Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophized This.

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Twitter.com slash I am Stephen West for updates on the episodes. Today's show is on Eric

From and his landmark book Escape from Freedom. I hope you love the show today. So last episode,

a major through line when discussing the art of loving by Eric From was that love is the only

sane and satisfactory answer to the fundamental problem of human existence, the fundamental problem

being that we are separate from everything and everyone else that we are alone, that we exist

in a state of what he called existential loneliness. But what some of you out there maybe did is you

heard that diagnosis, you looked to your left, saw some people you care about, looked to your right,

saw even more people you cared about, and then turned back to From and said, look, Eric From.

You're saying that everybody's alone out there. And I understand what you're saying,

I think you have some good ideas, but let's be real. You don't know me. You don't know how

alone or not alone I am. The real question is, why are you so insistent on convincing me that I'm

alone all the time? What Eric From would say is that you are among the most independent and

isolated human beings that have ever lived in human history. And what you can thank for this

reality are the very modern set of social conditions that you were born into that themselves only

exist because of a long multi thousand year process of what he calls the individuation of human

beings. Something that will be a recurring theme throughout this episode is that sometimes there

are parallels between the stages of development within our personal lives and the stages of development

on a more macro level when it comes to the way citizens behave politically within a society.

...