The Art of Being

by Erich Fromm

Therein lies the reason that all great teachers of man have arrived at essentially the same norms for living, the essence of these norms being that the overcoming of greed, illusions, and hate, and the attainment of love and compassion, are the conditions for attaining optimal being. Drawing conclusions from empirical evidence,

They recognize this craving as something different from normal desires, precisely because it damages the organism.

then, everyone also knows today a great deal about the pathological and damaging character of irrational passions such as the craving for fame, power, possessions, revenge, control, and can indeed qualify these needs as damaging, on an equally theoretical and clinical basis.

Our reason functions only to the degree to which it is not flooded by greed. The person who is the prisoner of his irrational passions loses the capacity for objectivity and is necessarily at the mercy of his passions; he rationalizes when he believes he is expressing the truth.

that man can be a slave without chains is of crucial importance in our situation today. The outer chains have simply been put inside of man.

The desires and thoughts that the suggestion apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains.

man can at least be aware of outer chains but be unaware of inner chains, carrying them with t...

He can try to overthrow the outer chains, but how can he rid himself of chains of whos...

The Church still by and large speaks only of inner liberation, and political parties, from liberals to communists, speak only about outer liberation.

Indeed, this chapter could be ended right here by saying: Read the writings of Masters of Living, learn to understand the true meaning of their words, form your own conviction of what you want to do with your life; and get over the naïve idea that you need no master, no guide, no model, that you can find out in a lifetime what the greatest minds of the human species have discovered in many thousands of years—and each one of them building with the stones and sketches their predecessors left them.

“How can anyone live without being instructed in the art of living and of dying?”

the most difficult obstacle to learning the art of living is what I would call the “great sham.”

The public, even the educated public, has largely lost its capacity to know the difference between what is genuine and what is fake.

The other reason for our difficulty to discern the difference between the authentic and the sham lies in the hypnotic attraction of power and fame. If the name of a man or the title of a book is made famous by clever publicity, the average person is willing to believe the work’s claims.

Whether he is kind, intelligent, productive, courageous matters little if these qualities have not been of use to make him successful. On the other hand, if he is only mediocre as a person, writer, artist, or whatever, and is a narcissistic, aggressive, drunken, obscene headline maker, he will—given some talent—easily become one of the “leading artists or writers” of the day.

Admittedly, it is useful for a vain and egocentric person just as it is for a person who has dropped much of his having structure, but by pretending that it is more than momentary relaxation, T.M. blocks the way for many who would seek a real path of liberation did they not believe they had found it in Transcendental Meditation.

The basis for any approach to self-transformation is an ever-increasing awareness of reality and the shedding of illusions. Illusions contaminate even the most wonderful-sounding teaching to make it poisonous.

that do contaminate teaching, such as announcing that great results can be achieved without effort, or that the craving for fame can go together with egolessness, or that methods of mass suggestion are compatible with independence.

Faith in life, in oneself, in others must be built on the hard rock of realism; that is to say, on the capacity to see evil where it is, to see swindle, destructiveness, and selfishness not only when they are obvious but in their many disguises and rationalizations.

Indeed, neither the Buddha, nor the Prophets, nor Jesus, nor Eckhart, nor Spinoza, nor Marx, nor Schweitzer were “softies.” On the contrary, they were hardheaded realists and most of them were persecuted and maligned not because they preached virtue but because they spoke truth. They did not respect power, titles, or fame, and they knew that the emperor was naked; and they knew that power can kill the “truth-sayers.”

How many billions of conversations have taken place in these last years about inflation, Vietnam, the Near East, Watergate, elections, etc., and how rarely do these conversations go beyond the obvious—the strict partisan viewpoint—and penetrate to the roots and causes of the phenomena that are discussed.

Perhaps most trivial talk is a need to talk about oneself; hence, the never-ending subject of health and sickness, children, travel, successes, what one did, and the innumerable daily things that seem to be important. Since one cannot talk about oneself all the time without being thought a bore, one must exchange the privilege by a readiness to listen to others talking about themselves. Private social meetings between individuals (and often, also, meetings of all kinds of associations and groups) are little markets where one exchanges one’s need to talk about oneself and one’s desire to be listened to for the need of others who seek the same opportunity.

One can hardly overestimate people’s need to talk about themselves and to be listened to.

Modern man is a mass man, he is highly “socialized,” but he is very lonely.

There is no contact between human beings that does not affect both of them.

Inasmuch as one cannot avoid bad company, one should not be deceived: One should see the insincerity behind the mask of friendliness, the destructiveness behind the mask of eternal complaints about unhappiness, the narcissism behind the charm.

“If you live in a country whose inhabitants are evil, avoid their company. If they try to force you to associate with them, leave the country, even if it means going to the desert.”

If other people do not understand our behavior—so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being “asocial” or “irrational” in their eyes, so be it.

Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.

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People are convinced that everything, even the most difficult tasks, should be mastered without or with only little effort.

The increasing need for technicians, for half-educated people who work in service industries, from clerks to minor executives, requires people with a smattering of knowledge as our colleges provide it.

Intellect does not make one a good cog

This replacement of overt by anonymous authority finds its expression in all areas of life: Force is camouflaged by consent; the consent is brought about by methods of mass suggestion.

The good life is the effortless life; the necessity to make strong efforts is, as it were, considered to be a medieval remnant, and one makes strong efforts only if one is really forced to do so, not voluntarily.

The era of modern progress claims to lead man into the promised land of painless existence. In fact, people develop a kind of chronic phobia of pain.

This existential desire for liberty slowly was repressed, however; in the desire to protect one’s property, the genuine wish for freedom became a mere ideology.

the nineteenth century those who ruled exercised overt, direct authority: kings, governments, priests, bosses, parents, teachers. With changing methods of production, particularly the increasing role of machines, and with the change from the idea of hard work and saving to the ideal of consumption (“happiness”), overt personal obedience to a person was substituted by submission to the organization: the endless belt, the giant enterprises, governments which persuaded the individual that he was free, that everything was done in his interests, that he, the public, was the real boss.

even with due appreciation of the historical significance of the “sexual revolution,” one should not ignore some other, less favorable “side effects” of that revolution. It tried to establish the freedom of whim instead of the freedom of will.

The general criterion of a whim is that it responds to the question “Why not?” and not to the question “Why?”

Ones whims address the question "why not?" while his Will addresses the question "why?"

Following a whim is, in fact, the result of deep inner passivity blended with a wish to avoid boredom. Will is based on activity, whim on passivity.

The most significant place in which the fiction of personal freedom is acted out is the area of consumption.

The customer-king is not aware that he has no influence on what is offered him, and that the alleged choice is no “choice” since the different brands are essentially the same, sometimes even manufactured by the same corporation.

The fact is, most of those who are so eager to reach states of altered consciousness do not have more developed states of consciousness than their fellow men who only drink coffee, liquor, and smoke cigarettes. Binges of widened consciousness are escapes from a narrow consciousness, and after the “trip” they are no different from what they were before and from how their fellow men have been all the time: Half-awake people.

The average man today thinks very little for himself. He remembers data as presented by the schools and the mass media; he knows practically nothing of what he knows by his own observing or thinking.

Nor does modern man—including the educated groups—think much about religious, philosophical, or even political problems. He ordinarily adopts one or the other of the many clichés offered him by political or religious books or speakers, but the conclusions are not arrived at as a result of active and penetrating thinking of his own. He chooses the cliché that appeals most to his own character and social class.

A Greek citizen in the period of the flowering of Greek democracy was certainly surrounded by more things than the hunter, yet he was actively concerned with the affairs of state, he developed and used his reason to an extraordinary degree, he was engaged, both artistically and philosophically.

Whatever filled their lives, it was largely a result of their own doing and their own experience.

He did not want to have or to consume more, because not the acquisition of riches but the productive use of his faculties and the enjoyment of being were his goal.

Yet these skill-requiring activities are increasingly fewer; the vast majority of men make a living by work that requires little intelligence, imagination, or concentration of any kind. Physical effects (results) are no longer proportionate to human effort, and this separation between effort (and skill) and result is one of the most significant and pathogenic features of modern society, because it tends to degrade effort and to minimize its significance.

modern man is basically very helpless in relation to his world. He only appears powerful because he dominates nature to an extraordinary degree.

Man at this point of his history has enslaved himself to the very fire that was to liberate him. Man today, wearing the mask of a giant, has become a weak, helpless being dependent on the machines