Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

“Man has a horror of aloneness. And of all kinds of aloneness, moral aloneness is the most terrible kind.” The quotation is from Honoré de Balzac and appears in Erich Fromm’s classic study of authoritarianism, Escape from Freedom, in which the Frankfurt School psychologist sought to explain why more Germans did not oppose Hitler. Fromm traced the answer not to mindless obedience but to the terror of feeling alienated from one’s community and to the tremendous desire to belong. “When other political parties were abolished and the Nazi party was Germany,” he observed, “opposition to it meant opposition to Germany. It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group. However much a German citizen may be opposed to the principles of Nazism, if he has to choose between being alone and feeling that he belongs to Germany, most persons will choose the latter.”