Fromm Here to Eternity

Erich Fromm accurately diagnosed our society.

The work of Erich Fromm seems even more prescient and potent today than when he postulated his ideas in the 20th century. His words are incendiary indictments of our civilization. He is a thinker on par with Nietzsche and Jung in my estimation.

Erich Seligmann Fromm was born on March 23, 1900 and died March 18, 1980.

He was a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, and philosopher. He was a Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States. During the mid-1920s, he trained to become a psychoanalyst through Frieda Reichmann's psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg. After the Nazi’s took over Germany, Fromm moved first to Switzerland and then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York. Fromm belongs to a Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytical thought.

Erich Fromm's statement that "Psychologists are in danger of becoming the priests of the industrial system" suggests that psychologists might unwittingly be used to maintain the status quo of a system that expects us to consume, compare and produce at the complete expense of our individual well-being. He argues that psychologists could inadvertently become agents of social control by focusing on helping individuals adapt to a system that may be slowly killing them rather than addressing the systemic issues themselves.

Did this system just evolve (or devolve) into a soul-killing monster, or was it designed to destroy us? I believe there is evidence to support the latter.

Fromm’s ideas rang true during his time, but the epically tragic acceleration and amplification of the disease of a social command-and-control system we saw during the Great Reset Plandemic of 2020 has made his warnings impossible to ignore. Everyone is suffering from a foreboding discontent, and manifesting symptoms of an illness they perceive as a personal pathology. But the disease does not originate from within, but from without. It’s as if we are all suffering from radiation sickness delivered by a psychological and spiritual nuclear holocaust.

Fromm said in a 1960 interview: "Psychology says that if you are dissatisfied with the boredom and meaninglessness of our society, you are neurotic. We’ll adjust YOU to a meaningless life without rebelling against it.”

It seems it is easier to “treat” the individual’s symptoms rather than the untenable, but seemingly unstoppable behemoth of a civilization we are living in.

Jiddu Krishnamurti put it this way, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”

So, if being “Normal” is a pathology, then maybe the current popularity of embracing abnormality is a logical reaction. It is understandable, but also misguided and tragic. It inspires the angry race-to-the-bottom that we see all around us. Sawing off your breasts, dyeing your hair blue, tattooing your eyeballs black and piercing every inch of your morbidly obese body for your Only Fans after you upload a video of you painting a swastika on a Tesla oddly does not seem to make one happy.

The way to live in a society that is anti-human, self-loathing, violent, chaotic and schitzophrenic does not lie in valorizing perverse lifestyles.

We can instead create our own “New Normal”. A simple life of love, creativity, independence and purpose.

The following are Dr. Fromm in his own sagacious words:

"Creation and destruction, love and hate, are not two instincts which exist independently. They are both answers to the same need for transcendence, and the will to destroy must rise when the will to create cannot be satisfied”

“Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows ‘what he wants,’ while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.”

“If I am what I have, and if I lose what I have, who then am I?”

“The scars left from the child’s defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.”

“The hoarders, who are anxiously worried about losing something, are, psychologically speaking, the poor impoverished people, regardless of how much they have.”

“There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.”

“One of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one’s life.”

"it is striking to see how man's intelligence has developed and how his reason has deteriorated.”

"from the nineteenth century to our day, there seems to have occurred an observable increase in stupidity”

“Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.”

Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robot

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