Chain of Being, to tell them what to do. If your father were a peasant, you would be a peasant. If your father were a king, that is what you would become. If you were a woman, well, there was only one role for women. Today, we might look at life in the Middle Ages, or life as an animal, and cringe. Nevertheless, the fact is that the lack of freedom represented by biological or social determinism is easy. Your life has structure, meaning, there are no doubts, no cause for soul-searching, you fit in and never suffered an identity crisis. Historically speaking, this simple, if hard, life began to change with the Renaissance. In the Renaissance, people started to see humanity as the center of the universe, instead of God. Then came the Reformation, which introduced the idea of each of us being individually responsible for our own soul's salvation. After Reformation came democratic revolutions such as the American and the French revolutions. Now all of a sudden people were supposed to govern themselves. Then came the industrial revolution, and instead of tilling the soil or making things with our hands, we had to sell our labor in exchange for money. Finally, there came socialist revolutions such as the Russian and the Chinese, which introduced the idea of participatory economics. You were no longer responsible only for your own well-being, but for your fellow workers as well.Therefore, over a mere 500 years, the idea of the individual, with individual thoughts, feelings, moral conscience, freedom, and responsibility, came into being. Unfortunately, with individuality came isolation, alienation, and bewilderment. Freedom is a difficult thing to have, and when it is possible, people tend to flee from it. Fromm describes three ways in which we escape from freedom: 1. Authoritarianism. We seek to avoid freedom by fusing ourselves with others, by becoming a part of an authoritarian system like the society of the Middle Ages. There are two ...
