Fromm, Erich. For the Love of Life (Translators: Robert and Rita Kimber). New York: The Free Press, 1986.

> Affluence and Ennui in Our Society

Activity is understood as something that brings the powers inherent in people to expression, that helps give birth, that brings to life both our physical and emotional, both our intellectual and artistic capacities. (8)

As we marvel more and more over the power of machines, we understand less and less of the wonderful powers of human beings. (8)

Since behaviorism sees the human being primarily as a mechanism, it makes similar assumptions about him: A certain stimulus will evoke a certain response. The study and exploration of that phenomenon and the formulation of prescriptions based on it is what the behaviorists call science. Perhaps it is a science, but it is not a humane one, for a living human being never reacts twice in precisely the same way. At each moment he is a different person. And though he may never be a totally different person, he is at least never exactly the same…I would say that behavioral psychology may be a science, but it is not a science of man. It is rather a science of alienated man conducted with alienated methods by alienated researchers. It may be capable of illuminating certain aspects of human nature, but it does not touch on what is vital, on what is specifically human about human beings. (11)

Boredom is one of the worst forms of torture. It is a very modern phenomenon, and it is spreading rapidly. A person who is at the mercy of his boredom and unable to defend himself against it will feel severely depressed. You may feel moved to ask here why most people don’t notice how grave a malady boredom is and how much suffering it causes us. I think the answer is quite simple. We produce today so many things that people can take to help them cope with their boredom. We can temporarily sweep our boredom under the rug by taking a tranquilizer or drinking or going to one cocktail party after another or fighting our wives or turning to the media for amusement or devoting ourselves to sexual activity. Much of what we do is an attempt to keep ourselves from fully acknowledging our boredom. But don’t forget that uneasy feeling that often overcomes you when you’ve watched a stupid movie or repressed your boredom some other way. Remember the hangover that hits you when you realize that what you did for diversion actually bored you to death and that you haven’t made use of your time but have killed it. Another remarkable thing about our culture is that we will go to any lengths to save time, but once we have it we kill it because we can’t think of anything better to do with it. (14)

In a society that is as totally oriented to consumption as ours is, the sexual revolution, if that’s what you want to call it, probably would have come about without Freud. We cannot exhort people to obtain everything they need to satisfy their senses and at the same time urge sexual abstinence on them. In a consumer society sex will inevitably become a consumer article. A number of industries depend on that fact, and a lot of money is spent to maintain the attractiveness of sexuality. That represents a change from earlier times but no revolution. (34)

The younger generation, as I have said, rejects the patriarchal order and consumer society as well. But it is given to another kind of consumerism, which is exemplified in young people’s use of drugs. There are many reasons why they reach for drugs and tend to develop an ever greater dependency on them, reasons that demand our careful consideration; but whatever else drug dependency is, it is also an expression of that same lazy, passive Homo consumens that the children criticize in their parents but that they themselves also represent in a different guise. The young people, too, are always waiting for something to come to them from the outside, waiting for the high of drugs, the high of sex, the high of the rock rhythms that hypnotize them, carry them off, sweep them away. Those rhythms do not encourage activity. They transport the young into an orgiastic state, into a state like a drug high, in which they forget themselves and so are profoundly passive. (35)

Can we somehow make good, truly productive use of the overabundant production we are technologically capable of, a use that serves human beings and their growth? That should be possible if we will understand that what we have to do is encourage and satisfy only those needs that make people more active, livelier, freer, so that they will not be driven by their feelings or simply react to stimuli but will be open and attentive and determined to realize their own potential, to enliven, enrich, and inspire themselves and others. One prerequisite for accomplishing that is, of course, to reorganize not only our work but also our so-called leisure. Our free time is, for the most part, nothing but lazy time. It provides us with an illusion of power because we can bring the world into our living rooms by pressing a button on the TV set or because we can get behind the wheel of a car and fool ourselves into thinking the engine’s 100 horsepower is our own. We have truly “free time” only to the extent that we cultivate needs that are rooted in man and that move him to become active. (36)

It is no coincidence that our rebellious youth comes primarily from the middle and upper classes, in which superfluence is most apparent. That kind of affluence may make for happiness in our imaginations, in our fantasies, but it does not make us happy in our heart of hearts. (37)

By character I mean what man has created to replace the animal instincts that are only minimally developed in him. (42)

Aggressiveness is always most present in those classes that are on the lowest social level, at the bottom of the social pyramid. Those are people who have few pleasures in life, who are uneducated, who see themselves being slowly squeezed out of the social mainstream, who are lacking in motivation and interests. Such people build up vast amounts of sadistic rage that does not develop in people who are productively occupied and who feel fully engaged in – or at least not totally excluded from – the social process. (49)

Madness is not really a disease in the sense that we normally think of disease but a certain way of solving the problem of human existence. The madman denies the powerlessness inherent in us that torments us because, in his fantasies, he does not recognize any limits. He behaves as if no limits existed. But because powerlessness is a reality he will necessarily lose his mind if he insists on pursuing his goal. If we wanted to put it this way, we could speak not of an illness but of a philosophy or – to be more precise still – a form of religion. Madness is an attempt to negate and deny human powerlessness by pretending to oneself, with the aid of some very specific tactic, that one is not ultimately powerless. (54)

Another trait of the sadist in bureaucrat’s clothes is an excessive preoccupation with order. Order is everything. Order is the only sure thing in life, the only thing over which we can exert complete control. People with an excessive need for order are usually people who are afraid of life, because life is not orderly. It brings surprises; spontaneity is crucial to it. The only thing we can be sure of is death, but what life brings is always something new. The sadistic individual, though, who cannot relate to others and who sees everyone and everything in life as mere objects, that kind of person hates anything living, because it poses a threat to him. But he loves order. (56)

If a person cannot demonstrate to himself that in some dimension of his being he is human, then he is on the verge of madness, for what he experiences at that point is an isolation from the rest of humankind that hardly anyone can bear. And it is a fact substantiated by the reports we have that many members of the units that carried out the execution of political prisoners, Jews, Russians, and others went mad, committed suicide, or suffered from a number of psychic disorders. A commander of one of those units even wrote that the troops had to be shown that the methods used to destroy the Jews, that is, shooting and gassing, were humane and militarily correct. Otherwise, the men’s psychic equilibrium would be disturbed. (58)

Hitler himself had something of that quality. He was not a compulsive washer, but many observers noticed that he was fastidious beyond the limits of normal cleanliness. (75)

A genuine conversation is not a battle but an exchange. The question of who is right and who is wrong is completely beside the point. It doesn’t even matter whether what the participants say is particularly cogent or profound. What matters is the genuineness of what they say. (90)

The art of conversation and joy in conversation (conversation in the sense of being open, being together, usually takes verbal form, but it can also take the form of movement in dancing; there are many ways to converse) – these things will become possible again only if major changes take place in our culture, that is, only if we can rid ourselves of our monomaniacal, goal-oriented way of life. We need to cultivate attitudes that recognize the expression and full realization of human potential as the only worthwhile goals in life. To put it in the simplest terms: What matters is being as opposed to having, to just using and consuming and getting ahead. (90)

Real conversation does not “divert.” It requires concentration, a gathering of our powers, not a scattering of them. If a person is not alive within himself, then his conversation can’t be very lively either. But there are many people who could be much livelier if they were not afraid to step out of themselves, to show who they really are, to cast off the crutches they need to keep from tumbling down into nothingness, if they were not afraid to be alone with themselves and others. (91-92)

I find that when I’m listening to the radio I’m still a free man. I turn it on when there’s a program that interests me. But I do not become addicted to it. With the aid of radio technology, I can listen to a conversation somewhat in the same way that I listen to someone else speaking on the telephone. What I hear on the radio is not, of course, as personal as a telephone conversation, but the point I want to make is that we take both the radio and the telephone is stride. We are not fascinated by them, and so I can truly say that I am free either to listen to the radio or not listen to it. (93)

My reaction to television is quite different. With television I lose a bit of my freedom. The minute the set is turned on and I see the picture on it, I experience what I would hesitate to call a compulsion but what is certainly a strong impulse or inclination to watch, even if I know intellectually that the program is utter drivel. I do not mean to say that everything on television is drivel. All I want to suggest is that even when a show is utter drivel and even when I know that’s what it is, I still feel drawn to watch it and listen to it. (93)

Television holds a fascination far greater than that of radio. It exerts a kind of psychological spell that cannot be explained in terms of the content of any particular program. I’ve often asked myself what this fascination is, and I think it is rooted in some very profound level of our nature: By merely pressing a button, we can summon another world into our living rooms. That appeals to profound magical instincts. (93)

With television I become a kind of god. I can get rid of the reality I actually live with, and in its place I can create a new reality that appears when I press the button. I’m almost God the Creator. (93)

Reality and what we see in television have become one, and I think that this experience of being able to press a button and make another world become reality is - as you have said - a profound, atavistic experience and one that we find incredibly seductive. That is why television has no need, as it were, to offer anything “good.” It’s appeal lies in the very nature of the medium. People are drawn to it the way they are to a fire or to any other exciting spectacle. (94)

It is remarkable with how little concentration people think, live, and work these days. Work is so fragmented and shattered that concentration is usually only mechanical and partial. We rarely encounter that full concentration that involves the whole person. A worker on an assembly line who has to tighten the same screw over and over again needs a certain kind of concentration to keep up his pace, but this type of concentration is very different from the gathering together of all our powers that we find in true concentration. A person with real concentration is capable of listening without his thoughts wandering off; he will not try to do five things at once because he can’t find any one thing that really satisfies him. And, of course, without concentration we can’t accomplish anything. (95)

Everything we do without concentration will have little value. If concentration is lacking, our activities will not provide us or anyone else with satisfaction. That holds true for all of us, not just for great artists or scientists. (95-96)

What I mean by necrophilia in a nonsexual and nonphysical sense is a fascination with everything that is dead, lifeless, with everything having to do with dismemberment, with the destruction of living relationships. The necrophiliac is motivated not by a love for the living but by an attraction to the purely mechanical. Necrophilia is not a love of death but a love of dead things, of everything that is not alive. Its opposite is love of the living, a love of everything that grows, that has structure, that forms a unity, that is not dismembered. (110)

Another way we can express this is to say that the necrophiliac is hopelessly boring. A biophile is never boring. It doesn’t matter what he talks about. The subject can be quite insignificant, but whatever he says is always marked by vitality. A necrophiliac may say something intelligent, but it does not come alive. We’ve all had the experience of hearing an intellectual say something terribly clever, yet we are bored by it. Conversely, a much less brilliant person can say something quite simple (this is bringing us back to our starting point this evening, the subject of conversation), and we are not bored at all. On the contrary, we are stimulated, because it is life that is speaking to us. We are always drawn to what is alive. It is vitality that makes people attractive. These days people seem to think - we men talk this way, and the cosmetic industry tries to convince woman that it is true - we seem to think people can make themselves attractive and lovable if they paint their faces this way or that way or adopt a certain expression that is supposed to be modern and irresistible. A lot of people fall for that kind of thing, usually people who don’t have much of a self. There is only one thing that really attracts us, and that is vitality. (111-112)

We can demonstrate that destructive tendencies, that is, tendencies growing out of the death wish, result from failures in the art of living. They are the consequences of not living correctly. (113)

We can show that people who have no chance to be free and to develop their own powers, people who are hemmed in, who live in a class or in a society in which everything functions in a mechanical, lifeless way - these people lose their capacity for spontaneity. (113)

This link between thwarted vitality and necrophilia is evident in individuals, too. It is by no means rare to find people whose families were so “dead” that the children never experienced even the faintest breath of life during their childhoods. Everything was bureaucratized, routined, subject to rules. Life consisted solely of possessing things, owning things. The parents regarded any sign of spontaneity in their children as inherently bad. It is clear beyond any doubt that children are naturally very lively and active, a fact proved by recent neurophysiological and psychological studies. The child becomes more and more discouraged and then takes another direction, a direction in which the nonliving becomes central. (113)

In the final analysis we can say that a person who finds no joy in living will try to avenge himself and will prefer to destroy life rather than feel that he can make no sense of his life at all. He may still be alive physiologically, but psychologically he is dead. That is what gives rise to the active desire to destroy and to the passionate need to destroy everyone, including oneself, rather than confess that one has been born yet has failed to become a living human being. That is a bitter feeling for those who experience it, and we are not indulging in mere speculation if we assume that the wish to destroy follows on this feeling as an almost inevitable reaction. (113-114)

I’m afraid that our preoccupation with everything mechanical encourages it [necrophilia]. We are running away from life. It is difficult to explain in any concise way why it is that things are taking the place of human beings in our cybernetic society and culture, pushing human beings aside. As we mentioned earlier this evening, people are becoming increasingly uncertain about their own being. (114)

The intellectual has one prime task to fulfill, first, last, and always. It is his job to search out the truth as best he can and to speak that truth. It is not the intellectual’s primary calling, it is not his primary function, to draft political platforms. And to say this does not contradict what I have just been saying about political activity. But it is the intellectual’s special task - and this is what defines his role or should define it - to purse the truth without compromise and without regard for his own or anyone else’s interests. If intellectuals restrict their function of finding and speaking the whole truth in the service of any party program or any political goals, no matter how praiseworthy the program or the goals may be, then those intellectuals are failing in their own unique task and, ultimately, in the most important political task they have. For I feel that political progress depends on how much of the truth we know, how clearly and boldly we speak it, and how great an impression it makes on other people. (116)

A narcissistic person considers only those things real and important that directly affect him. My ideas, my body, my possessions, my opinion, my feelings - all those things are real. And what is not mine is pale stuff that hardly exists at all. In pathological cases, narcissism can be so extreme that an individual is incapable of even perceiving what is going on in the outside world. (120)

The authoritarian character has a structural predilection to submit, to subordinate itself, but it also has a need to dominate. Those two things always go together; the one compensates for the other. (126)

The truly democratic or revolutionary character is just the opposite and will refuse both to dominate and to be dominated. For the democratic character the equality and dignity of man are deeply felt imperatives, and such a character will be drawn only to what promotes human dignity and equality. (126)

Conviction is an opinion that is rooted in a person’s character and not just in his head. Conviction is a product of what he is; opinion is often based only on what he hears. (127)

For to offer resistance, you’ve got to have an inner core, a conviction. You have to have faith in yourself, to be able to think critically, to be an independent human being, a human being and not a sheep. To achieve that, to learn “the art of living and of dying,” takes a lot of effort, practice, patience. Like any other skill, it has to be learned. (133)

Widespread passivity, a lack of participation in the decisions affecting our own lives and our own society’s life - that is the soil in which fascism or similar movements, for which we usually find names only after the face, can grow. (133)

What was this messianic idea that the prophets had? It was to establish a new peace that was more than just the absence of war; it was to establish a state of solidarity and harmony among individuals, among nations, between the sexes, between man and nature, a state in which, as the prophets say, man is not taught to be afraid. (137-138)

Man is not a thing; he is a living being caught up in a continual process of development. At every point in his life he is not yet what he can be and what he may yet become. (140)

The opposite of wellbeing is depression, as Spinoza demonstrated. This would suggest that joy is a product of reason, and depression is what results from an incorrect way of life. (146)