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In 1941, a man who had just escaped Nazi Germany sat down at Columbia University and tried to answer the most important question of the twentieth century.

It was not “how did Hitler take power?” Historians had already begun documenting that. The question Erich Fromm needed to answer was different. It was worse.

Why did the people let him?

Not the inner circle. Not the military leaders or the party functionaries or the industrialists who funded the operation. The ordinary people. The shopkeepers and teachers and factory workers and farmers who watched a democratic republic dismantle itself and did not just allow it to happen but cheered while it did.

Fromm published his answer in a book called Escape from Freedom. The book argued that fascism is not imposed on a population from the outside. It is chosen from the inside. By people who are free. Who have the ability to think for themselves. And who voluntarily surrender that ability because the weight of freedom has become more than they can carry.

Eighty-four years later, the book reads like a field manual for understanding the United States of America.

The Core of Fromm’s Argument

Fromm identified a paradox at the center of modern life that most political theorists had missed entirely.

The modern era liberated human beings from the constraints that had organized their lives for centuries. Feudalism collapsed. The authority of the church weakened. Rigid class systems loosened. People gained the freedom to choose their own beliefs, their own careers, their own identities. For the first time in history, the individual was free.

But Fromm saw what that freedom actually produced in millions of people. Not confidence. Not creativity. Not self-determination. Anxiety. Isolation. A paralyzing sense of insignificance.

He called this the burden of freedom. The distinction he made was between two types of freedom. Freedom from is liberation from external constraints. You are free from the king, from the church, from the rigid hierarchy that told you who you were and what your life meant. Freedom to is the capacity to use that liberation productively. To create meaning. To build relationships. To construct a life that matters on your own terms.

The modern world delivered freedom from. It did not deliver freedom to. Millions of people were liberated from the structures that had oppressed them and left standing in an open field with no direction, no community, no framework for meaning, and no one to tell them what to do next.

For psychologically strong individuals, this is an opportunity. For everyone else, it is a crisis.

Fromm argued that when the anxiety of freedom becomes unbearable, people do not fight to preserve it. They run from it. They seek out any structure, any leader, any movement that promises to take the burden away. They surrender their autonomy in exchange for certainty. They trade self-determination for belonging. They hand their freedom to someone else and feel relief, not loss.

He called this the escape from freedom. And he identified three mechanisms through which it happens.

The first is authoritarianism. The person submits to a leader and allows the leader to do their thinking for them. The submission feels like strength because the leader projects power and the follower absorbs it by association.

The second is destructiveness. The person attempts to destroy the world that makes them feel small. If the institutions, the experts, the systems, the cultural changes are what make freedom feel unbearable, then destroying those things feels like liberation.

The third is automaton conformity. The person abandons individual thought entirely and thinks whatever the group thinks. They adopt the opinions, the language, the values, and the emotional reactions of the crowd. They experience this as thinking for themselves because the group’s thoughts have replaced their own