Hello, I’m Wang Fang. Welcome to To the Unique You.

““Give me liberty, or give me death,” said Patrick Henry. “Life is dear, and love dearer; both may be sacrificed for liberty,” wrote Sándor Petőfi. “Neither wealth nor poverty nor force can make one yield,” said Mencius; “wander without dependence into the boundless,” dreamed Zhuangzi. However differently cultures understand it, freedom remains a central human aspiration and ideal trait.

We are moved by sacrifices for freedom: William Wallace crying “Freedom!” before execution in Braveheart, or Andy emerging from Shawshank prison into rain, every feather metaphorically shining with liberty. Freedom seems worth fighting for with life itself.

Imprisonment punishes criminals because no one wants liberty taken. When an innocent person is chained like livestock, outrage moves us to speak and act. Freedom is a note in human life whose brilliance seems unsurpassed.

Yet is nothing equal to freedom on the scales? If life offered two buttons, freedom and safety, and only one could be pressed, which would you choose?

Modern people torn between freedom and security became psychologist Erich Fromm’s （Erich Fromm, 1900-1980）subject. He asked why people able to direct their lives fear doing so, surrendering freedom to circumstance, other people, ideology, or irrational emotion.

Two events shaped Fromm, born in Frankfurt in 1900. First, a twenty-five-year-old artist he admired killed herself soon after the death of her father, her only family and closest bond. Fromm urgently wanted to understand what could drive someone so far and sought answers in Freud, later training for years in psychoanalysis.

The second was World War I: popular fanaticism and hatred, nationalism, rapid division into “us” and “them,” and claims of our greatness and their baseness shocked him. Again he sought to understand human irrationality, this time not individual but mass irrationality. He found answers in Karl Marx.