The Insane Society

...Its freshness does not reside in the shrewd observations which the lay reader cannot find elsewhere, nor in any sensationloaded clinical indiscretions—of which there is a studied dearth throughout the book—but precisely in the brilliant mirroring of one science in the other, in the revelation that findings of psychology become meaningful in sociology, and facts known to sociologists beget significance in psychology...

...He does not believe in cultural relativism but dis tinguishes healthy from unhealthy societies, and he is not ashamed to equate his "concept of mental health with the norms postulated by the great spiritual teachers of mankind...

...Escape From Freedom is a classic of political psychology...

...Bitter experience has taught us that equality of income, planning, social security, nationalization will not produce anything but—at best—a better and more efficient capitalism...

...The philosophy of this socialism he calls communitarianism— a word that will hardly fire the imagination of many...

...IN HIS RECENT BOOK, The Sane Society, our friend Erich Fromm, himself a psychologist, turns the tables on his colleagues and reverses their procedure...

...hu man activity itself has been reduced to an abstraction...

...Instead of asking, as they do, how the individual can be adjusted to society, he says in effect: Why not adjust society to the requirements of a full development of the personality...

...nor will the multitude easily be persuaded by the examples he gives of such communities where they seemed to have worked...

...There need be no biological defects of its members, and yet the conditions of survival may have been specialized in such cruel ways as to exclude certain types from a socially meaningful life...

...Efficiency, however, is the opposite of what Fromm calls productiveness...

...Socialists, therefore, have always tried to widen the scope of workers' control...

...We no longer are "ourselves" even in our free time, because our selves are not free...

...Since not everybody can be an artist, most people work to make a living and consider the need to do so as a "curse...

...Psychoanalysis and Religion pursued the probing Freud, Jung and others began into the oldest field of social sublimation...

...but if the creative abilities of the first have been perverted by the attitudes of marketing, so have the enjoyment abilities of the second...

...it is what Friedrich Schiller and Huibinga called "play," and no sadder indictment of our alienation could be found than this lack of a proper word for our most profound yearning and the central conception of non-alienated self-realization...

...Except in the termite state, where the individual exists for the sake of society, failure to provide opportunity of happiness and self-realization for great numbers indicates a disease not of the people but of their pattern of life, their values and the social arrangements which anthropologists call culture, sociologists civilization and political economists society...

...To maintain this humanistic attitude in the 20th century, indeed he has to reject both 19th-century materialism and 20th-century scientism...

...FROM THESE PREMISES follows Fromm's position vis-a-vis capitalism and socialism...

...the innocent hobby of photography stands revealed as a dangerous agent of our enslavement...

...competition has bred a characterological type that may be fittest for survival temporarily but certainly is not the most desirable socially and falls short of man's best chance fully to develop his capacities for production and enjoyment...

...but whatever name it was given, collective bargaining, industrial democracy, cooperative enterprise, codetermination and human engineering have not done away with the basic split between production and consumption, work and play...

...he implies that there might be degrees of alienation and takes the "dialectical position, that an alienated society develops the elements which contradict it...

...it is responsible for, and consists in, the appearance of the fractional man, denounced by many thinkers ever since the time of the Renaissance— a man who is dealing with oth ers not as a full person but through that part of his personality which is their least common denominator...

...YET, WHILE ALL THIS is as bad as Fromm says it is, his sociological frame of reference seems less clearly defined than his psychological terms...

...Going one step further, Fromm shows how even our ways of enjoyment and relaxation have become alienated...

...It is no accident, therefore, that Riesman and Fromm should concentrate their criticism on the horrors of our consumer culture...

...Nothing, however, is farther from Fromm's intention than the idea of productiveness for its own sake...

...In the "mass culture" of managed industrialism, enjoyment has been perverted into "consumption," and human ex perience of fellow-men and of the good things in Nature has been replaced by the purely receptive attitudes of a consumer mentality...

...Fromm himself has vigorously refuted Marcuse's contention, in the summer issue of this magazine, that "there is no place for (true) love and happiness whatsoever in a capitalist society...

...Humanistic social ism never tires of reminding exploiters and exploited alike—and today we must add: managers and bureaucrats even more so—that they are subject to the abstract laws of value produc tion and technological rationality which deny them the chance to feel and act with human sympathy towards their neighbours, friends and even their own selves...

...At this point, a sharper distinction between "alienation" of different kinds, moreover, might have avoided some confusion of capitalism with popular culture...

...These and other signs of serious maladjustment, such as the divorce rate, the peace-of-soul-books and the increasing demand for family counseling, again raise Rousseau's question whether the incidence of insanity and neurosis is related to the development of our civilization...

...Exploitation is analyzed not so much in terms of surplus value but, following Hegel and the young Marx, as the instrumental attitude of one man to another...

...If we look into the descriptive part, where Fromm develops his own utopia, his meaning becomes clear: productiveness is an attitude towards life, the universe and mankind which allows the development of a person's full potentialities...

...In our industrialized society, where the production sphere is the center of alienation, the craving for "escape" and relief in the consumption sphere expresses an element of rebellion which Fromm tends to overlook...

...nor has corporate research into "human relations" or the glad-handers' companionability reduced the hostile-instrumental feelings between man and man...

...In so doing, Fromm had to cover much of the ground which, through their various approaches, had previously been explored by Marx, Max Weber, Durkheim, Schumpeter, Tawney, Fromm himself and most recently Riesman...

...Specialization has crippled man's creative powers...

...As with Plato and the long sequence of thinkers up to Marx and most 19th-century writers, that which Fromm calls good is always related to that which he calls true, or beautiful for that matter...

...it uses psychological terms and psychoanalytical insight to explore the meaning of society...

...but with Fromm this results in a strange bias against consumer attitudes as such and in favor of certain producer attitudes...

...Clearly, the socialist virtues cannot be selected virtues of other societies...

...Scholars brought up in any of these traditions will find it easy to retranslate Fromm's terms back into their particular languages...

...His new book does for psychology what Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture had done for anthropology...

...Even where we might have genuine experience, says Fromm, we prefer to remove its immediacy: instead of abandoning ourselves to the beauty of a mountain view, we snap a picture of it...

...in an industrial society, the worker's pride may refer to his skills and abilities in controlling a process of production...

...The neighbor who bores us with the slides from his European trip may simply wish to re-live his experience and enhance it by sharing it...

...more also are admitted to institutions under increasingly humane laws and insurance plans...

...He is mostly concerned with the capture of this hitherto subversive sphere by the conformist spirit of alienation...

...We have to start from the beginning again, with man...

...Apart from allowing greater numbers of misfits to emerge on the statistical surface, our society seems to produce special forms of anxiety, insecurity, mental aberrations not known heretofore...

...Moreover, the ranks of the biologically un fit, mentally inadequate and socially undesirable are constantly increasing as sanitary improvements, social conscience and the progress of medicine save and prolong the lives which cruder societies allowed to wither and perish...

...his indictment of the new consumer attitudes indeed is poignant, his observations of related commercial attitudes brilliant, and shrewd his bracketing of both with fashionable philosophies...

...It is easy to discern in his ideal a certain nostalgia for the wholeness of life, work and play that allegedly existed in the medieval craftsman's world and still is being sought by the artist, the country doctor and teacher...

...But for most independent producers, as he says himself, the pride of work is tied up with the sense of property—a decidedly alienated form of satisfaction...

...No one, indeed, can be surprised that in our highly industrialized and urbanized societies fewer disorders should escape the ever-watchful eyes of the fact-gatherers...

...The civilization of the machine age has become equally odious in its liberal-capitalist and its totalitariancommunist form...

...Fromm uses the am biguous word "love," but might have benefited from Scheler's development of the sympathy concept...

...more cases are correctly diagnosed and properly reported...

...They were concerned, as Fromm is, with human attitudes, not with better ways of running an economy smoothly and providing more material satisfactions to more citizens...

...He frankly calls Marx a naive optimist in thinking that the good nature of man just had to be liberated from under oppression...

...Finally, our asylum statistics are swollen by the village drunk, the family fool, the half-moronic laborer, the shrivelling spinster, the senile totterer whom paternalistic clans and agrarian communities will tolerate in their midst...

...however, the re wards, in terms of sublimations and cultural achievements, have become ever more questionable while the price, in terms of insanity and social unfitness, has grown out of all proportions...

...Or is all this merely a statistical illusion...

...Is our society, then, itself insane...

...Freud has taught us to look upon these frustrations as the price of civilization...

...The answer may all depend on who looks at what and at what time...

...these technological satisfactions, too, are fractional and ideological, as long as the worker's control of the process affords him no insight into the social purposes which it serves...

...Fromm's remedy against the insanity of a society of professional 24-hour-aday consumers is to turn them back into producers...

...This reviewer, who might take exception to some of Fromm's suggestions for a solution, yet knows of no other book that so well expounds the terms in which the solution must be sought, and it is his guess that even those who com-ignorance and complacency in matpletely disagree will find it thoughtful ters that should concern us most— and thought-provoking, never dogmatic which is all we need in the present and forever pointing the finger at our situation...

...Of the whole population, one out of 18 persons will spend some time in a mental institution...

...In this light, that photographic camera looks somewhat less infernal...

...However, the merit of Fromm's approach is his decided return to the utopians...

...Are the conditions of survival themselves responsible for the many deviations from the development of healthy, normally creative personalities...

...others find adjustment possible only by severely curbing their natural inclinations, or even crack up under the strain of conflicting motivations—to live in peace with society on the one hand, and to realize their innate powers on the other...

...To say that their enormous proportion in the later stages of industrial civilization is just an optical mirage, means admitting that our notion of a social misfit now includes a number of types which formerly could be fitted into society...

...Is the enjoyment of another man's experience, such as a painting by Renoir, less alienated than the reproducing of one's own...

...Fromm makes it abundantly clear that the workers have much more to lose than their chains...

...Fromm's mastery in the art of interweaving, juxtaposing and integrating several sciences, to build up functional descriptions of our collective disease, will be appreciated by comparison with similar attempts where the various ingredients remain visibly separated chapter-wise...

...About 50,000 Americans are dope addicts...

...It obviously is a mental as much as a material condition...

...only now, after the failure of so many alienated forms of socialism, can they be studied with benefit to our understanding of what socialism is all about...

...Capitalism has split him into two half-persons, one who works and one who plays...

...Quite apart from all income differentials and independent of class antagonism, this basic perversion of human relationships into abstract, instrumental value relations is "capitalism...

...The rapid increase in productivity—besides taking much of the effort out of work —recently has removed the job of feeding and clothing all humanity from the center of attention, and for the first time in history, men are free to make their lives meaningful for themselves, not only in their working hours but even more so in their hours of play which now tend to outnum ber the others...

...they also have to lose the cherished frustrations and satisfactions that go with a life in chains, the irrational worries and alienated needs to which they have been accustomed under the insane conditions of survival...

...Man For Himself related ethics to characterology...

...Yet, refrigerators, TV and family cars, even with companypaid pension plans, have produced no feeling of security...

...he is mistaken...

...They would be ill advised, though, to conclude that the book is wanting in originality...

...socialism cannot be capitalism minus exploitation or minus private property or minus the capitalistic market...

...All his previous research was concerned with the area where psychology and sociology overlap: his Studies on Family and Tradition (available in German only) did pioneer work on the "transmission belt" between society and individual...

...The greatest failure of socialism so far has been its inability to envisage socialist people...

...a quarter of a million chil dren between 7 and 17 are arraigned in juvenile courts each year, and 1, 750,000 serious crimes are committed by adults...

...To prepare his own solution, Fromm has introduced the notion of "productiveness," avoiding hackneyed expressions like "creative," free and spontaneous...

...His own term is most unfortunate because it can be confused with one of the most outrageously alienated idols of capitalism...

...The various socialist and pseudo-socialist solutions which Fromm discusses also lead him to the conclusion that the problem has not been recognized except in some small communities based on the utopian and quasi-religious notions of brotherly love, sharing of experience and sharing of work...

...to top it, these mass enjoyments often are presented to us in a pre-digested form, canned and sterilized...

...He is not so much concerned with the mechanics of the business cycle or the deprivations of poverty, as he is with human dignity and personal creativity in an industrial society...

...A man may feel that evenings "at home" and away from the drudgery of work he can devote himself to his likes, desires, hobby, family and self-improvement...

...Fromm himself is a writer, a scientist, a teacher and something of an artist, besides being a rebel —all of which makes him an eminent example of his own ideal...

...two million problem drinkers lose one out of twelve working months, and one hundred thousand of them have to be hospitalized for as much as six months...

...He is ready to admit that some form of planned capitalism can avoid depressions and that, at least in the most advanced countries, workers are materially well off...

...Fromm is eminently equipped to analyze the terms in which such a question can be meaningfully discussed...

...15 out of 100,000 adults will end their own lives and 8 will kill others...

...It is strange, though, that Fromm should have avoided reference to communitarian settlements in the New World, and at least one reader vainly waited for an apology of the anarchist experiments in the Spanish civil war...

...18 per cent of the draftees rejected by the armed forces have to be rejected for psycho-neurotic disor ders...

...Does all this suffice to account for the frightening numbers of our social misfits...

...Yet in the enthusiasm of discovery Fromm somehow loses sight of production just at the time when the most interesting development happens in this sphere...

...Fromm achieves this integration through a tightly knit and very subtle frame of definitions and conceptions which cannot be outlined in a brief review but must be studied in detail...

...They are, as in Fromm's earlier contributions, analytic and normative at the same time—this feature makes Fromm one of the last true humanists...