Automation conformity

Rollo May asserts plainly in the opening pages of The Meaning of Anxiety that anxiety in fact has meaning, and that our aim cannot be to eliminate it but to work with it, and through it, to use it to propel our creativity and vigor for life. And yet, anxiety is often deeply, even intolerably, unpleasant, and the effort to embrace it can test us beyond our abilities. We are wont, then, to look for an escape hatch, an easy path to relief; but those paths always come with a cost. It is to be expected that certain “mechanisms of escape” from the situation of isolation and anxiety should have developed. The mechanism most frequently employed in our culture, [Erich] Fromm believes, is that of automation conformity. An individual “adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him [sic] by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be.” This conformity proceeds on the assumption that the “person who gives up his individual self and…