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| Erich Fromm
As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask. Authority is not a quality one person has, in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him. Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Immature love says "I love you because I need you." Mature love says "I need you because I love you." Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted. Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve. The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent. The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal. To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime. We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them. What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal. Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies. |
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