Interesting Readings

Sometimes when I read something interesting I need to jot down . "On Being Human" by Eric Fromm.

Extracts from Fromm's lecture on "The Psychological Problem of Man in Modern Society" :

(...Labour has become a commodity, sold on the labour market; under the same conditions of fair competition....Man has transformed himself into a commodity, and experiences his life as capital to be invested profitably. If he suceeds in this, he is "successful" and his life has meaning; if not, he is a "failure". His "values" 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 judgement 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 easily in large groups, who want to consume more and more, and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated.)....

(As a worker, clerk, or manager, modern man is even alienated from his work. The worker has become an economic atom....seldom in touch with the whole product.....The meaninglessness and alienation of work result in a longing for complete laziness. Man hates his working life because it makes him feel a prisoner and a fraud. His ideal becomes absolute laziness...This tendency is reinforced by the type of consumption necessary for the expansion of the market....If I do not postpone the satisfaction of my wish...I have no conflict, no doubts; no decision has to be made; I am never alone with myself because I am always busy- either working or having fun. I have no need to be aware of myself as myself because I am constanlty absorbed with consuming).....

(This alienated, isolated man is frightened....The bureaucratic industrial system, especially as it has developed in big corporations, produce anxiety, first of all because of the discrepancy between the bigness of the social entity (corporation, government, armed services) and the smallness of one individual. Furthermore, because of the general insecurity that this system produces in almost everybody. Most people are employed and thus dependent on their bureaucratic bosses. They have sold not only their labour, but also their personality (their smiles, their tastes, even their friendships) in the bargain....

(For the psychiatrist, certain consequences of this situation are important. Man, having been transformed into a thing, is anxious, without faith, without conviction, with little capacity for love. He escapes into empty busy-ness, alcoholism, extreme sexual promiscurity, and psychosomatic symptoms of all kinds, which can best be explained by the theory of stress. Paradoxically, the wealthiest societies turn out to be the sickest, and the progress of medicine in them is matched by a great increase of all forms of psychic and psychosomatic illness)....