A psychoanalyst in 1941 explained why people come to want what the system needs them to want.
In 1941, the German-born psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm published Escape from Freedom, introducing the concept of dynamic adaptation.1 Fromm contrasted it with simpler forms of adjustment, in which a person adopts new habits without changing their character structure, the way one might learn to eat with chopsticks when moving to a new country. Dynamic adaptation operated at a deeper level. When external conditions could not be changed, people unconsciously reshaped their drives, desires, and emotional responses to fit what was available.
Fromm used the example of a boy raised by a domineering father. The child did not merely comply outwardly; over time, he developed a genuine desire to submit, a character structure that made obedience feel natural rather than imposed.2 The adaptation was dynamic because it involved the generation of new psychic forces, new anxieties, new desires, that maintained the adjustment from the inside.
Fromm applied this framework to industrial society. In The Sane Society (1955), he argued that modern capitalism required people to become "homo consumens," individuals who experienced consuming as the primary mode of relating to the world.3 In Fromm's earlier terms, this was a dynamic adaptation to an economic system that needed continuous consumption to function.
Fromm considered this one of the deepest problems of modernity. People could adapt so thoroughly to their conditions that they no longer recognized the adaptation as such. What felt like personal preference was, in Fromm's analysis, a socially produced character trait.4