Rebel against the forced sickness of capitalism
George Clark, April 2002
rtf (8Kb)version of this document
| Countervailing power can be more or less radical. The
elegant power of the hegemonic elite outlines, allows and embraces delimited forms of
countervailance (acceptable opposition) which do not threaten the dominant paradigm. There
are times, however, when the paradigm needs shifting (the only constant thing is change)
and when the countervailing forces come to be seen as unacceptable to the established
order. |
- Is the elegant power of the emergent globalised elite reaching hegemonic
proportions?
- Is the oligopolisation of the media and the knowledge industry becoming a threat to
human freedom?
This brief collection of quotes from western illuminati of the last century
suggests that it might |
| For more on this theme see
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Contents:
Eastern wise men have for long noted that you are what you think and that it is never
too late to change your mind. Hopefully this is true as it offers a glimmer of hope for a
future of human beings rather than human havings.
The short extracts given below come from Erich Fromm, one of the
world’s most influential and brilliant thinkers on psychological, philosophical and
social issues. They are from his 1976 book "To Have or to Be" which sees
the immature and pathological ‘having’ mode of existence as bringing the world
to the brink of ecological and psychological disaster, and envisages a new emphasis on
mature and healthy ‘being’ as the only course if humanity is to avoid
catastrophe.
The tendency to grow in terms of their own nature is common to all living things. Hence
we resist any attempt to prevent our growing in the ways determined by our structure. In
order to break this resistance, whether it is conscious or not, physical or mental force
is necessary. The use of … force … that tends to bend us in directions contrary
to our given structure, and that is detrimental to our growth, arouses resistance.
What is resisted is the free, spontaneous expression of the infant’s, the
child’s, the adolescent’s, and eventually the adult’s will, their thirst
for knowledge and truth, their wish for affection. The growing person is forced to give up
most of his or her autonomous, genuine desires and interests, and his or her own will, and
to adopt a will and desires and feelings that are not autonomous but superimposed by the
social patterns of thought and feeling.
Society, and the family as its psychosocial agent, has to solve a difficult problem:
Yet by a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting
ideology, it solves this task by and large so well that most people believe they are
following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and
manipulated. [How does this process evolve?]
(Freud’s concept of) the anal character (is) a
person whose main energy in life is directed towards having, saving and hoarding money and
material things as well as feelings, gestures, words, energy. It is the character of the
stingy individual and is usually connected with such other traits as orderliness,
punctuality, stubbornness, each to a more than ordinary degree.
His concept of the anal character as one that has not reached maturity is in fact a
sharp criticism of bourgeois society of the nineteenth century, in which the qualities of
the anal character constituted the norm for moral behaviour and were looked upon as the
expression of ‘human nature’.
Freud’s view (was) that the predominant orientation in possession occurs in the
period before the achievement of full maturity and is pathological if it remains
permanent. In other words, the person exclusively concerned with having and possession is
a neurotic, mentally sick person; hence it would follow that the society in which most of
the members are anal characters is a sick society.
"Because society with its developed organisation exercises a hitherto unknown
power over Man, Man’s dependency on it has grown to a degree that he has almost
ceased to live a mental existence of his own … by a general act of will freedom of
thought has been put out of function, because many give up thinking as free individuals,
and are guided by the collective to which they belong … With the sacrifice of
independence of thought we have – and how could it be otherwise – lost faith in
truth. Our intellectual-emotional life is disorganised. The over organisation of our
public affairs culminates in the organisation of thoughtlessness." (Fromm’s
translation (p158) of Albert Schweitzer’s (1923) Die Schuld
der Philosophie an dem Niedergang der Kultur)
1856-1939 - Austrian founder of psychoanalysis
1875-1965 - German theologican, physician, musician and moralist
- 1952 - Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
1900-1980 - German/American psychoanalyst
- 1941 Escape from Freedom
- 1956 The Art of Loving
- 1976 To Have or to Be; Abacus; ISBN 0 349 11343 2
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