The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology
Erich Fromm, 1968
A specter is stalking in our midst, Erich Fromm wrote in 1968, and that specter is a completely mechanized society in which people are well fed, content and passive. The psychoanalyst and philosopher explains how real hope differs from waiting, why constant busyness can be a form of passivity, and how to avoid becoming a part of a giant machine. He also proposes steps that give people back their role as participants in their own lives.
Who it is for
For anyone who feels they live on autopilot between work and shopping, and for anyone curious about how technology and big organizations change human character.
Fortitude is the capacity to say “no” when the world wants to hear “yes.”
A specter almost no one sees
A specter is stalking in our midst, writes Erich Fromm, but only a few see it clearly. It is not communism and not fascism. It is a completely mechanized society, set on producing and consuming as much as possible and run by computers. The people in it are well fed and content, but passive and unfeeling. They are turning more and more into small parts of a giant machine.
Fromm, a psychoanalyst and philosopher, spent forty years writing about how human character is tied to the structure of society. He wrote this book in response to America’s situation in 1968, when the Vietnam War was going on and the world lived under the threat of a nuclear strike. As he saw it, we stand at a crossroads. One road leads to a society where people become helpless cogs. The other leads to a society that puts technology at the service of people.
Fromm is no enemy of machines. He argues against those who consider a mechanical future inevitable, and he believes the system can be brought back under human control. But that takes hope, and not at all the kind we usually call by that name.
Ahead we’ll talk about how real hope differs from waiting, why constant busyness can be passivity, how the computer can become a new god, and how “having” differs from “being”. And at the end we’ll look at what Fromm proposed doing so that people become participants again rather than parts.
The old man at the open gate
In his novel “The Trial”, Franz Kafka tells a parable that Fromm considers an exact portrait of false hope. A man comes to the gate of the Law and asks the doorkeeper to let him in. The doorkeeper says not yet. The door is open, but the man decides to wait for permission. He sits and waits, day after day, year after year, and studies the doorkeeper for so long that he even knows the fleas in his fur collar. Before he dies, he asks why, in all those years, no one but him has asked to enter. The doorkeeper answers: “This gate was meant only for you, and now I am going to shut it.”
According to Fromm, many people are like that old man. They hope, but they don’t act on the impulse of their hearts, and they wait until the bureaucrats give them the “green light”. Such hope is a disguised form of powerlessness. Its close relative is the belief that the future, progress or history will do everything for us.
There is also the opposite mistake: charging ahead with no regard for reality, like false messiahs and the leaders of putsches. Fromm sees this too as despair, only wearing the mask of courage.
Real hope, in his words, is paradoxical. It is like a crouched tiger that will jump only when the moment for jumping has come. A person with strong hope notices the signs of new life, cherishes them, and is ready to help bring to birth what is ready to be born.
Next to hope, Fromm places two more supports. The first is rational faith: not blind trust in an idol or a leader, but a conviction about a real, though unproven, possibility. It grows out of your own experience: whoever has changed themselves believes that others can change too. The second is courage, or, as Spinoza called it, fortitude. It is the ability to keep hope from turning into empty optimism and faith from turning into blind submission.
This leads to a simple question for yourself: where in your life is the gate open while you are still waiting for permission to go in?
About the author
Erich Fromm (1900–1980) was a German-American psychoanalyst, philosopher and sociologist, the author of “Escape from Freedom”, “The Sane Society” and “The Art of Loving”. All his life he studied how the structure of a society shapes human character.
All books by this author: Erich Fromm
Terms from the book
- Ego
- Kennedy
- Kafka: Franz Kafka, a Prague writer who wrote in German, the author of the novel “The Trial”. His parable of the man at the gate of the Law is part of that novel.
- Rational faith: Fromm’s concept: a conviction, growing out of one’s own experience, in a real though not yet proven possibility. The opposite of blind submission to an idol, a leader or an ideology.
- Fortitude: In Fromm, the ability to keep hope from turning into empty optimism and faith from turning into blind submission. The capacity to say “no” when “yes” is expected of you.
- Spinoza: Baruch Spinoza, a seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher. Fromm borrows the word “fortitude” from him for a particular kind of courage.
- Second Industrial Revolution: Fromm’s name for the change of his time: the first revolution replaced the strength of people and animals with the energy of steam and electricity, and the second is beginning to replace human thought with machines.
- Mumford: Lewis Mumford, an American historian and critic of technology, the author of “The Myth of the Machine”. Fromm calls him one of the outstanding humanists and builds on his concept of the megamachine.
- Megamachine: Mumford’s image: a society organized as one huge machine in which people work as its parts. He saw the first such systems as far back as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.
- Homo consumens: “Consuming man”, Fromm’s expression for a person whose only aim is to have more and to use more.
- Khrushchev: Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the USSR from 1953 to 1964, one of the negotiators during the Cuban missile crisis.
- Cuban missile crisis: The standoff between the United States and the USSR in October 1962 over Soviet missiles in Cuba, when the world was on the brink of nuclear war.
- Hotline: A direct line of communication between the leaders of the United States and the USSR, set up in 1963 so that in a crisis they could reach agreement quickly and directly.
- Guaranteed annual income: An idea discussed by economists in the 1960s: everyone receives from the state enough for a modest but dignified life, whether or not they work.
- Pirkei Avot: “Ethics of the Fathers”, a section of the Mishnah, the ancient code of Jewish oral law, made up of the sayings of the sages.
All terms
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