Fawcett Publications, Inc.,
1955
The following is taken from
"The Twentieth Century",
a section in Chapter Six
("Various Other Diagnoses")
of THE SANE SOCIETY,
by Erich Fromm.
Turning now to the twentieth century
there is also a remarkable similarity
in the criticisms and diagnosis
of the mental ill health of contemporary society,
just as in the nineteenth century,
remarkable particularly in view of the fact
that it comes from people
with different philosophical and political views.
Although I leave out from this survey
most of the socialist critics
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
because I shall deal with them separately in the next chapter,
I shall begin here with the views
of the British socialist, R. H. Tawney,
because they are in many ways
related to the views expressed in this book.
In his classic work, The Acquisitive Society
(originally published under the title
The Sickness of an Acquisitive Society),
he points to the fact
that the principle on which capitalistic society is based,
is the domination of man by things.
In our society, he says,
"... even sensible men are persuaded
that capital 'employs' labor,
such as our pagan ancestors imagined
that the other pieces of wood and iron,
which they deified in their day,
sent their crops, and won their battles.
When men have gone so far
as to talk as though
their idols have come to life,
it is time
that someone broke them.
Labor consists
of persons,
capital
of things.
The only use of things
is to be applied to the service
of persons."
[from R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society,
Harcourt, Brace & Company, Inc., 1920, p. 99]
He points out that the worker in modern industry
does not give his best energies
because he lacks interest in his work,
owing to his nonparticipation in control.
[in The Acquisitive Society,
pages 106 - 107]
He postulates,
as the only way out
of the crisis of modern society,
a change in moral values.
It is necessary to assign
"... to economic activity
itself
its proper place
as the servant,
not a master,
of society.
The burden of our civilization is not merely,
as many suppose,
that the product of industry is ill-distributed,
or its conduct tyrannical,
or its operation interrupted by embittered disagreements.
It is that industry itself has come to hold a position
of exclusive predominance among human interest,
which no single interest,
and least of all
the provision of the material means of existence,
is fit to occupy.
Like a hypochondriac
who is so absorbed in the processes
of his own digestion
that he goes to his grave
before he has begun to live,
industrialized communities
neglect the very objects
for which it is worthwhile to acquire riches
in their feverish preoccupation
with the means
by which riches can be acquired.
That obsession by economic issues
is as
local and transitory
as it is
repulsive and disturbing.
To future generations it will appear as pitiable
as the obsession
of the seventeenth century by religious quarrels
appears today;
indeed, it is less rational,
since the object of which it is concerned is less important.
And it is a poison which inflames every wound
and turns each trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer.
Society will not solve the particular problems of industry
which afflict it,
until that poison is expelled,
and it has learned to see industry itself
in the right perspective.
If it is to do that, it must rearrange its scale of values.
It must regard economic interests as one element in life,
not as the whole of life.
It must persuade its members
to renounce the opportunity of gains
which accrue without any corresponding service,
because the struggle for them
keeps the whole community in a fever.
It must so organize industry
that the instrumental character
of economic activity is emphasized
by its subordination to the social purpose
for which it is carried on."
[from The Acquisitive Society,
pages 183 - 184]
One of the most outstanding contemporary students
of the industrial civilization in the United States,
Elton Mayo,
shared, although somewhat more cautiously,
Durkheim's viewpoint.
"It is true," he said,
"that the problem of social disorganization,
with its consequent anomie,
probably exists in a more acute form in Chicago
than in other parts of the United States.
It is probable that it is a more immediate issue
in the United States than in Europe.
But it is a problem
of order in social development
with which the whole world is concerned."
[from "The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization",
by Elton Mayo, The Macmillan Company,
New York, 1933, p. 125]
Discussing the modern preoccupation with economic activities,
Mayo says:
"Just as our political and economic studies
have for 200 years
tended to take account only of the economic functions involved in living,
so also in our actual living
we have inadvertently allowed pursuit of economic development
to lead us in a condition
of extensive social disintegration ...
It is probable that the work a man does
represents his most important function in the society;
but unless there is some sort of integral social background to his life,
he cannot even assign a value to his work.
Durkheim's findings
in 19th century France
would seem to apply
to 20th century America."
[from "The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization",
by Elton Mayo, The Macmillan Company,
New York, 1933, p. 131]
Referring to his comprehensive study
of the attitude of the Hawthorne workers toward their work,
he comes to the following conclusion:
"The failure of workers and supervisors to understand
their work and working conditions,
the wide-spread sense of personal futility
is general to the civilized world,
and not merely characteristic of Chicago.
The belief of the individual in his social function
and solidarity with the group --
his capacity for collaboration in work --
these are disappearing,
destroyed in part by rapid scientific and technical advance.
With this belief, his sense of security and of well-being
also vanishes,
and he begins to manifest
those exaggerated demands of life
which Durkheim has described."
[from "The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization",
by Elton Mayo, The Macmillan Company,
New York, 1933, p. 159]
Mayo not only agrees with Durkheim in the essential point of his diagnosis,
but he also comes to the critical conclusion
that in the half century of scientific effort after Durkheim,
very little progress has been made in the understanding of the problem.
"Whereas,"
he writes,
"in the material and scientific spheres
we have been careful to develop knowledge and technique,
in the human and socio-political,
we have contented ourselves
with haphazard guess
and opportunist fumbling."
[from "The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization",
by Elton Mayo, The Macmillan Company,
New York, 1933, p. 132]
And further,
"... we are faced with the fact, then,
that in the important domain
of human understanding and control
we are ignorant of the facts and their nature;
our opportunism in administration and social enquiry
has left us incapable of anything
but impotent inspection of a cumulative disaster ...
So we are compelled to wait
for the social organism to recover
or perish,
without adequate medical aid."
[from "The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization",
by Elton Mayo, The Macmillan Company,
New York, 1933, p. 169 - 170]
Speaking more specifically
of the backwardness of our political theory,
he states:
"Political theory has tended to relate itself
for the most part
to its historic origins;
it has failed to originate and sustain
a vigorous enquiry
into the changing structure of society.
In the meantime the social context,
the actual condition of civilized peoples
has undergone so great a variety of changes
that any mere announcement of the ancient formulae
rings hollow and carries no conviction to anyone."
[from "The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization",
by Elton Mayo, The Macmillan Company,
New York, 1933, p. 138]
Another thoughtful student of the contemporary social scene,
F. Tannenbaum,
arrives at conclusions which are not unrelated to those
of Tawney,
in spite of the fact that Tannenbaum
emphasizes the central role of the trade union,
in contrast to
Tawney's socialist insistence
on the direct participation of the workers.
Concluding his "Philosophy of Labor,"
Tannenbaum writes:
"The major error of the last century
has been the assumption that a total society
can be organized
upon an economic motive,
upon profit.
The trade-union
has proved that notion
to be false.
It has demonstrated once again
that men do not live by bread alone.
Because the corporation can offer
only bread or cake,
it has proved incompetent to meet the demands
for the good life.
The union, with all its faults,
may yet save the corporation and its great efficiencies
by incorporating it into its own natural 'society',
its own cohesive labor force,
and by endowing it
with the meanings that all real societies possess,
meanings that give some substance of idealism
to man in his journey
between the cradle and the grave.
Those meanings
cannot be embraced
by expanding
the economic motive.
If the corporation is to survive,
it will have to be endowed
with a moral role in the world,
not merely an economic one.
From this point of view,
the challenge to management
by the trade-union is salutary and hopeful.
It is a route,
perhaps the only available one,
for saving the values of our democratic society,
and the contemporary industrial system as well.
In some way the corporation and its labor force
must become one corporate group
and cease to be a house divided
and seemingly at war."
[from Frank Tannenbaum, "A Philosophy of Labor",
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1952, p. 168]
Lewis Mumford, with whose writings
my own ideas have many points in common,
says this about our contemporary civilization:
"The most deadly criticism
one could make
of modern civilization
is that
apart from its
man-made crises and catastrophes,
it is not humanly interesting ...
In the end, such a civilization
can produce only a mass man:
incapable of choice,
incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities:
at best patient,
docile,
disciplined to monotonous work
to an almost pathetic degree,
but increasingly irresponsible
as his choices become fewer and fewer:
finally,
a creature governed mainly by his conditional reflexes --
the ideal type desired,
if never quite achieved,
by the advertising agency
and the sales organizations of modern business,
or by the propaganda office
and the planning bureaus
of totalitarian
and quasi-totalitarian governments.
The handsomest encomium
for such creatures is:
'They do not make trouble.'
Their highest virtue is:
'They do not stick their necks out.'
Ultimately, such a society produces
only two groups of men:
the conditioners and the conditioned;
the active
and
the passive
barbarians.
The exposure of this web of falsehood,
self-deception, and emptiness
is perhaps what made
Death of a Salesman
so poignant
to the metropolitan American audiences
that witnessed it.
Now this mechanical chaos
is plainly not self-perpetuating,
for it affronts and humiliates the human spirit;
and the tighter and more efficient it becomes
as a mechanical system,
the more stubborn will be
the human reaction against it.
Eventually, it must drive modern man
to blind rebellion,
to suicide,
or to renewal:
and so far
it has worked in the first two ways.
On this analysis,
the crisis we now face
would be inherent in our culture
even if it had not,
by some miracle,
also unleashed
the more active disintegrations
that have taken place
in recent history."
[from Lewis Mumford,
"The Conduct of Life",
Harcourt, Brace & Company,
New York, 1951,
pages 14 and 16]
A. R. Heron,
a convinced supporter of Capitalism
and a writer with a much more conservative bent
than the ones quoted so far,
nevertheless comes to critical conclusions
which are essentially very close
to those of Durkheim and Mayo.
In his
Why Men Work,
a 1948 selection
of the Executive Book Club of New York,
he writes:
"It is fantastic to picture a great multitude of workers
committing mass suicide because of boredom,
a sense of futility,
and frustration.
But the fantastic nature of the picture
disappears
when we broaden our concept of suicide
beyond the killing of the physical life
of the body.
The human being
who has resigned himself
to a life devoid of thinking,
ambition,
pride,
and personal achievement,
has resigned himself to
the death of attributes
which are
distinctive elements of human life.
Filling a space in the factory or office
with his physical body,
making motions designed by the minds of others,
applying physical strength,
or releasing the power of steam or electricity,
are not
in themselves
contributions of the essential abilities
of human beings.
This inadequate demand upon human abilities
can be no more forcibly indicated
than by reference to modern techniques
for the placement of workers.
Experience has shown that there are jobs,
a startling number of them,
which cannot be satisfactorily filled
by persons of average or superior intelligence.
It is no answer to say that large numbers of persons
with inferior intelligence need the jobs.
Management shares responsibility
with statesmen,
ministers,
and educators
for the improvement
of the intelligence of all of us.
We shall always be governed in a democracy
by the votes of people as people,
including those whose native intelligence is low
or whose potential mental and spiritual development
have been cramped.
We must never abandon
the material benefits
we have gained from technology
and mass production
and specialization of tasks.
But we shall never achieve the ideals of America
if we create a class of workers
denied the satisfactions of significant work.
We shall not be able to maintain those ideals
if we do not apply every tool
of government,
education,
and industry
to the improvement of the human abilities
of those who are our rulers --
the tens of millions of ordinary men and women.
The part of this task assigned to management
is the provision of working conditions
which will release the creative instinct of every worker,
and which will give play
to his divine-human ability to think."
[from A. R. Heron, "Why Men Work",
Stanford University Press, Stanford,
1948, pages 121 - 122]
After having heard the voices
of various social scientists,
let us conclude this chapter
by listening to three men
outside of the field of social science:
A. Huxley,
A. Schweitzer,
and
A. Einstein.
Huxley's indictment
of twentieth-century Capitalism
is contained in his "Brave New World".
In this novel (1931), he describes a picture
of an automatized world which is clearly insane
and yet which
only in details
and somewhat in degree
is different from the reality of 1954.
[That is, the date of the writing
of "The Sane Society".]
The only alternative he sees
is the life of the savage
with a religion which is
half fertility cult
and half penitente ferocity.
+++
In a foreword
written for the new edition of
"Brave New World" (1946)
he writes:
[This following section of
"THE SANE SOCIETY "
is a long excerpt from
"Brave New World"
by Aldous Huxley,
The Vanguard Library,
London, 1952, pages 11-15]
"Assuming, then,
that we are capable of learning as much
from Hiroshima
as our forefathers learned
from Magdeburg,
we may look forward to a period,
not indeed of peace,
but of limited
and only partially ruinous
warfare.
During that period it may be assumed
that nuclear energy will be harnessed to industrial uses.
The result, pretty obviously,
will be a series of economic and social changes
unprecedented in rapidity and completeness.
All the existing patterns of human life
will be disrupted
and new patterns will have to be improvised
to conform with
the non-human fact of atomic power.
Procrustes in modern dress,
the nuclear scientist will prepare
the bed on which mankind must lie;
and if mankind doesn't fit --
well, that will be just too bad
for mankind.
There will have to be some stretching
and a bit of amputation --
the same sort of stretching and amputation
as have been going on
ever since applied science
really got into its stride,
only this time
they will be
a good deal more drastic
than in the past.
These
far from painless operations
will be directed
by highly centralized totalitarian governments.
Inevitably so;
for the immediate future
is likely to resemble the immediate past,
and in the immediate past
rapid technological changes,
taking place in a mass-producing economy
and among a population predominantly property-less,
have always tended
to produce economic and social confusion.
To deal with confusion,
power has been centralized
and government control increased.
It is probable that all the world's governments
will be more or less completely totalitarian
even before the harnessing of atomic energy;
that they will be totalitarian
during and after the harnessing
seems almost certain.
Only a large-scale popular movement
toward decentralization
and self-help
can arrest the present tendency toward statism.
At present there is no sign
that such a movement will take place.
There is, of course, no reason
why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old.
Government by clubs
and firing squads,
by artificial famine,
mass imprisonment
and mass deportation,
is not merely inhumane
(nobody cares much about that nowadays);
it is demonstrably inefficient --
and in an age of advanced technology,
inefficiency
is the sin against the Holy Ghost.
A really efficient totalitarian state
would be one in which the all-powerful executive
of political bosses and their army of managers
control a population of slaves
who do not have to be coerced,
because they love their servitude.
To make them love it
is the task assigned,
in present-day totalitarian states,
to ministries of propaganda,
newspaper editors
and schoolteachers.
But their methods
are still crude and unscientific.
The old Jesuits' boast that,
if they were given the schooling of
the child,
they could answer for
the man's
religious opinions,
was a product of wishful thinking.
And the modern pedagogue
is probably rather less efficient
at conditioning his pupil's reflexes
than were the reverend fathers
who educated Voltaire.
The greatest triumphs of propaganda
have been accomplished,
not by doing something,
but by refraining from doing.
Great is the truth,
but still greater,
from a practical point of view,
is silence about the truth.
By simply not mentioning certain subjects,
by lowering what Mr. Churchill calls an 'iron curtain'
between the masses
and such facts or arguments
as the local political bosses regard as undesirable,
totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion
much more effectively than they could have done
by the most eloquent denunciations,
the most compelling of logical rebuttals.
But silence is not enough.
If persecution,
liquidation
and other symptoms of social friction
are to be avoided,
the positive sides of propaganda
must be made
as effective
as the negative.
The most important
Manhattan Projects of the future
will be vast government-sponsored enquiries
into what the politicians and the participating scientists
will call 'the problem of happiness' --
in other words,
the problem of making people
love their servitude.
Without economic security,
the love of servitudecannot possibly come into existence;
for the sake of brevity,
I assume that the all-powerful executive and its managers
will succeed in solving the problem
of permanent security.
But security tends very quickly
to be taken for granted.
Its achievement
is merely a superficial,external revolution.
The love of servitude
cannot be established
except as the result of a deep,
personal revolution in human minds
and bodies.
To bring about that revolution we require,
among others,
the following discoveries and inventions.
First, a greatly improved technique of suggestion --
through infant conditioning
and, later,
with the aid of drugs, such as scopolamine.
Second, a fully developed science of human differences,
enabling government managers to assign any given individual
to his or her proper place in the social and economic hierarchy.
(Round pegs in square holes
tend to have dangerous thoughts
about the social system
and to infect others
with their discontents.)
Third (since reality, however utopian,
is something from which
people feel the need
of taking pretty frequent holidays),
a substitute for alcohol
and the other narcotics,
something at once less harmful
and more pleasure-giving
than gin or heroin.
And fourth (but this would be a long-term project,
which would take generations of totalitarian control
to bring to a successful conclusion),
a foolproof system of eugenics,
designed to standardize the human product
and so to facilitate
the task of the managers.
In "Brave New World"
this standardization of the human product
has been pushed to fantastic,
though not perhaps impossible, extremes.
Technically and ideologically we are still a long way
from bottled babies
and Bokanovky groups of semi-morons.
But by A.F. 600 [or about 600 years from now],
who knows what may not be happening?
Meanwhile the other characteristic features
of that happier and more stable world --
the equivalents of soma
and hypnopaedia
and the scientific caste system --
are probably not more than
three or four generations away.
Nor does the sexual promiscuity
of "Brave New World"
seem so very distant.
There are already certain American cities
in which the number of divorces
is equal to the number of marriages.
In a few years, no doubt,
marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses,
good for a period of twelve months,
with no law against changing dogs
or keeping more than one animal at a time.
As political and economic freedom
diminishes,
sexual freedom tends
compensatingly
to increase.
And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families
with which to colonize empty or conquered territory)
will do well to encourage that freedom.
In conjunction with
the freedom to daydream
under the influence of dope
and movies
and the radio,
it will help to reconcile his subjects
to the servitude
which is their fate.
All things considered,
it looks as though Utopia
were far closer to us than anyone,
only fifteen years ago,
could have imagined.
Then, I projected it
six hundred years into the future.
Today, it seems quite possible
that the horror may be upon us
within a single century.
That is, if we refrain from
blowing ourselves to smithereens
in the interval.
Indeed, unless we choose to decentralize
and to use applied science,
not as the end
to which human beings are to be made the means,
but as the means
to producing a race of free individuals,
we have only two alternatives to choose from:
either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms,
having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb
and as their consequence the destruction of civilization
(or, if the warfare is limited,
the perpetuation of militarism);
or else
one supra-national totalitarianism,
called into existence by the social chaos
resulting from rapid technological progress in general
and the atom revolution in particular,
and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability,
into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia.
You pays your money
and you takes your choice."
+++
[The 'Brave New World' excerpt ends here.]+++
Albert Schweitzer
and
Albert Einstein,
who
perhaps more than any other living persons
manifest the highest development
of the intellectual
and moral traditions
of Western culture,
have this to say on present-day culture.
+++
Albert Schweitzer writes:
"A new public opinion
must be created
privately and unobtrusively.
The existing one
is maintained by the press,
by propaganda,
by organization,
and by financial and other influences
which are at its disposal.
This unnatural way
of spreading ideas
must be opposed
by the natural one,
which goes from man to man
and relies solely on
the truth of our thoughts
and the hearer's receptiveness
for new truth.
Unarmed,
and following the human spirit's
primitive and natural fighting method,
it must attack the other,
which faces it,
as Goliath faced David,
in the mighty armor of the age.
About the struggle
which must needs ensue
no historical analogy
can tell us much.
The past has, no doubt,
seen the struggle
seen the struggle
of the free-thinking individual
against the fettered spirit
of a whole society,
but the problem
has never presented itself
on the scale on which it does today,
because
the fettering of the collective spirit
as it is fettered today
by modern organizations,
modern un-reflectiveness,
and modern popular passions,
is a phenomenon
without precedent in history.
Will the man of today
have strength to carry out
what the spirit
demands from him,
and what the age
would like
to make impossible?
In the over-organized societies
which in a hundred ways
have him in their power,
he must somehow become once more
an independent personality
and so
exert influence back upon them.
They will use
every means
to keep him in that condition
of impersonality
which suits them.
They fear personality
because
the spirit and the truth,
which they would like to muzzle,
find in it
a means
of expressing themselves.
And their
power
is,
unfortunately,
as great
as
their fear.
There is a tragic alliance
between society as a whole
and its economic conditions.
With a grim relentlessness
those conditions
tend to bring up the man of today
as a being without freedom,
without self-collectedness,
without independence,
in short
as a human being
so full of deficiencies
that he lacks
the qualities of humanity.
And they are
the last things
that we can change.
that we can change.
Even if it should be granted us
that the spirit should begin its work,
we shall only
slowly and incompletely
gain power
over these forces.
There is, in fact,
being demanded from the will
that which our conditions of life
refuse to allow.
And how heavy the tasks
that the spirit
has to take in hand!
It has to create
the power of understanding
the truth that is really true
where at present
nothing is current
but propagandist truth.
It has to depose ignoble patriotism,
and enthrone the noble kind of patriotism
which aims at ends that are worthy
of the whole of mankind,
in circles where the hopeless issues
of past and present political activities
of past and present political activities
keep nationalist passions aglow
even among those
who in their hearts
would fain
be free from them.
It has to get the fact
that civilization
is an interest
of all men
and of humanity as a whole
recognized again in places
where national civilization
is today worshipped as an idol,
and the notion of a humanity
with a common civilization
lies broken to fragments.
It has to maintain our faith
in the civilized State,
even though our modern States,
spiritually and economically ruined
by the war,
have
no time to think
about the tasks of civilization,
and dare not devote their attention
to anything
but
how to use every possible means,
even those
which undermine
the conception of justice,
to collect money
with which
to prolong their own existence.
It has to unite us
by giving us a single ideal
of civilized men,
and this is a world where
one nation
has robbed its neighbor
of all faith
in humanity,
idealism,
righteousness,
reasonableness,
and truthfulness,
and all alike
have come under
the domination of powers
which are plunging us
ever deeper
into barbarism.
It has to get attention concentrated
on civilization
while the growing difficulty
of making a living
absorbs the masses
more and more in material cares,
and makes all other things
seem to them
to be mere shadows.
It has to give us faith
in the possibility of progress
while the reaction
of the economic
on the spiritual
becomes more pernicious every day
and contributes to
an ever growing demoralization.
It has to provide us with reasons for hope
at a time when
not only
secular
and religious institutions and associations,
but the men, too,
who are looked upon as leaders,
continually fail us,
when artists
and men of learning
show themselves
as supporters of barbarism,
and
notabilities who pass for thinkers,
and behave outwardly as such,
are revealed,
when crises come,
as being nothing more than
writers
and
members of academies.
All these hindrances
stand in the path
of the will
to civilization.
A dull despair
hovers about us.
How well we
now understand
the men
of the Greco-Roman decadence,
who stood before events
incapable of resistance,
and leaving the world to its fate,
withdrew
upon their inner selves!
Like them, we are bewildered
by our experiences of life.
Like them, we hear enticing voices
which say to us
that the one thing
which can still make life tolerable
is to live for the day.
We must, we are told,
renounce every wish
to think
or hope
about anything
beyond our own fate.
We must find
rest
in
resignation.
The recognition that civilization
is founded
on some sort of
theory of the universe,
can be restored
only through a spiritual awakening,
and
a will for ethical good
in the mass of mankind,
compels us
to make clear to ourselves
those difficulties
in the way of
a rebirth of civilization
which ordinary reflection
would overlook.
But at the same time
it raises us above all considerations
of possibility
or impossibility.
If the ethical spirit
provides a sufficient standing ground
in the sphere of events
for making civilization a reality,
then we shall get back to civilization,
if we return
to a suitable theory of the universe
and
the convictions
to which this
properly gives birth."
+++
[This ends the selection from
"The Philosophy of Civilization",
by Albert Schweitzer,
The Macmillan Company,
New York,
and A & C Black Ltd., London England.]
+++
In a short article,
"Why Socialism,"
Einstein writes:
"I have now reached the point
where I may indicate briefly
what to me
constitutes the essence
of the crisis
of our time.
It concerns
the relationship
of the individual
to society.
The individual
has become
more conscious than ever
of his dependence
upon society.
But he does not experience
this dependence
as a positive asset,
as an organic tie,
as a protective force,
but rather
as a threat
to his natural rights,
or even
to his economic existence.
Moreover, his position in society
is such
that the egotistical drives
of his make-up
are constantly being
accentuated,
while his social drives,
which are by nature weaker,
progressively
deteriorate.
All human beings,
whatever their position
in society, are suffering
from this process
of deterioration.
Unknowingly prisoners
of their own egotism,
they feel insecure,
lonely,
and deprived
of the naive,
simple
and
unsophisticated enjoyment
of life.
Man can find
meaning in life,
short and perilous as it is,
only through
devoting himself
to society."+++
[This ends the selection
from
"Why Socialism?"
in Monthly Review,
Vol. 1, i, 1949, pages 9 - 15,
and
also brings to a close the section called
"The Twentieth Century"
from Chapter Six
("Various Other Diagnoses")
of THE SANE SOCIETY,
by Erich Fromm.]
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