CONCEPT
Automaton Conformity
The third of Fromm's escape mechanisms — dissolution of the individual self into the mass — and the structural pattern of the professional who adopts AI because everyone is adopting it.
Automaton conformity is the third of Fromm's three original escape mechanisms: the dissolution of the individual self into the mass through the elimination of the distinction between one's preferences and the group's. The conformist does not submit to a specific authority (that is the authoritarian escape) and does not attack the world that produces the anxiety (that is the destructive escape). The conformist simply becomes indistinguishable from everyone else. If you think what everyone thinks, feel what everyone feels, want what everyone wants, then the terrifying isolation of individual freedom disappears. You are no longer alone with your choices. You are not, in any meaningful sense, choosing at all.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Fromm treated automaton conformity as the most common escape in modern democratic societies — less dramatic than authoritarianism, less destructive than aggression, and therefore more socially acceptable. The conformist does not violate any norm. The conformist embodies every norm. The conformity operates below the level of