Erich Fromm: Society, Technology and Progress #93

How the 50s have betrayed us

Photo by Ryan De Hamer on Unsplash

Welcome back to our year-long experiment of living six of the most prominent philosophies of life and happiness in our everyday lives. I’m happy to see you here and I hope that you are still enjoying the ride.

Today, we want to see how, in the opinion of philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, society and technology influence our happiness — and we will try to see what we can do about it.

Society, technology and progress

Fromm wants to argue that our societies, as they are now, necessarily create unhappy individuals. This is an important point, for many reasons:

First, if this was true, one could not just blame the unhappiness of people in industrialised societies on accidental events, like a pandemic, a war, unemployment or a disease. All these, of course, tend to make things worse — but, according to Fromm, it is the very fabric of our system that is bound to create unhappy individuals. We cannot hope to get a happy industrial society by, say, raising the taxes or lowering them, but promoting social housing or supporting free enterprise, by regulating against pollution or in favour of big oil. None of these, as necessary as some of them might be, will be able to change the root of the ailment of our societies: that capitalism, as it practised in the Western industrialised world, is just not compatible with human happiness and flourishing.