned by it. Their relationship to external authority is voluntary and evaluated rather than automatic and unquestioned.
Fromm writes, “Full freedom and independence exist only when the individual thinks, feels, and decides for himself. He can do so authentically only when he has reached a productive relatedness to the world outside himself, which permits him to respond authentically.”
The second is critical, non-illusioned thinking. This is the capacity to see things as they actually are rather than as you have been told they are, as you wish they were, or as they would need to be in order for your current life to make sense. Non-illusioned thinking is expensive. It costs you the comfort of your assumptions. It costs you the ease of consensus. It sometimes costs you relationships with people who need you to share their illusions in order to feel safe.
Fromm writes, “The nonrevolutionary character will be particularly prone to believe something which is announced by the majority. The person in the critical mood will react precisely in the opposite way. He will be particularly critical when he hears the judgment of the majority, which is that of the market place, of those who have power.”
The third is the capacity to say no. To anyone. To the elder at the campfire who tells you how to live, to the family that expects you to stay in the family business, to the church that tells you which questions are permitted, to the employer who has held your schedule for twenty-five years, to the culture that tells you what a successful life is supposed to look like. The capacity to say no is not the same as being disagreeable. Disagreeable people say no out of reactivity. The revolutionary character says no out of a settled inner certainty that the thing being asked of them is not theirs to carry. The no comes from the compass, not from the ego.
Fromm writes, “Or, to put it differently, the revolutionary character is a person capable of disobedience. He is someone for whom disobedience can be a virtue. . . Disobedience is a dialectical concept, because, actually, every act of disobedience is an act of obedience, and every act of obedience is an act of disobedience. What do I mean by this? Every act of disobedience, unless it is empty rebelliousness, is obedience to another principle.”
The fourth is love of life over attachment to the dead past. Fromm called this biophilia, the orientation toward life, growth, and becoming, as opposed to necrophilia, the orientation toward what is fixed, controlled, and already determined. The revolutionary character is drawn toward what is alive and growing, even when what is alive and growing is uncomfortable and unpredictable. They are able to grieve the past without being anchored to it, and that capacity changes everything about how they move forward.
Fromm writes, “The revolutionary is the man who has emancipated himself from the ties of blood and soil, from his mother and his father, from special loyalties to state, class, race, party, or religion. The revolutionary character is a humanist in the sense that he experiences in himself all of humanity, and that nothing human is alien to him. He loves and respects life. He is a skeptic and a man of faith.”
The fifth, and the one I find most important, is that the revolutionary character is defined by who they are becoming rather than by what they are against. This is the distinction that separates the revolutionary character from the rebel. The rebel is still defined by the system they left. Their identity is opposition. They only know who they are by knowing what they are against. The revolutionary character has moved past opposition into something more demanding, which is the ongoing work of becoming a person who thinks and loves independently, without needing an enemy to organize their identity around.
I have longed to see myself as the person Fromm describes in that essay. I have read it across different seasons of my life and each time I read it I measure myself against the five qualities and come away both encouraged and humbled.
I’m consistently reminded of something a professor said in my master’s program: “Humans are terrible self-assessors, every single one of us.” That observation has become a kind of guardrail for me. It keeps me from declaring that I have arrived at something I am still in the middle of becoming.
Do I believe I am on the road to becoming a revolutionary character? Absolutely. The years of therapy, the journaling, the leaving of systems that no longer fit, the building of Illume, the daily practice of trying to think and love from my own center rather than from whatever map is nearest, all of that is what following the compass looks like over decades. Do I believe I have fully arrived? Some days, maybe. Most days, I know I have not. The revolutionary character is a practice you return to every morning, and some mornings you are closer to it than others.
What I find most useful about Fromm’s framework is that it gives me a picture of what I am aiming at without flattering me into thinking I am already there. The five qualities he names are aspirational for almost everyone, including the people who think they have already achieved them. Independence from idols sounds straightforward until you notice how many idols you are still carrying without realizing it. Non-illusioned thinking sounds obvious until you catch yourself in an illusion you have been protecting for years, and the capacity to say no sounds simple until you are sitting across from someone you love who is asking you to be someone you are no longer willing to be.
Fromm writes, “The majority of people have never been revolutionary characters. But the reason why we are no longer living in caves is precisely because there have always been enough revolutionary characters in human history to get us out of the caves and their equivalents. There are, however, many others who pretend to be revolutionaries when, in fact, they are rebels, authoritarians, or political opportunists.”
I read this essay for the first time years ago and it changed what I thought I was aiming at. I read it again last night and it still asks more of me than I am comfortable with. That is how I know it is still doing its work.
Fromm described the revolutionary character well. The rest is up to each of us.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Why Some People Arrive Here Early
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
