‘Fleabag’ Casts Light on Our Fear of Freedom

The heroine of ‘Fleabag’ searches for authenticity, but is that even possible?

‘I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning.’ — Fleabag

In the second season of the BBC show Fleabag, our heroine is invited to make an impromptu confession by a priest, who she happens to find quite dreamy. She proceeds to describe her various sins: lying, stealing, sex outside of marriage (and once or twice ‘inside someone else’s’). And then she says:

‘I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to… tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong. And I know that’s why people want someone like you in their lives, because you just tell them how to do it.’

Her monologue invokes the central theme of Erich Fromm’s The Fear of Freedom, which deals with the anxiety and alienation freedom causes. Fromm argues that freedom is so uncomfortable for us that we are tempted to take refuge in the authority of tyrants, customs or destruction. Destruction gives us a sense of control while letting us express our pain. Tyrants and customs tell us how to be. That frees us psychologically from the doubt bound up with freedom of action, which demands that we think for ourselves. It gives us ‘false freedom’. It tells us ‘what to wear, what to eat, what to like.’ We find it soothing.

Tyrants and customs tell us how to be, thus freeing us psychologically.

As for many philosophers and psychologists working in the second half of the 21st century, the rise of the Nazis was a fairly big influence on Fromm’s thinking. Writing in 1941, Fromm wished to understand what caused the German people to follow Adolf Hitler into the abyss. He argued that the certainties the Nazis offered consoled a people living in a country changed by modernity. That these certainties were right or wrong was less important than the fact they were given. The clarity was intoxicating, for it freed the German people from the awful anxiety and isolation bound up with living at a time of economic hardship and social upheaval.

Needless to say, the doubt experienced by those who voted from the Nazis, who had endured hyper-inflation, war, and a radical alteration in self-image, was worlds apart from that felt by the heroine of Fleabag; but the authority for which the Nazis stood, and the ‘false freedom’ they promised, was also extreme. Yet in liberal societies, too, those historic givers of certainty—those implicit rules on how to dress and in what to believe—have also been eroded, as they were during the transition from traditional to industrialised societies, leaving us all with the daunting task of finding out how to live well for ourselves. Some of us embrace this search for authenticity; others feel they have no choice. Some, like Adam Scott’s Hot Priest, reject it, and (in his case) choose faith. Some idealise the hunt for the authentic self. Others say it is impossible. Certainly if our mission in the last half-century has been to turn our freedom into happiness, then we have failed quite spectacularly to do it. Despite greater material comfort and safety, we are less happy today than we were in 1957.

If our mission in the last half-century has been to turn our freedom into happiness, then we have failed.

And this in part is what makes the main character in Fleabag so easy to like. Like her, we grope clumsily in a hyper-liberal world for something solid to hang onto, for some relief from having to work out for ourselves how to be. The historic group identities in which we could lose our individuality have for the most part crumbled, and though some of us have zealously adopted new group identities, from crypto traders to ketogenic dieters, many still find ourselves afflicted by uncertainty and unable to share our lives with the members of a cohesive social group, our membership of which not in question.

Fleabag strikes a hopeful note at its conclusion, but her search may just be futile. For we live among others, and through our relationships with them we discover our identity and our purpose. A self is only a self because it is surrounded by other selves; and having been shaped by those and other selves the idea of our being truly ‘individual’ is impossible. We are who we are because of others, from womb to tomb. And it seems that, going on the evidence, a society of individuals is an unhappy one.