Fromm, Erich. The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1968.

A specter is stalking in our midst whom only a few see with clarity. It is not the old ghost of communism or fascism. It is a new specter: a completely mechanized society, devoted to maximal material output and consumption, directed by computers; and in this social process, man himself is being transformed into a part of the total machine, well fed and entertained, yet passive, unalive, and with little feeling. (1)

Hope is a psychic concomitant to life and growth. (12)

When hope has gone life has ended, actually or potentially. Hope is an intrinsic element of the structure of life, of the dynamic of man’s spirit. (13)

Another outcome of the shattering of hope is the “hardening of the heart.” We see many people – from juvenile delinquents to hard-boiled but effective adults – who at one point in their lives, maybe at five, maybe at twelve, maybe at twenty, cannot stand to be hurt any more. (20-21)

Another and much more drastic result of shattered hope is destructiveness and violence. Precisely because men cannot live without hope, the one whose hope has been utterly destroyed hates life. Since he cannot create life, he wants to destroy it, which is only a little less of a miracle – but much more easy to accomplish. He wants to avenge himself for his unlived life and he doe sit by throwing himself into total destructiveness so that it matters little whether he destroys others or is destroyed. (21)

The signs of hopelessness are all here. Look at the bored expression of the average person, the lack of contact between people – even when they desperately try “to make contact.” Look at the incapacity to plan seriously for overcoming the ever-increasing poisonousness of the city’s water and air and the predictable famine in the poor countries, not to speak of the inability to get rid of the daily threat to the lives and plans of all of us – the thermonuclear weapon. Whatever we say or think about hope, our inability to act or plan for life betrays our hopelessness. (22-23)

What is the effect of this type of organization on man? It reduces man to an appendage of the machine, ruled by its very rhythm and demands. It transforms him into Homo consumens, the total consumer, whose only aim is to have more and to use more. This society produces many useless things, and to the same degree many useless people. Man, as a cog in the production machine, becomes a thing, and ceases to be human. He spends his time doing things in which he is not interested; and when he is not producing, he is consuming. He is the eternal suckling with the open mouth, “taking in,” without effort and without inner activeness, whatever the boredom-preventing (and boredom-producing) industry forces on him – cigarettes, liquor, movies, television, sports, lectures – limited only by what he can afford. (38)

The passiveness of man in industrial society today is one of his most characteristic and pathological features. He takes in, he wants to be fed, but he does not move, initiate, he does not digest his food, as it were. He does not reacquire in a productive fashion what he inherited, but he amasses it or consumes it. He suffers from a severe systemic deficiency, not too dissimilar to that which one finds in more extreme forms in depressed people. (39)

Man’s passiveness in only one symptom among a total syndrome, which one may call the “syndrome of alienation.” Being passive, he does not relate himself to the world actively and is forced to submit to his idols and their demands. Hence, he feels powerless, lonely, and anxious. He has little sense of integrity or self-identity. Conformity seems to be the only way to avoid intolerable anxiety – and even conformity does not always alleviate his anxiety. (39)

We are in the very midst of the crisis of modern man. We do not have too much time left. If we do not begin now, it will probably be too late. But there is hope – because there is a real possibility that man can reassert himself, and that he can make the technological society human. It is not up to us to complete the task, but we have no right to abstain from it. (162)