/similar_quotes/79

Showing 11 similar quotes for quote #79 from To Have or to Be? by Erich Fromm

Publisher: Inner Traditions International (2003)

221-222

Suicide, condemned by most moralities with social and religious foundations, has in fact been permitted by two doctrines whose norms of life are not far from those indicated for the differentiated man in the present epoch: Stoicism and Buddhism. One can refer to the ideas of Seneca regarding Stoicism, recalling above all the general background of its vision of life. I have already said that for Seneca the true man would be above the gods themselves because they, by their very nature, do not know adversity and misfortune, whereas he is exposed to them, but has the power to triumph over them. Moreover, Seneca sees the beings that are most harshly tested as the worthiest, recalling this analogy: in war it is the most capable, sure, and qualified persons that leaders entrust with the most exposed positions and the hardest tasks. Usually it is this virile and agonistic conception that applies when suicide is condemned and stigmatized as cowardice and desertion. (There is a saying attributed by Cicero to the Pythagoreans: 'To leave the place that one is assigned in life is not permitted without an order from the leader, who is God.') Instead Seneca reached the opposite conclusion, and put the justification of suicide directly into the mouth of divinity (De Providentia 6:7-9). He makes the divinity say that he has given the superior man, the sage, not only a force stronger than any contingency, and something more than being exempt from evils, namely the power to triumph over them interiorly, but has also ensured that no one can hold him back against his will: the path to 'exit' is open to him — patet exitus, 'Wherever you do not want to fight, it is always possible to retreat. You have been given nothing easier than death.' \nGiven the presuppositions mentioned earlier with regard to the general vision of life, there is no doubt that Seneca did not intend this decision to refer to cases in which death is sought because a given situation appears unbearable: especially then, one could not permit oneself the act. Here too it is unnecessary to add what is equally valid for all those who are driven to cut their life short due to emotional and impassioned motives, because this would be equivalent to recognizing one's own passivity and impotence toward the irrational part of one's soul. The same is even true for cases in which social motives intervene. Both the ideal Stoic type and the differentiated man do not permit these motives to intimately touch them, as if their dignity were injured by what binds them to social life. They would never be driven to put an end to their own existence for these motives, which are included by the Stoics in the category of 'that which does not depend on me.' The only exception we can consider is the case of a disgrace not before others whose judgment and contempt one cannot bear, but before oneself, because of one's own downfall. Considering all this, Seneca's maxim can only have the meaning of an enhancement of the inner freedom of a superior being. It is not a matter of retreating because one does not feel strong enough before such ordeals and circumstances; rather, it is a matter of the sovereign right — that one always keeps in reserve — to either accept these ordeals or not, and even to draw the line when one no longer sees a meaning in them, and after having sufficiently demonstrated to one- self the capacity to face them. Impassibility is taken for granted, and the right to 'exit' is justifiable as one of the possibilities to be considered, in principle, only for the sake of decreeing that our circumstances have our assent, that we are really active in them, and that we are not just making a virtue of necessity.

The Society of the Spectacle

Author: Guy Debord

Publisher: kindle import (0)

Leninism was the highest voluntaristic expression of revolutionary ideology—a coherence of the separate governing a reality that resisted it. With the advent of Stalinism, revolutionary ideology returned to its fundamental incoherence. At that point, ideology was no longer a weapon, it had become an end in itself. But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes insane. The totalitarian ideological pronouncement obliterates reality as well as purpose; nothing exists but what it says exists. Although this crude form of the spectacle has been confined to certain underdeveloped regions, it has nevertheless played an essential role in the spectacle’s global development. This particular materialization of ideology did not transform the world economically, as did advanced capitalism; it simply used police-state methods to transform people’s perception of the world. \n\nThe ruling totalitarian-ideological class is the ruler of a world turned upside down. The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane. The social organization of total falsehood stems from this fundamental contradiction. \n\nStalinism was also a reign of terror within the bureaucratic class. The terrorism on which this class’s power was based inevitably came to strike the class itself, because this class has no juridical legitimacy, no legally recognized status as an owning class which could be extended to each of its members. Its ownership has to be masked because it is based on false consciousness. This false consciousness can maintain its total power only by means of a total reign of terror in which all real motives are ultimately obscured. The members of the ruling bureaucratic class have the right of ownership over society only collectively, as participants in a fundamental lie: they have to play the role of the proletariat governing a socialist society; they have to be actors faithful to a script of ideological betrayal. Yet they cannot actually participate in this counterfeit entity unless their legitimacy is validated. No bureaucrat can individually assert his right to power, because to prove himself a socialist proletarian he would have to demonstrate that he was the opposite of a bureaucrat, while to prove himself a bureaucrat is impossible because the bureaucracy’s official line is that there is no bureaucracy. Each bureaucrat is thus totally dependent on the central seal of legitimacy provided by the ruling ideology, which validates the collective participation in its “socialist regime” of all the bureaucrats it does not liquidate. Although the bureaucrats are collectively empowered to make all social decisions, the cohesion of their own class can be ensured only by the concentration of their terrorist power in a single person. In this person resides the only practical truth of the ruling lie: the power to determine an unchallengeable boundary line which is nevertheless constantly being adjusted. Stalin decides without appeal who is and who is not a member of the ruling bureaucracy—who should be considered a “proletarian in power” and who branded “a traitor in the pay of Wall Street and the Mikado.” The atomized bureaucrats can find their collective legitimacy only in the person of Stalin—the lord of the world who thus comes to see himself as the absolute person, for whom no superior spirit exists. “The lord of the world recognizes his own nature—omnipresent power—through the destructive violence he exerts against the contrastingly powerless selfhood of his subjects.” He is the power that defines the terrain of domination, and he is also “the power that ravages that terrain.”

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: kindle import (0)

Food of the Gods

Author: Terence McKenna

Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

Consider what it is to listen and understand someone speaking to us. In a certain sense we have to become the other person; or rather, we let him become part of us for a brief second. We suspend our own identities, after which we come back to ourselves and accept or reject what he has said. But that brief second of dawdling identity is the nature of understanding language; and if that language is a command, the identification of understanding becomes the obedience. To hear is actually a kind of obedience. Indeed, both words come from the same root and therefore were probably the same word originally. This is true in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Russian, as well as in English, where 'obey' comes from the Latin obedire, which is a composite of ob + audire, to hear facing someone.16 The problem is the control of such obedience. This is done in two ways. The first but less important is simply by spatial distance. Think, if you will, of what you do when hearing someone else talk to you. You adjust your distance to some culturally established standard.17 When the speaker is too close, it seems he is trying to control your thoughts too closely. When too far, he is not controlling them enough for you to understand him comfortably. If you are from an Arabian country, a face-to-face distance of less than twelve inches is comfortable. But in more northern 16 Straus, p. 229. 17 For those interested in pursuing this subject, see Edward T. Hall's The Hidden Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1966), which stresses the cultural differences, and Robert Sommer's Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969), which examines spatial behavior in depth. 98 The Mind of Man countries, the conversation distance most comfortable is almost twice that, a cultural difference, which in social exchanges can result in a variety of international misunderstandings. To converse with someone at less than the usual distance means at least an attempted mutuality of obedience and control, as, for example, in a love relationship, or in the face-to-face threatening of two men about to fight. To speak to someone within that distance is to attempt to truly dominate him or her. To be spoken to within that distance, and there remain, results in the strong tendency to accept the authority of the person who is speaking. The second and more important way that we control other people's voice-authority over us is by our opinions of them. Why are we forever judging, forever criticizing, forever putting people in categories of faint praise or reproof? We constantly rate others and pigeonhole them in often ridiculous status hierarchies simply to regulate their control over us and our thoughts. Our personal judgments of others are filters of influence. If you wish to allow another's language power over you, simply hold him higher in your own private scale of esteem. And now consider what it is like if neither of these methods avail, because there is no person there, no point of space from which the voice emanates, a voice that you cannot back off from, as close to you as everything you call you, when its presence eludes all boundaries, when no escape is possible — flee and it flees with you — a voice unhindered by walls or distances, undiminished by muffling one's ears, nor drowned out with anything, not even one's own screaming — how helpless the hearer!

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

115

Once the person begins to look to his relationship to the Ultimate Power, to infinitude, and to refashion his links from those around him to that Ultimate Power, he opens up to himself the horizon of unlimited possibility, of real freedom. This is Kierkegaard’s message, the culmination of his whole argument about the dead-ends of character, the ideal of health, the school of anxiety, the nature of real possibility and freedom. One goes through it all to arrive at faith, the faith that one’s very creatureliness has some meaning to a Creator; that despite one’s true insignificance, weakness, death, one’s existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force. Again and again throughout his writings Kierkegaard repeats the basic formula of faith: one is a creature who can do nothing, but one exists over against a living God for whom “everything is possible.”

When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. Occasionally someone admits that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill, as did U.S. Congressman Mendel Rivers, who fed appropriations to the military machine and said he was the most powerful man since Julius Caesar. We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are. The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the “low” heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease. It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a sky-scraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other, this is what he meant: “civilized” society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible. The question that becomes then the most important one that man can put to himself is simply this: how conscious is he of what he is doing to earn his feeling of heroism?

When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. Occasionally someone admits that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill, as did U.S. Congressman Mendel Rivers, who fed appropriations to the military machine and said he was the most powerful man since Julius Caesar. We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are. The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the “low” heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.

Living Buddha, Living Christ

Author: Thich Nhat Hanh

Publisher: Riverhead Trade (2007)

To Have or to Be?

Author: Erich Fromm

Publisher: Continuum Impacts (2005)

Perhaps the most striking example of today's consumer-buying phenomenon is the private automobile. Our age deserves to be dubbed 'the age of the automobile,' four whole economy has been built around automobile production, and our whole life is greatly determined by the rise and fall of the consumer market for cars.\n\n 'To those who have one, their car seems like a vital necessity; to those who do not yet own one, especially people in the so-called socialist states, a car is a symbol of joy. Apparently, however, affection for one's car is not deep and abiding, but a love affair of somewhat short duration, for owners change their cars frequently; after two years, even after just one, an auto owner tires of the 'old car' and starts shopping around for a 'good deal' on a new vehicle. From shopping around to purchase, the whole transaction seems to be a game in which even trickery is sometimes a prime element, and the 'good deal' is enjoyed as much as, if not more than, the ultimate prize: that brand-new model in the driveway.\n\n 'Several factors must be taken into account in order to solve the puzzle of the seemingly flagrant contradiction between the owners' property relationship to their automobiles and their so-short-lived interest in them. First, there is the element of depersonalization in the owner's relationship to the car; the car is not a concrete object that its owner is fond of, but a status symbol, an extension of power - an ego builder; having acquired a car, the owner has actually acquired a new piece of ego. A second factor is that buying a new car every two years instead of, say, every six increases the buyer's thril of acquisition; the act of making the new car one's own is a kind of defloration - it enhances one's sense of control, and the more often it happens, the more thrilled one is. The third factor is that frequent car buying means frequent opportunities to 'make a deal' - to make a profit by the exchange - a satisfaction deeply rooted in men and women today. The fourth factor is one of great importance: the need to experience new stimuli, because the old stimuli are flat and exhausted after but a short while. In an earlier discussion of stimuli, I differentiated between 'activating' and 'passivating' stimuli and suggested the following formulation: 'the more 'passivating' a stimulus is, the more frequently it must be changed in tensity and/or in kind; the more 'activating' it is, the longer it retains its stimulating quality and the less necessary is change in intensity and content.' The fifth and most important factor lies in the change in social character that has occurred during the past century and a half, i.e., from the 'hoarding' to the 'marketing' character. While the change does not do away with the having orientation, it does modify it considerably.

The difference between being and having is not essentially that between East and West. The difference is rather between a society centered around persons and one centered around things...It is not that Western man cannoth fully understand Eastern systems, such as Zen Buddhism (as Jung thought), but that modern Man cannot understand the spirit of a society that is not centered in property and greed.'