And you desire greater levels of freedom to be able to run your own experiments. As the years go on, you slowly can do more and more things for yourself. But you still eat what your parents tell you to eat, and you go wherever they tell you to go. You’re not born capable of taking care of yourself, so you’re still in a slightly less-inclusive luxury resort. You don’t have a care in the world as a fetus. People feed you like people feed you grapes at a resort. You don’t have to lift a finger as a fetus. Now, I don’t know about you people, but I remember it being like a five-star resort. Think all the way back to what it was like when you were a fetus. Let’s consider the metaphor of a child for a second, though. This is no exception.įromm would liken the development of human beings from the Stone Age until now to the development of a child from a fetus into an adult-also sometimes called the process of individuation. Something that will be a recurring theme throughout this episode is that sometimes there are parallels between the stages of development within our personal lives and the stages of development on a more macro level when it comes to the way citizens behave politically within a society. And what you can thank for this reality are the very modern set of social conditions that you were born into, that themselves only exist because of a long, multi-thousand-year process of what he calls the individuation of human beings. What Erich Fromm would say is that you are among the most independent and isolated human beings that have ever lived in human history. The real question is, why are you so insistent on convincing me that I’m alone all the time?” You don’t know how alone or not alone I am. But what some of you out there maybe did is, you heard that diagnosis you looked to your left, saw some people you care about, looked to your right, saw even more people you cared about and then turned back to Fromm and said, “Look, Erich Fromm, you’re saying that everybody’s alone out there. So, last episode, a major through line when discussing The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm was that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the fundamental problem of human existence-the fundamental problem being that we are separate from everything and everyone else, that we are alone, that we exist in a state of what he called existential loneliness. Today’s show is on Erich Fromm and his landmark book Escape from Freedom.
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