the price of freedom

The Burden Of Decision

Erich Fromm's first book, Escape from Freedom (1940), was written just before World War II to explain the attraction of totalitarianism - of the Right or of the Left - for the young after World War I. A similar book today, trying to explain the alienation of the young, might well be entitled Escape from Decision.

It is, above all, the burden of decision imposed by the society of organizations which the young find frightening and against which they rebel. Suddenly there are career choices; the great majority only yesterday had their careers determined from birth on. Suddenly there are decisions on the direction and purpose of knowledge. Suddenly we have to have new economic policies; we can no longer trust either the automatic operation of Adam Smith's "complementary trade," or the "inevitability of history" of the Marxian schema. Suddenly we have acquired enough knowledge in medicine to have to make decisions - on heart transplants or artificial kidneys, for instance - about whom to keep alive and whom to let die.

The rhetoric of the young complains bitterly about being "manipulated." But their actions make it clear that it is the burden of decision that frightens them. They want to "drop out" so that there are no decisions, no choices, no responsibility.

To sidestep decision is also a decision - and as the young will find out, the one least likely to be right. The students, for instance, who stay on in graduate school (or who join the Peace Corps) to avoid having to decide, are likely to find, a few years later, that they have indeed made the wrong decision. They are lucky if all they have lost is time.

But the reaction of the young, while futile, again reflects true insight. The society of organizations demands of the individual decisions regarding himself. At first sight, the decision may appear only to concern career and livelihood. "What shall I do?" is the form in which the question is usually asked. But actually it reflects a demand that the individual take responsibility for society and its institutions. "What cause do I want to serve?" is implied. And underlying this question is the demand the individual take responsibility for himself. "What shall I do with myself?" rather than "'What shall I do?" is really being asked of the young by the multitude of choices around them. The society of organizations forces the individual to ask of himself: "Who am I?" "What do I want to be?" "What do I want to put into life and what do I want to get out of it?"

These are existential questions for all that they are couched in secular form and appear as choices between a job in government, in business, or in college teaching. They have not been asked - at least not by Western man - for several centuries. The Protestant Reformation four hundred years ago last posed them as general questions to be answered by everyone. Where medieval Catholicism had given an "automatic" answer of salvation through observance, the Reformation demanded of the individual that he ask himself: "Who do I want to be in order to be saved?"

Ever since Descartes in the mid-seventeenth century brushed aside man's spiritual existence as irrelevant, the West has concerned itself with what goes on outside of man - nature and society. Of all the major thinkers of the nineteenth century, only Kierkegaard even asked, "How is human existence possible?" To all the others this was a meaningless and unfashionable question. They all asked: "How is society possible?" Rousseau asked it, Hegel asked it, the classical economists asked it. Marx answered it in one way, liberal Protestantism in another. The concern all through the last two centuries of Western history was the society, its rights, its functions, its performance.

Now for the first time, we are again face to face with the age-old question of individual meaning, individual purpose, and individual freedom. Narcotic drugs and avoidance of soap are not particularly relevant answers. But at least the alienation of the young throughout the world today ensures that the questions will have to be considered. For the society of organizations offers choices, and therefore imposes on the individual the burden of decisions. It demands of him the price of freedom: responsibility.

- Peter Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity