On my way to discovering the Teacher # Next after my dear Bertrand Russell
QUOTES
That is why “our conscious mind represents mainly our own society and culture, while our unconscious represents the universal man in each of us.”
Thus, with the knowledge that the unconscious, independent of that which is socially conscious and repressed, represents the entire person with all his possibilities, Fromm justifies the humanistic belief in the unity of people not only theoretically; as soon as one opens oneself to one’s unconscious, becomes conscious of one’s unconscious and thus comes to experience one’s other possibilities, one then unfurls, grows, and has the paradoxical and productive—or, as Fromm also says, the humanistic—experience that one can be related reasonably and lovingly to the world and to people because nothing foreign is any longer really strange to one.
I have spoken of the birth process of new societies. I would almost like to say that twentieth-century man seems to be a miscarriage.
What began in the nineteenth century continued in the twentieth with ever-increasing intensity and speed: the growth of the modern industrial system, which led to more and more production and to increased consumer orientation. Man became a collector and a user. More and more, the central experience of his life became I have and I use, and less and less I am.
The priorities of the industrial system are balance, quantification, and accounting. The question is always: What is worthwhile? What brings profit?
Man has become an enterprise: His life is his capital and his task seems to be to invest this capital as well as possible. If it is well invested, then he is successful. If he invests his life poorly, then he is without success. He himself thus becomes a thing, an object.
Modern industry and economics have effectively developed to the point that, as a requisite for operation, they need people who become consumers, who possess as little individuality as possible, and who are ready to obey an anonymous authority while suffering from the illusion of being free and subject to no authority.
Modern man seeks succor, so to speak, from the Big Mother of the company or of the state and becomes a perpetual infant who, however, can never be satisfied, because he does not develop his possibilities as a person.
The disease from which modern man suffers is alienation. The concept of alienation had sunken into oblivion for decades, but it has lately become popular again. Hegel and Marx once used it, and one could rightly say that the philosophy of existentialism is essentially a rebellion against man’s growing alienation in modern society.
For Hegel and Marx, “alienation” means that a person has lost himself and has ceased to perceive himself as the center of his activity. A person has much and uses much, but he is little: “The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life—and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.”
In the nineteenth century, one could say: “God is dead.” In the twentieth, one must say that man is dead. Today, this adage rings true: “Man is dead, long live the thing!”
Evil no longer exists in contrast to good; rather, there is a new inhumanity: indifference—that is to say, complete alienation, complete indifference vis-à-vis life.
This attitude of the dehumanized human—of the person who does not care, of the person who not only is not his brother’s keeper but is not even his own keeper—this attitude characterizes modern man.
One must first become aware of who we are, what drives us, and where we are going. Only when we are aware of this can we make a decision about where we want to go.
Since I am today still a socialist, as I always was, I believe that the new form of society will be a form of humanistic socialism that is as distinct from existing capitalism as from the falsification of socialism that Soviet communism calls itself.
Contemporary man is certainly passive in most of his leisure time. He is the eternal consumer; he “takes in” drink, food, cigarettes, lectures, sights, books, movies; all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for his appetite: a big bottle, a big apple, a big breast. Man has become the suckler, the eternally expectant and the eternally disappointed.
Man has transformed himself into a commodity, and experiences his life as capital to be invested profitably. If he succeeds in this, he is “successful” and his life has meaning; if not, he is a “failure.” His “value” lies in his salability, not in his human qualities of love and reason or in his artistic capacities. Hence, his sense of his own value depends on extraneous factors: his success, the judgment of others. Hence, he is dependent on these others, and his security lies in conformity, in never being more than two feet away from the herd.
What kind of man, then, does our society need in order to function smoothly? It needs men who cooperate easy in large groups, who want to consume more and more, and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience, yet who are willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction; men who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without an aim—except the aim to be on the move, to function, to go forward.
The aim of a humanist industrial society cannot be maximum profit for a few, or even maximum consumption for the many.
The first dislike I want to mention is the fact that everything and almost everybody is for sale.
From this follows something else: Fewer and fewer people can be trusted.
People look for pleasure and excitement, instead of joy; for power and property, instead of growth. They want to have much, and use much, instead of being much.
They are more attracted to the dead and the mechanical than to life and living processes. I have called this attraction to that which is not alive, using words of Miguel de Unamuno, “necrophilia,” and the attraction to all that is alive, “biophilia.” In spite of all the emphasis on pleasure, our society produces more and more necrophilia and less and less love of life.
Another contradiction lies in the drastic split between the traditional religious and humanistic values that are still generally accepted in the Western world and new technological values and norms that are their very opposites. The traditional values say that one ought to do something because it is good, true, or beautiful, or, to put it differently, because it serves the unfolding and growth of man. The new technological value says one ought to do something because it is technically possible. If it is technically possible to travel to the moon, one ought to do it in spite of the fact that immensely more urgent tasks on earth are left undone.
Another contradiction lies in the fact that whereas industrial society all over the world increases literacy, and eventually higher education, its educational progress is in sharp contrast to the inability of citizens for active critical thought.
While on the one hand literacy increases, television creates a new type of illiteracy in which the consumer is fed by pictures, using his eyes and ears but not his brain. Briefly, while we are producing ever more efficient machines, man himself is losing some of his most important qualities. He becomes a passive consumer led by the big organization, which has no aim and vision except that of becoming ever bigger, more efficient, and growing faster.
The more powerful the person is over nature, the more powerless the man or woma... This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The question indeed is: Is modern man, the man of the twentieth century, really prepared to live in one world? Or is it that we are intellectually living in the twentieth century and emotionally living in the stone age?
Is it that while we are preparing this one world our feelings and goals are still those of tribalism? And by tribalism I mean, in fact, an attitude that we find in most all primitive tribes: one has confidence only in the members of one’s own tribe, one feels a moral obligation only to the members of one’s own tribe, to the people—and this is very essential, although it sounds trivial—an obligation only to those who have eaten the same food, sung the same songs, and spoken the same language.
We find ourselves in the midst of tribalism. We call it nationalism. We, indeed, seem to salute it as the great liberation of nations from former dependence on stronger nations—which in some way of course is true. But at the same time we also see that the nationalism that started in the Western World really only a hundred and fifty years ago as a result of the French Revolution has now become the mode of feeling of almost the entire world. I feel that this is a very dangerous development, in view of the fact that unless man learns to live as one man, a part of one world, this nationalism will cause conditions and situations in which he is in danger of destroying himself. (less)
Unless we develop a new humanism, there will be no one world.
Actually Marx is much quoted and little understood, but so is the Bible.
Man, totally concerned with the production, sale, and consumption of things, becomes more and more like a “thing” himself. He becomes a total consumer engaged in the passive taking in of everything, from cigarettes and liquor, to television, movies, and even lectures and books. He feels lonely and anxious, because he does not see a real meaning to his life beyond that of making a living. He is bored and overcomes his boredom by more and ever-changing consumption and the thrills of meaningless excitement. His thinking is split from emotions, truth from passion, and his mind from his heart. Ideas do not appeal to him because he thinks in terms of calculations and probabilities rather than in terms of convictions and commitments.
Perhaps the greatest danger in our present system lies in the fact that things—gadgets and technical accomplishments—become more attractive than life and growth.
Today’s idols are the objects of a systematically cultivated greed: for money, power, lust, glory, food, and drink. Man worships the means and ends of this greed: production, consumption, military might, business, the state. The stronger he makes his idols, the poorer he becomes, the emptier he feels. Instead of joy, he seeks thrill; instead of life, he loves a mechanized world of gadgets; instead of growth, he seeks wealth; instead of being, he is interested in having and using.
I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between “life” and “death”; between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission.
I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way.
I believe that freedom is the capacity to follow the voice of reason and knowledge, against the voices of irrational passions; that it is the emancipation that renders man free and puts him on the way to using his own rational faculties and to understanding objectively the world and his own part in it.
I believe that one can and must hope for the collective regaining of a mental health that is characterized by the capacity to love and to create; by the liberation of man from incestuous ties with the clan and the soil; by a sense of identity based on the experience that the individual has of himself as the subject and agent of his powers; by the capacity to affect reality inside and outside of himself and bring about the development of objectivity and reason.
I believe in the possible realization of a world in which man can be much, even if he has little; a world in which the dominant motivation of existence is not consumption; a world in which “man” is the end, first and last; a world in which man can find the way of giving a purpose to his life as well as the strength to live free and without illusions.
Soviet communism has been so successful in distorting and corrupting Marx’s ideas (and incidentally convincing the West that “Soviet Marxism” was the true interpretation of Marx) that it is very difficult to rid oneself of this distorted picture.
Only a relatively small number of Marxist scholars—among them pro—and anti-Marxists—have pointed out that Marx’s final goal was not economic but human change;