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heart4321's review against another edition
4.0
"Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem" was my favorite essay of the lot. His notion that "human history began with an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience" is a striking idea. He asserts that we wouldn't have truly been human without the fall (in the Judeo-Christian sense) and I agree that our disobedience is an integral part of what makes us human. The obedience that he fears is that we would willingly, and knowingly, obey an order to destroy ourselves with a nuclear bomb. This was written in the 60s, so that bit felt outdated, but the concept still stands that as a society we have to potential to degenerate to the point of suicide.
The most striking idea from the next essay, "Prophets and Priests," was that as a society we encourage uniformity through the shame and fear of being different: "The corruption of the theories of progressive education have led to a method where the child is not told what to do, not given orders, nor punished for failure to execute them. The child just 'expresses himself.' But, from the first day of his life onward, he is filled with an unholy respect for conformity, with the fear of being 'different,' with the fright of being away from the rest of the herd" (Fromm 23). The irony that strikes me today is that this has morphed into an obsession with being different for the sake of being the same, ex. "I have to assert that I too am from xyz marginalized group, so that I can fit in with everyone else who isn't basic." Both what Fromm describes and our modern take of it flatten dynamic individuals into nice little labeled packages.
I quite enjoyed the third essay's, "Let Man Prevail," critique of capitalism/consumerism. Fromm writes, "The average man feels insecure, lonely, depressed, and suffers from a lack of joy in the midst of plenty. Life does not make sense to him; he is dimly aware that the meaning of life cannot lie in being nothing but a 'consumer.' He could not stand the joylessness and meaninglessness of life were it not for the fact that the systems offer him innumerable avenues of escape, ranging from television to tranquillizers, which permit him to forget that he is losing more and more of all that is valuable in life" (Fromm 51). This remains a cutting observation of our society over sixty years later. As I was reading however, I did have the niggling thought that society is not a nebulous indefinable thing, it is made up of people and we are those people. We did create the societies in which we live. It is too easy to say, "look, consumerist society is bad," without balancing it against the fact that our capitalist and consumerist society has created the wealth that allows us to explore life more fully. It isn't necessarily the structure that is inherently bad, it is how people interact with the structure. Fromm himself marvels at the fact that within a hundred years we had reduced the work week from 70 hours to 40, and all of those regained hours could be used to pursue one's enjoyment of life. I think Fromm would agree that it's unwise to take that for granted. As I read this essay, I kept thinking 'capitalism is the worst economic system in the world, except for everything else.'
The last essay, "Humanist Socialism," was the weakest of the lot. Fromm's ideals are wonderful and fantastic, but they are just that: fantastic to the point of being pure fantasy. Humans are not as good as he thinks we are. His call for a decentralized government, for example, would be a mess in execution. Can you imagine having a little government with everyone who lives on your street, then having to collaborate with everyone who lives the next street over to make governmental decisions? That sounds like a nightmare. You would have all sorts of weird, dysfunctional chaos. He also talks about working for the sake of the work, not the profit, and I agree that this is a nice idea, but then where does the money come from to support oneself? Well, he solves that quite easily: it comes from the government. But is that the same decentralized government he was suggesting a minute ago? And where did they get the money, if no one cares about profit and we actively try to make people less consumeristic? Also, he says we ought to spend our money on getting two thirds of the world out of poverty, so really there isn't any money left over to support my life-giving, but monetarily impotent job as a whittler. Of course, I'm being silly and over-simplifying his arguments, but it really did feel like an essay chockful of wonderful, impractical ideals.
All of the is to say, I'd definitely recommend this book! I quite enjoyed reading it!
The most striking idea from the next essay, "Prophets and Priests," was that as a society we encourage uniformity through the shame and fear of being different: "The corruption of the theories of progressive education have led to a method where the child is not told what to do, not given orders, nor punished for failure to execute them. The child just 'expresses himself.' But, from the first day of his life onward, he is filled with an unholy respect for conformity, with the fear of being 'different,' with the fright of being away from the rest of the herd" (Fromm 23). The irony that strikes me today is that this has morphed into an obsession with being different for the sake of being the same, ex. "I have to assert that I too am from xyz marginalized group, so that I can fit in with everyone else who isn't basic." Both what Fromm describes and our modern take of it flatten dynamic individuals into nice little labeled packages.
I quite enjoyed the third essay's, "Let Man Prevail," critique of capitalism/consumerism. Fromm writes, "The average man feels insecure, lonely, depressed, and suffers from a lack of joy in the midst of plenty. Life does not make sense to him; he is dimly aware that the meaning of life cannot lie in being nothing but a 'consumer.' He could not stand the joylessness and meaninglessness of life were it not for the fact that the systems offer him innumerable avenues of escape, ranging from television to tranquillizers, which permit him to forget that he is losing more and more of all that is valuable in life" (Fromm 51). This remains a cutting observation of our society over sixty years later. As I was reading however, I did have the niggling thought that society is not a nebulous indefinable thing, it is made up of people and we are those people. We did create the societies in which we live. It is too easy to say, "look, consumerist society is bad," without balancing it against the fact that our capitalist and consumerist society has created the wealth that allows us to explore life more fully. It isn't necessarily the structure that is inherently bad, it is how people interact with the structure. Fromm himself marvels at the fact that within a hundred years we had reduced the work week from 70 hours to 40, and all of those regained hours could be used to pursue one's enjoyment of life. I think Fromm would agree that it's unwise to take that for granted. As I read this essay, I kept thinking 'capitalism is the worst economic system in the world, except for everything else.'
The last essay, "Humanist Socialism," was the weakest of the lot. Fromm's ideals are wonderful and fantastic, but they are just that: fantastic to the point of being pure fantasy. Humans are not as good as he thinks we are. His call for a decentralized government, for example, would be a mess in execution. Can you imagine having a little government with everyone who lives on your street, then having to collaborate with everyone who lives the next street over to make governmental decisions? That sounds like a nightmare. You would have all sorts of weird, dysfunctional chaos. He also talks about working for the sake of the work, not the profit, and I agree that this is a nice idea, but then where does the money come from to support oneself? Well, he solves that quite easily: it comes from the government. But is that the same decentralized government he was suggesting a minute ago? And where did they get the money, if no one cares about profit and we actively try to make people less consumeristic? Also, he says we ought to spend our money on getting two thirds of the world out of poverty, so really there isn't any money left over to support my life-giving, but monetarily impotent job as a whittler. Of course, I'm being silly and over-simplifying his arguments, but it really did feel like an essay chockful of wonderful, impractical ideals.
All of the is to say, I'd definitely recommend this book! I quite enjoyed reading it!
jaylawson's review
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
Definitely takes a while to finish this book with the verbose and complicated sentences, but worth the read. The book itself isn't entirely about disobedience; I found that disobedience itself was only thoroughly discussed in the first 2 chapters while the second two focused on political, social and economic activities, namely capitalism and socialism . A must-read for leftist theory.
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