Day 29: Doughnut democracy

As always, seeing Hannelie was pure inspiration. Kindness and breadth of insight have rarely been combined more elegantly with that sharp refreshing lemon flavored wit. Thinking that she was prompting me to read Gary Larson I actually stumbled across the way in which Fromm's thinking on "the fear of freedom" has been ignored. And how well it summarizes some of the key challenges we as a society face right now.
Fromm's insistence that every "freedom from" needs to be synthesized with a "freedom to" is a real siren call. The spontaneity to share an authentic self is mostly absent today, not just in a work context but also in the way we view our lives in general. As Hannelie put it so elegantly: "you are not born a woman, you become one." The freedom from wrinkles, hairy legs and curly hair does not give you freedom to be anything but a preconceived identity, determined by advertising and social convention. The googled-wiki-wisdom that we have access to is nothing but a massive dose of "common sense", shaping pre defined ways of acting and thinking about reality.

She makes an interesting case that men and women will converge in the way they look, because there is more money to be made in manufactured manliness, modeled on the formula that industry knows so well with women. Already you see how gillette is promoting the manscape, and everything from facial creams to foot spas are peddling a new insecurity about being simply you.
Fromm, in analysing deeply the drivers of a mass acceptance of National Socialism, echoed Alex de Tocqueville: "It is vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity." Following their style icons slavishly it becomes an act of futility to ask consumers to make a real choice on style when they are confronted by something that has not been endorsed. In 2005 I commissioned a research project that saw consumers making statements about five identical garments labelled differently. Every single attribute, from quality, stylishness to price expectation was entirely driven by the label. You could show someone two identical products together and they would find a difference, because they have been told to expect one.

Now, next and known

How does one reduce the stress that thinking for yourself and being authentic generates. As I sit here I am thinking of all the workshops and creative get-aways I have led over the years. Thinking back at the burning eyes and expectations I wonder how much fear there was actually in the room. It is not simply a fear of stepping into the unknown, it is a fear of acknowledging the non-accepted "known." There is a need for synthesis, where the steps of "free from" and "free to" are blended into a new condition. How does one do this when the mechanisms for generating the "free to" state are fundamentally corrupted by pervasive precondition? The illusion of democracy is actually a hollow doughnut, where the core has been filled by a nagging emptiness. Can someone hand me the jelly and vanilla cream?