In his book The Sane Society, Erich Fromm points out that alienation has become an endemic disease of modern capitalism. Fromm defines alienated individual as somebody as “the person who can only experience the outer world photographically, but is out of touch with his inner world”. [Fromm, 1990, p. 207] The opposite of alienation is schizophrenia, that is, when the individual can not experience the outer world objectively, as most people do. For this psychoanalyst, the individual must be in contact with her feelings and at the same time have the capacity to experience the world in its objective-action context.
One of the main problems of consumerist society is that happiness is confused with mere pleasure. Nothing can be farther from reality. For Fromm
“Happiness results from the experience of productive living, and the use of the powers of love and reason which unite us with the world. Happiness consists …show more content…
His happiness is dependent on the approval of others, and current comparisons of himself with his classmates or work colleagues which result in disfavor to him make him feel miserable.
From the standpoint of normative humanism:
“Mental health…is characterized by the ability to love and to create, by the emergence from the incestuous ties to family and nature, by a sense of identity based on one’s experience of self as the subject and agent of one’s powers, by the grasp of reality inside and outside of ourselves, that is, by the development of objectivity and reason” (Fromm, 1989, p. 203)
My experience as a teacher has been that whenever I aim to create awareness about an unpleasant subject, e.g. how our meat consumption is responsible for the deforestation of the Amazon, for the extinction of many species of flora and fauna, for our contribution to world hunger and for horrific animal cruelty, most of the students become critical and start to question themselves and their
One of the main problems of consumerist society is that happiness is confused with mere pleasure. Nothing can be farther from reality. For Fromm
“Happiness results from the experience of productive living, and the use of the powers of love and reason which unite us with the world. Happiness consists …show more content…
His happiness is dependent on the approval of others, and current comparisons of himself with his classmates or work colleagues which result in disfavor to him make him feel miserable.
From the standpoint of normative humanism:
“Mental health…is characterized by the ability to love and to create, by the emergence from the incestuous ties to family and nature, by a sense of identity based on one’s experience of self as the subject and agent of one’s powers, by the grasp of reality inside and outside of ourselves, that is, by the development of objectivity and reason” (Fromm, 1989, p. 203)
My experience as a teacher has been that whenever I aim to create awareness about an unpleasant subject, e.g. how our meat consumption is responsible for the deforestation of the Amazon, for the extinction of many species of flora and fauna, for our contribution to world hunger and for horrific animal cruelty, most of the students become critical and start to question themselves and their