Fromm, Erich. The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1964.

Man-Wolf or Sheep?

There are many who believe that men are sheep; there are others who believe that men are wolves. Both aside can muster good arguments for their positions. Those who propose that men are sheep have only to point to the fact that men are easily influenced to do what they are told, even if it is harmful to themselves; that they have followed their leaders into wars which brought them nothing but destruction; that they have believed any kind of nonsense if it was only presented with sufficient vigor and supported by power - from the harsh threats of priests and kings to the soft voices of the hidden and not-so-hidden persuaders. It seems that the majority of men are suggestible, half-awake children, willing to surrender their will to anyone who speaks with a voice that is threatening or sweet enough to sway them. Indeed, he who has a conviction strong enough to withstand the opposition of the crowd is the exception rather than the rule, an exception often admired centuries later, mostly laughed at by his contemporaries. (p. 17)

It is on this assumption – that men are sheep – that the Great Inquisitors and the dictators have built their systems. More than that, this very belief that men are sheep and hence need leaders to make the decisions for them, has often given the leaders the sincere conviction that they were fulfilling a moral duty – even though a tragic one – if they gave man what he wanted: if they were leaders who took away from him the burden of responsibility and freedom. (p. 17)

But if most men have been sheep, why is it that man’s life is so different that sheep? His history has been written in blood; it is a history of continuous violence, in which almost invariably force has been used to bend his will. Did Talaat Pasha alone exterminate millions of Armenians? Did Hitler alone exterminate millions of Jews? Did Stalin alone exterminate millions of political enemies? These men were not alone; they had thousands of men who killed for them, tortured for them, and who did so willingly but with pleasure. Do we not see man’s inhumanity to man everywhere – in ruthless warfare, in murder and rape, in the ruthless exploitation of the weaker by the stronger, and in the fact that the sighs of the tortured and suffering creature have so often falled on deaf ears an hardened hearts? All these facts have led thinkers like Hobbes to the conclusion that homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to his fellow man); they have led many of us today to the assumption that man is vicious and destructive by nature, that he is a killer who can be restrained from his favorite pastime only by fear of more powerful killers. (p. 18)

There are many numerous opportunities for cruelty and sadism in everyday life in which people could indulge without fear of retaliation; yet many do not do so; in fact, many react with a certain sense of revulsion when they meet cruelty and sadism. (p. 18)

If we are convinced that human nature is inherently prone to destroy, that the need to use force and violence is rooted in it, then our resistance to ever increasing brutalization will become weaker and weaker. (p. 19)

I shall single out three phenomena which, in my opinion, form the basis for the most vicious and dangerous form of human orientation; these are love of death, malignant narcissism, and symbiotic-incestuous fixation. The three orientations, when combined, form the “syndrome of decay,” that which prompts men to destroy for the sake of destruction, and to hate for the sake of hate. In opposition to the “syndrome of decay,” I sall describe the “syndrome of growth”; this consists of love of life (as against love of death), love of man (as against narcissism), and independence (as against symbiotic-incestuous fixation). Only in a minority of people is either one of the two syndromes fully developed. But there is no denying that each man goes forward in the direction he has chosen: that of life or that of death; that of good or that of evil. (p. 23)

The distinction between various types of violence is based on the distinction between their respective unconscious motivations; for only the understanding of the unconscious dynamics of behavior permits us to understand the behavior itself, its roots, its course, and the energy which it is charged. (p. 24)

The most normal and nonpathological form of violence is playful violence. We find it in those forms in which violence is exercised in the pursuit of displaying skill, not in the pursuit of destruction, not motivated by hate or destructiveness. (p. 24)

In reality one would often find unconscious aggression and destructiveness hidden behind the explicit logic of the game. But even this being so, the main motivation in this type of violence is the display of skill, not destructiveness. (p. 25)

Of much greater practical significance than playful violence is reactive violence. By reactive violence I understand that violence which is employed in the defense of life, freedom, dignity, property – one’s own or that of others. It is rooted in fear, and for this very reason it is probably the most frequent form of violence; the fear can be real or imagined, conscious or unconscious. This type of violence is in the service of life, not of death; its aim is preservation, not destruction. (p. 25)

Very often the feeling of being threatened and the resulting reactive violence are not based upon reality, but on the manipulation of man’s mind; political and religious leaders persuade their adherents that they are threatened by an enemy, and thus arouse the subjective response of reactive hostility. (p. 25)

Another aspect of reactive violence is the kind of violence which is produced by frustration. We find aggressive behavior in animals, children, and adults, when a wish or a need is frustrated. Such aggressive behavior constitutes an attempt, although often a futile one, to attain the frustrated aim through the use of violence. (p. 26)

Related to the aggression resulting from frustration is hostility engendered by envy and jealosy. Both jealousy and envy constitute a special kind of frustration. They are caused by the fact that B has an object which A desires, or is loved by a person whose love A desires. Hate and hostility is aroused in A against B who receives that which A wants, and cannot have. Envy and jealousy are frustrations, accentuated by the fact that not only does A not get what he wants, but that another person is favored instead. The story of Cain, unloved through no fault of his own, who kills the favored brother, and the story of Joseph and his brothers, are classical versions of jealousy and envy. Psychoanalytic literature offers a wealth of clinical data on these same phenomena. (pp. 26-27)

Another type of violence related to reactive violence but already a step further in the direction of pathology is revengeful violence. In reactive violence the aim is to avert the threatened injury, for this reason such violence serve the biological function of survival. In revengeful violence, on the other hand, the injury has already been done, and hence the violence has no function of defense. It has the irrational function of undoing magically what has been done realistically. We find revengeful violence in individuals as well as among primitive and civilized groups. (p. 27)

The revenge motive is in inverse proportion to the strength and productiveness of a group or an individual. The impotent and the cripple have only one recourse to restore their self-esteem if it has been shattered by having been injured: to take revenge according the the lex talionis: “an eye for an eye.” On the other hand the person who lives productively has no, or little, such need. Even if he has been hurt, insulted, and injured, the very process of living productively makes him forget the injury of the past. The ability to produce proves to be stronger than the wish for revenge. (p. 27)

Closely related to revengeful violence is a source of destructiveness which is due to the shattering of faith which often occurs in the life of a child. (p. 28)

A child starts life with faith in goodness, love, justice. The infant has faith in his mother’s breasts, in her readiness to cover him when he is cold, to comfort him when he is sick. This faith can be faith in father, mother, in a grandparent, or in any other person close to him; it can be expressed in faith in God. In many individuals this faith is shattered at an early age. The child hears father lying in an important matter; he sees his cowardly fright of mother, ready to betray him (the child) in order to appease her; he witnesses the parents’ sexual intercourse, and may experience father as a brutal beast; he I unhappy or frightened, and neither one of the parents, who are allegedly so concerned for him, notices it, or even if he tells them, pays any attention. (pp. 28-29)

It is always the faith in life, in the possibility of trusting it, of having confidence in it, which is broken. (p. 29)

While all these forms of violence are still in the service of life realistically, magically, or at least as the result of damage to or disappointment in life, the next form to be discussed, compensatory violence, is a more pathological form, even though less drastically so than necrophilia, which is discussed in Chapter 3. (p. 30)

By compensatory violence I understand violence as a substitute for productive activity occurring in an impotent person. (p. 30)

To create life is to transcend one’s status as a creature that is thrown into life as dice are thrown out of a cup. But to destroy life also means to transcend it and to escape the unbearable suffering of complete passivity. To create life requires certain qualities which the impotent person lacks. To destroy life requires only one quality – the use of force. The impotent man, if he has a pistol, a knife, or a strong arm, can transcend life by destroying it in others or in himself. He thus takes revenge on life for negating itself to him. Compensatory violence is precisely that violence which has its roots in and which compensates for impotence. The man who cannot create wants to destroy. In creating and in destroying he transcends his role as a mere creature. (p. 31)

Closely related to compensatory violence is the drive for complete and absolute control over a living being, animal or man. This drive is the essence of sadism. (pp. 31-32)

There is one last type of violence which needs to be described: archaic “blood thirst.” This is not the violence of the cripple; it is the blood thirst of the man who is still completely enveloped in his tie to nature. His is a passion for killing as a way to transcend life, inasmuch as he is afraid of moving forward and being fully human. (p. 33)

In the man who seeks an answer to life by regressing to the pre-individual state of existence, by becoming like an animal and thus being freed from the burden of reason, blood becomes the essence of life; to shed blood is to feel alive, to be strong, to be unique, to be above all others. Killing becomes the great intoxication, the great self-affirmation on the most archaic level. (p. 33)

Literally, “necrophilia” means “love of the dead” (as “biophelia” means “love of life”). The term is customarily used to denote a sexual perversion, namely the desire to possess the dead body (of a woman) for purposes of sexual intercourse, or a morbid desire to be in the presence of a dead body. (p. 39)

The person with the necrophilous orientation is one who is attracted to and fascinated by all that is not alive, all that is dead; corpses, decay, feces, dirt. Necrophiles are those people who love to talk about sickness, about burials, about death. (p. 39)

The necrophilous dwell in the past, never in the future. Their feelings are essentially sentimental, that is, they nurse the memory of feelings which they had yesterday – or believe that they had. They are the cold, distant, devotees of “law and order.” Their values are precisely the reverse of the values we connect with normal life: not life, but death excites and satisfies them. (pp. 39-40)

Characteristic for the necrophile is his attitude toward force…The lover of death necessarily loves force. For him the greatest achievement of man is not to give life, but to destroy it; the use of force is not a transitory action force upon him by circumstances – it is a way of life. (40)

While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional manner, the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things. All living processes, feelings, and thoughts are transformed into things. (41)

The opposite of the necrophilous orientations is the biophilous; its essence is love of life in contrast to love of death. Like necrophilia, biophilia is not constituted by a single trait, but represents a total orientation, an entire way of being. It is manifested in a person’s bodily processes, in his emotions, in his thoughts, in his grestures, the biophilous orientation expresses itself in the whole man. The most elementary form of this orientation is expressed in the tendency of all living organisms to live. (45)

The tendency to preserve life and to fight against death is the most elementary form of the biophilous orientation, and is common to all living substance. Inasmuch as t is a tendency to preserve life, and to fight death, it represents only one aspect of the drive toward life. The other aspect is a more positive one: living substance has the tendency to integrate and to unite; it tends to fuse with different and opposite entities, and to grow in a structural way. Unification and integrated growth are characteristic of all life processes, not only as far as cells are concerned, but also with regard to feeling and thinking. (45-46)

The full unfolding of biophilia is to be found in the productive orientation. The person who fully loves life is attracted by the process of life and growth in all spheres. He prefers to construct rather than to retain. He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new to the security of finding confirmation of the old. He loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty. His approach to life is functional rather than mechanical. He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations. He wants to mold and to influence by love, reason, by example; not by force, by cutting thigns apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things. He enjoys life and all its manifestations rather than mere excitement. (47)

Biophilic ethics have their own principle of good and evil. God is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces. (47)

The pure necrophile is insane; the pure biophile is saintly. (48)

Perhaps the most obvious factor that should be mentioned here is that of a situation of abundance versus scarcity, both economically and psychologically. As long as most of man’s energy is taken up by the defense of his life against attacks, or to ward off starvation, love of life must be stunted, and necrophilia fostered. Another important social condition for the development of biophilia lies in the abolition of injustice. By this I do not refer here to the hoarding concept according to which it is considered injustice if everybody does not have exactly the same; I refer to a social situation in which one social class exploits another, and imposes conditions on it which do not permit the unfolding of a rich and dignified life; or in other words, where one social class is not permitted to share with others in the same basic experience of living; in the last analysis, by injustice I refer to a social situation in which a man is not an end in himself, but becomes a means for the ends of another man. (52)

Finally, a significant condition for the development of biophilia is freedom. But “freedom from” political shackles is not a sufficient condition. If love for life is to develop, there must be freedom “to”; freedom to create and to construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine. (52)

Summing up, love for life will develop most in a society where there is: security in the sense that the basic material conditions for a dignified life are not threatened, justice in the sense that nobody can be an end for the purposes of another, and freedom in the sense that each man has the possibility to be an active and responsible member of society. (52-53)

I consider the necrophilous character as being the malignant form of the character structure of which Freud’s “anal character” is the benign form. (55)

In the case of malignant narcissism, the object of narcissism is not anything the person does or produces, but something he has; for instance, his body, his looks, his health,, his wealth, etc. The malignant nature of this type of narcissism lies in the fact that it lacks the corrective element which we find in the benign form. If I am “great” because of some quality I have, and not because of something I achieve, I do not need to be related to anybody or anything; I need not make any effort. (77)

In maintaining the picture of my greatness I remove myself more and more from reality and I have to increase the narcissistic charge in order to be better protected from the danger that my narcissistically inflated ego might be revealed as the product of my empty imagination. (77)

Malignant narcissism, thus, is not self-limiting, and in consequence it is crudely solipsistic as well as xenophobic. (77)

A society which lacks the means to provide adequately for the majority of its members, or a large proportion of them, must provide these members with a narcissistic satisfaction of the malignant type if it wants to prevent dissatisfaction among them. For those who are economically and culturally poor, narcissistic pride in belonging to the group is the only – and often a very effective – source of satisfaction. (79)

The highly narcissistic group is eager to have a leader with whom it can identify itself. The leader is then admired by the group which projects its narcissism onto him. In the very act of submission to the powerful leader, which is in depth an act of symbiosis and identification, the narcissism of the individual is transferred onto the leader. The greater the leader, the greater the follower. (87)

To sum up: The tendency to remain bound to the mothering person and her equivalents – to blood, family, tribe – is inherent in all men and women. It is constantly in conflict with the opposite tendency – to be born, to progress, to grow. In the case of normal development, the tendency for growth wins. In the case of severe pathology, the regressive tendency for symbiotic union wins, and it results in the person’s more or less total incapacitation. (107)

Incestuous wishes are not primarily a result of sexual desires, but constitute one of the most fundamental tendencies in man: the wish to remain tied to where he came from, the fear for being free, and the fear of being destroyed by the very figure toward whom he has made himself helpless, renouncing any independence. (108)

In the most archaic forms of incestuous symbiosis and narcissism they are joined by necrophilia. The craving to return to the womb and to the past is at the same time the craving for death and destruction. If extreme forms of necrophilia, narcissism, and incestuous symbiosis are blended, we can speak of syndrome which I propose to call the “syndrome of decay.” The person suffering from this syndrome is indeed evil, since he betrays life and growth and is a devotee of death and crippledness. (108)

Evilness is a specifically human phenomenon. It is the attempt to regress to the pre-human state, and to eliminate that which is specifically human: reason, love, freedom. Yet evilness is not only human, but tragic. Even if man regresses to the most archaic forms of experience, he can never cease being human; hence he can never be satisfied with evilness as a solution. (148)

Evil is man’s loss of himself in the tragic attempt to escape the burden of his humanity. (148)

The degrees of evilness are at the same time the degrees of regression. The greatest evil is those strivings which are most directed against life; the love for death, the incestuous-symbiotic striving to return to the womb, to the soil, to the inorganic; the narcissistic self-immolation which makes man an enemy of life, precisely because he cannot leave the prison of his own ego. Living this way is living in “hell.” (149)

If man becomes indifferent to life there is no longer any hope that he can choose the good. Then, indeed, his heart will have so hardened that his “life” will be ended. If this should happen to the entire human race or to its most powerful members, then the life of mankind may be extinguished at the very moment of its greatest promise. (150)