Erich Fromm's ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM merited a re-read recently. I'm down on bathroom reading -- particularly books that haven't become victims of my intellectual shredding. Fromm's book doesn't avoid some ripping asunder for its being a little moralistic and preachy. Clearly, his writing doesn't aim to be as sophisticated as Nietzsche's writing, in that he doesn't appeal to the implicit desire of his readers to want to be something better than they are, which would be a means of communicating without preaching.
Fromm is a social scientist, not an artist or philosopher, so he simply tells his readers where they fall short of authenticity.
Apart from style, his analysis is plain and accurate. He sees that we eschew "emotion" to our loss, in order to be considered sophisticated. We accept the ideology that it is good to be "employed". The etymology of the word is already self-evident, as Fromm states, for the word, "employment", already tells the whole story about the status of the average human, who is a tool to be used.
It seems then that we're still prone to psychological self-deception in the same manner that we were in 1941, the year the book appeared. At the same time, we are less lonely. We deceive ourselves not so much about who we are, but about climate change, about whether our lifestyles ought not to be radically altered to cater to our own needs, rather than to the task of adaptation to a broken and defunct system. And so on.
Fromm is a social scientist, not an artist or philosopher, so he simply tells his readers where they fall short of authenticity.
Apart from style, his analysis is plain and accurate. He sees that we eschew "emotion" to our loss, in order to be considered sophisticated. We accept the ideology that it is good to be "employed". The etymology of the word is already self-evident, as Fromm states, for the word, "employment", already tells the whole story about the status of the average human, who is a tool to be used.
It seems then that we're still prone to psychological self-deception in the same manner that we were in 1941, the year the book appeared. At the same time, we are less lonely. We deceive ourselves not so much about who we are, but about climate change, about whether our lifestyles ought not to be radically altered to cater to our own needs, rather than to the task of adaptation to a broken and defunct system. And so on.
No comments:
Post a Comment