Progress Far Outpaces Personal Integration

Autonomy

By now, I hope the reader understands that the autonomy (independence) I’m discussing has nothing to do with so-called “healthy” individualism, a cult of personality, or loud self-assertion. Autonomy refers to an individual’s inner ability to manage themselves and to sincerely search for meaning, even while recognizing that, as far as we know, life has no inherent purpose. This concept doesn’t imply rebellion against authority as such; rather, it means acting calmly based on inner conviction, not out of convenience, outrage, coercion, or orders. The simplest example is someone following traffic rules because they care about their own safety, not out of fear of the police.

Autonomy doesn’t mean complete freedom of action. The existence of any society depends on a balance between individual self-assertion and the common good. If people couldn’t restrain their instincts, society couldn’t exist. The ongoing balancing and reconciliation of opposing tendencies within the individual, as well as between the individual and society—the ability to achieve this without sacrificing personal values, enlightened self-interest, and the interests of the society you live in—develops a sense of freedom. This forms the foundation for a growing sense of identity, self-respect, and inner freedom—in short, autonomy.

Awareness of one’s identity, confidence in one’s uniqueness, long-lasting and meaningful relationships with a select few, one’s own life path; respect for one’s work and the pleasure of doing it well, pursuing personal interests, private memories, tastes, and pleasures—these are the core of autonomous human existence. Autonomy allows a person to enjoy life, rewards them with valuable, often creative experiences, and doesn’t just offer compliance with society’s reasonable demands while preserving one’s personality.

An individual who can afford good food and drink, who doesn’t deny themselves tasty meals and fine beverages, must have a stronger stomach than someone who has to get by on a meager diet. By the same logic, a citizen who enjoys all the benefits of an affluent economy and the freedom to arrange their life as they wish must have a more integrated (whole) personality to make the right choices and reasonably limit themselves, compared to someone who doesn’t need inner strength for self-restraint because society offers little to enjoy or abstain from. Of course, in every society there are those who simply don’t find pleasure in food and drink, so they don’t need a strong personality or even a strong stomach. But an affluent society doesn’t tempt such people more than they can handle. The problem arises for the individual who lacks both a strong constitution and the inner strength to restrain their desires, but who still enjoys good food and drink.

My daily practice probably explains better why, in today’s era of scientific and technological progress, people need a more integrated personality. Throughout history, there have always been families where parents reject one of their children or have mixed feelings toward them. If the situation doesn’t become too extreme, most children more or less cope, though not without consequences. Psychology teaches that such parental attitudes usually harm the child’s psyche. A modern, educated parent who feels negative or mixed emotions toward their child feels guilty and wants to compensate somehow. This forced guilt often worsens the parent’s negative feelings, so the child suffers doubly: from the parent’s irritation, which the child causes by being the source of their guilt.

A parent who realizes their negative feelings are harming their child needs to develop the strength of character to process their guilt and integrate it into their psyche. This wasn’t required in the past, when parents didn’t know that negative feelings toward a child could be harmful. Back then, parents likely believed they were fulfilling their duty simply by providing food and necessities, without thinking about feelings. Now, to get rid of guilt, an adult might convince themselves that the child has a defect, that their negative feelings are caused by this, and that no one is to blame. I’ve seen parents who, in another era, would have simply turned away from their child, but now, wanting to rid themselves of guilt, insist that the child has mental or other issues.

Rejecting new information is not the answer. It’s important to understand that every step toward greater awareness—in this case, recognizing the potentially dangerous nature of some human emotions—requires us to become stronger and more integrated individuals. Only then will true progress follow.

For both the rejecting parent and the child, it’s better if the parent doesn’t feel guilt, though such a situation is still undesirable. However, in the past, such a parent had no choice, while today many options are available, and that’s for the better. The parent can accept their guilt as part of themselves instead of shifting it onto the child or someone else. They can identify the roots of their rejection and eliminate them, so they no longer have to turn away from the child or feel guilty. Any solution benefits everyone involved. But if the parent simply reacts to more advanced knowledge (realizing that rejection is destructive) without working on themselves to change internally (integrate their guilt, eliminate the causes of rejection), scientific advances may do more harm than good.

Today, if we want social, scientific, or technological progress to improve rather than worsen the human condition, we need a more developed consciousness and deeper personal wholeness than ever before. Personal autonomy and awareness of freedom are just other aspects of these higher stages of personal integration.

This need for inner growth explains why some researchers of social and technological progress look to the future pessimistically. They don’t believe people can achieve personal integration in parallel with external progress. Their fears for humanity’s future in our technological age are essentially a result of their low opinion of human nature.

In reality, we’ve already taken many steps toward external progress, and each new success became possible only when we reached a higher level of personal development required by the changing environment. This is often overlooked by those who are pessimistic about our future. Their a priori low assessment of humans and their potential prevents them from realizing that, ever since becoming social beings, people have faced and successfully solved this problem.

In the previous chapter, I mentioned how the modern nomad relates to settled life in general and to city dwellers in particular. Indeed, a nomad cannot become a successful city dweller until they learn to restrain their impulses to grab and run at the slightest whim or disappointment, or to seek bloody revenge for any insult. Nor can they develop self-control until close, long-term relationships with a larger group than their family or tribe become meaningful to them, and until the economic and cultural advantages of city life become attractive. For such benefits, they may want and be ready to limit themselves and develop new social skills—in short, to achieve greater personal wholeness.

Most former nomadic tribes wanted and managed to achieve this, often in just a few generations. I have little doubt that today’s person can also reach a higher degree of wholeness if new living conditions promise more freedom than suppression. Of course, if they offer benefits as significant as those city life offered the nomad. We have no doubt that technology brings huge advantages. The question is whether, and to what extent, these advantages are multiplied by people’s successful coexistence. Because that alone is enough to make further personal integration pleasant and beneficial, and people will willingly work on themselves.

I wrote this book mainly to suggest the direction in which, I believe, this higher personal integration should move, and to enlighten the reader about aspects of modern mass society that hinder this process.

Imbalance

*This chapter uses material from the article “Individual Autonomy and Mass Control,” published in Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie; T. W. Adorno and W. Dirks, editors, Vol. I: Sociologica, Aufsätze, Max Horkheimer zum sechzigsten Geburtstag gewidmet. Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955, Frankfurt am Main.

Today, external progress far outpaces personal integration. The resulting imbalance affects many citizens of the modern mass state and causes nervous disorders. These, as we know, arise from unresolved conflicts. But resolving conflicts depends on personal integration, which allows us to cope with them successfully. This ability is developed through experience in effectively overcoming difficulties. This explains the apparent “neuroticism” of teenagers. They are too young to have accumulated experience in resolving internal and external conflicts and are unsure they can handle them. This also leads to other problems of adolescence.

Moreover, today’s teenagers face far more choices and temptations than their peers in the past. This means today’s youth need much greater maturity to resist dangerous temptations, which are so numerous it’s overwhelming. In my youth, I didn’t need strength of character or particularly strong moral principles to resist the temptation to steal a car: none of the guys I knew drove, and my girlfriend didn’t expect me to take her for a ride. Back then, there weren’t even cars around us. Today, car theft is the most common offense among teenagers. Here’s a real-life example of how progress exacerbates emotional problems and therefore requires a higher level of personal integration.

If an individual repeatedly fails to solve their problems, both internal and social, they lose faith in their ability to handle new challenges. Life tests the modern citizen, with their weak decision-making skills, by constantly putting them in situations where they must choose—which of many unsuitable professions to pick, which of many imperfect parties to support, which of countless tempting but essentially useless gadgets to buy. But their choices rarely match their deepest desires. As a result, the mental energy spent on choosing is wasted, and the person feels empty, with no benefit to themselves.*

In general, the ability to make decisions and resolve conflicts depends on the individual’s ability to immediately discard all solutions that clearly contradict their values and personality. This leaves very few options, making it much easier to choose the right one. A person who isn’t very integrated can’t check all the options against their values and interests, and thus can’t narrow the problem down to a manageable size. The need to make decisions each time oppresses and confuses such a person.

Interestingly, having many equally attractive options theoretically means a person is free to choose, but psychologically, this breadth of choice doesn’t feel like freedom. On the contrary, it causes vague dissatisfaction. But when you know certain options don’t suit you and choose the one you consider best or most acceptable, you gain positive experience. Even if the choice isn’t about the most important things, it still gives a sense of accomplishment and self-satisfaction.

Modern mass society also amplifies the feeling that one’s self-identity is increasingly blurred and the boundaries of autonomy are narrowing in other ways:

1. Today, it’s harder for people to develop their own standards and live by them, because with so many options and ways to secure a comfortable life, an individual lifestyle loses its significance, and there’s less need to develop the ability to go one’s own way.
2. At the same time, the illusion of greater freedom is promoted, so when people can’t satisfy their desires, they feel it more painfully and are more deeply affected.
3. People are offered such a wide range of options that it exceeds what can reasonably be expected of an individual’s ability to choose independently.
4. Neither upbringing nor school education can provide individuals with examples, guidance, or principles about which of their instinctive desires can be satisfied and how. By adulthood, when there’s a real need to express these desires, a young person’s personality may be formed but not trained to handle this problem. This happens to those who have become dependent on society and its instructions for almost every area of life. So, when trying to solve another problem, such a person relies on society’s cues, for example, in how to satisfy sexual needs; and then even their intimate life can’t give them a sense of their own unique individuality.

When social changes are rapid, individuals don’t have time to form new internal attitudes for interacting with a constantly changing environment. This confuses and unsettles them. The more often this happens, the more they look to others to see how they cope and try to imitate their behavior. But this “borrowed” behavior, which doesn’t fit their human essence, only weakens their personal wholeness, making them less and less able to face change while maintaining autonomy. (Much of what’s said here about the autonomous individual versus the individual controlled by mass society is discussed more fully, though with different emphases and conclusions, in David Riesman’s book “The Lonely Crowd,” where he compares the autonomous personality with one oriented toward others.)

Today, we fear modern mass society, where people no longer respond to life’s challenges independently and directly, but are ready to mindlessly copy solutions offered by others. We fear that these external solutions are dictated solely by the interests of technological progress, while the need for a more integrated personality is ignored. If it starts with uncritical agreement to follow decisions about external circumstances, it rarely stops there, since external and internal life are so closely intertwined. Thus, as soon as a person starts relying on outside solutions for their external life, they may soon do the same for their internal conflicts. Once this state of personal disintegration becomes widespread, society loses all brakes on rapid social change; and the faster the changes, the harder it is to achieve the new level of personal wholeness needed to keep up.

Integration itself is a slow process. According to the laws of mental economy, once a type of behavior becomes habitual, new types of behavior can form only when the individual is convinced of their great superiority over previous ones, or sees them as the only way to cope with a new challenge. It takes time for a person to reach this understanding, more time and effort to develop and refine new behaviors, and even more time and hard work to make the new behavior a true (organic) part of their personality. Only then is a person ready to face a new challenge independently, that is, to respond in a way that aligns with their integrated personality. Thus, the rapid pace of economic and social change makes it extremely difficult to form and maintain an autonomous personality. On the other hand, individuals who lack independence readily accept rapid change. Here lies a serious problem we must recognize: rapid changes in significant social conditions tend to multiply individuals lacking true autonomy, which in turn makes it even easier to accelerate social change.

The less a person can resolve their internal conflicts, as well as conflicts between their desires and the demands of the environment, the more they rely on society’s cues for how to respond to new challenges. At this point, it doesn’t matter where they get their solutions—from newspaper columnists, advertising, or a psychiatrist. The more they accept these answers as their own, the less able they are to respond independently to the next challenge, and the more solutions must come from outside. I find it hard to say at what stage of this evolution of the mass state we are now.