The Seba library treats Automaton Conformity in 9 passages, across 3 authors (including Fromm, Erich, McGilchrist, Iain, Auerbach, Erich).
AUTHORITARIANISM • • • • • ]63 2. DESTRUCTIVENESS 3. AUTOMATION CONFORMITY VI. PSYCHOLOGY OF NAZISM
The table of contents of ‘Escape from Freedom’ establishes Automaton Conformity as the third and culminating mechanism of escape, structurally coordinate with authoritarianism and destructiveness within Fromm’s typology.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want… we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.
Fromm articulates the core phenomenology of automaton conformity: the subject adopts socially prescribed desires as if they were self-generated, mistaking intense but script-driven activity for authentic self-determination.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
In the last chapter of this book we shall continue the discussion of the automaton with regard to the cultural scene in our own democracy.
Fromm explicitly extends the automaton figure beyond Nazi Germany into democratic culture, framing automaton conformity as a structural feature of modern mass society rather than an aberration.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
Since there is still a need to feel some individuality, such need is satisfied with regard to minor differences; the initials on the handbag or the sweater… become the expression of individual differences.
In ‘The Art of Loving’, Fromm elaborates how automaton conformity is masked by superficial tokens of individuality — consumer and partisan markers — while genuine self-differentiation disappears.
, The Art of Loving, 1956supporting
the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.
Fromm situates automaton conformity within a broader energetic economy: when spontaneous life is suppressed — as automaton conformity suppresses it — the blocked energy deflects into destructive channels.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting
I do everything out of obligation. I eat with effort, for material life does not interest me. I pretend to love, I make the gestures, but I feel none of it… Men are ‘automated corpses’.
McGilchrist’s psychiatric phenomenology presents clinical testimony that resonates with Fromm’s concept: patients describe a mode of mechanical, affectively evacuated social performance that parallels the psychological structure of automaton conformity.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
‘I walk like a machine’, says one patient; ‘I’m a psycho-machine’, says another.
Phenomenological reports of machine-like, depersonalised existence collected by McGilchrist provide a psychopathological counterpoint to Fromm’s social-theoretical account of automaton selfhood.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside
the degree of individuation which an individual has reached… In the infant I-ness has developed but little yet; he still feels one with mother.
Fromm’s developmental account of individuation provides the anthropological backdrop against which automaton conformity reads as a regressive dissolution of the self back into undifferentiated merger with the collective.
, The Art of Loving, 1956aside
on the whole he is no automaton producing comic effects. He even develops, and grows kinder and wiser while his madness persists.
Auerbach’s literary-critical use of ‘automaton’ as a figure for mechanical, stereotype-bound characters provides an oblique comparative register for Fromm’s social-psychological term.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside