Vox Populi
I had a friend send me a message this morning after we spent the previous evening watching a documentary written by Candace Owens dealing with the George Floyd story and Black Lives Matter, with a paragraph from a book by Eric Fromm, Escape From Freedom, page 39, where the author spoke of:
“character-disordered individuals are ineffective and destructive in their marriages, their friendships and their business dealings-to any area of their existence in which they fail to assume any responsibility for its quality…By casting away their responsibility, they may feel comfortable with themselves. Still, they have ceased to solve the problems of living, cease to grow spiritually, and have become a dead weight on society.”
~Erich Fromm
This is happening on a grand scale in America and the West in general due to the statistical fact that character-disordered people are increasingly parenting us. It's a fact that these people will produce children that will be character-disordered people or at least be neurotic personalities. So what society gets out of them is dead weight and an easily accessed mob for a BLM riot or Antifa harassing a pro-life march on our nation's capital.
In a recent read from A Palace of Nowhere by James Finley, he speaks of Merton using the phrase “Vox Populi.” This Latin phrase is defined as the opinion or beliefs of the majority or, in original Latin: the people's voice. Merton's definition is that “Vox Populi” defines your identity as an individual and not as a personality. The writer Berdyaev clearly defines the difference. The “Vox Populi” defines humanity for its selfish purposes. The Thief is stealing your true self and destroying your heart in the process! It's that powerful.
“Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their own opinion as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority”
~Erich Fromm
Fromm is telling us that as most of us are offspring of character-disordered parents, we are statistically likely to have ourselves defined by our upbringing by these people. Merton's use of this phrase speaks to the development of our false selves in our postmodern culture. Merton takes it a bit deeper and tells us about the spiritual nature of our development as human beings and spends much of the book A New Man leading us back to our first love to find out that our true self will be found in Christ, our Messiah, our Savior, our Truth, not via the Vox Populi of the post-modern culture of the Western world.
We need to realize we have a choice. We can continue on our way as a product of “Vox Populi,” or we can state asking questions and start reading books like Merton’s, A New Man or Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom, or John Eldridges Sacred Romance and hijack your future for the good and figure out who your true self is, not what the culture, the “Vox Populi” wants you to be. What the culture desires for you ultimately results in despair and depravity for its purpose. And that isn’t what I wanted for myself. I spent most of my life defined by character-disordered parents, became a character-disordered man and married a character-disordered woman, and parented character-disordered children who then produced and are raising character-disordered grandchildren. This has to stop! Please, God!
I'll leave you with a piece from Gerald Mays's book The Awakened Heart, where he speaks of the greatest human tragedy, to give up the search for our hearts, our true selves. We are told that to lose heart is to lose everything. And if we are to live from our heart, we cannot abandon the desire to find it.
“There is a desire within each of us, in the deepest center of ourselves, that we call our heart. We were born with it; it is never completely satisfied and never dies. We are often unaware of it, but it is always awake…Our true identity, our reason for being, is to be found in this desire”
~Gerald May
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Gerald May, The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love You Need (1993) HarperCollins
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (US), The Fear of Freedom (UK) (1941) Avon Books
