International Library of Psychology: Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics

At about the age of 23 I discovered for the first time that I had a mind. Previous to that, I had been more-or-less incapable of any sort of introspection. Smoking marijuana opened my unconscious mind and I felt like I was able to step outside of myself and see myself for the first time. I immediately started reading books other than adventure novels. One of the first authors I discovered was Eric Fromm. His thinking completely galvanized me. I thought that he had figured out all human problems, and all people had to do was pay attention. I knew essentially nothing about Freud, Jung, Marx, Nietzsche, and so on, and Fromm synthesized all of their thinking into a coherent system. Fromm championed the bogey-man of right-wing Christianity, namely secular humanism. The idea of which is that the foundations for value systems should be based on man’s autonomy and reason. In order to know what was good for man, one has to know the nature of man. Authoritarian ethics is an irrational system based on acquiring power over people. This strikes me as so self-evident that it’s incredible that it could arouse controversy. Fromm claims that one of the best tools for knowing human nature is psychoanalysis. These days Freud’s ideas are commonly held to be erroneous, and some critics dismiss Fromm’s ideas as he relies upon ideas of Freud. This is nonsense. Freud was one of mankind’s greatest geniuses. While it is true that his motivations discoveries he made regarding human nature were physiologically clockwork, following the prejudices of his time, Fromm acknowledged this. Too completely dismiss Freud’s ideas on this basis would be like denouncing Kepler’s equations because he thought that planetary motion was caused by the “Holy Spirit,” or Newton’s theory of gravity because he explained it in terms of action at a distance. Rereading Fromm forty some years later, I am astonished at the extent to which he and I think alike. No doubt, this is because I devoured his work at an impressionable time of my life. So I still think that his ideas should be taught in high school. One thing I’ve become convinced of over the years is that irrational devotion to dogma is most often the source of evil, whether the dogma is religious or political. Teaching young people to not enslave their minds to authoritarian dogma is simply sane.