Nothing is more common than the idea that we, the people living in the Western world of the twentieth century, are eminently sane.
Of all the opening lines from all the books read in all the gin joints around the world, few would seem to be as innocuous and free from serious debate and controversy as this one. It’s that one word there at the end, however, that causes a problem. “Eminently” is often used as a synonym for very, but it actually goes far deeper than. What the author is suggesting that is most people living in the Western world are not just very same, but “exceedingly” so. The next logical step, of course, is that if all the people are exceptionally sane that must mean that society is as well. Congratulations, you just have arrived as the crux which makes this opening eminently controversial.
Man may be defined as the animal that can say "I," that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.
The key to discovering sanity in the modern world essentially boils down to one pursuit above all others: discovering our sense of individualism. The author’s language referencing the mentality of conformity rivals that of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. While Nietzsche unfortunately suffers from a completely unwarranted and unintended associated with Nazism, the truth is that above all else he railed against “the herd.” In his own way, Fromm rails against herd mentality, ascribing to it a pestilential ability to infect literally ever aspect of modern life.
The mechanism through which the anonymous authority operates is conformity.
The extension of “I” as an entity of self-awareness does not in any way guarantee the ability to break free from instinct hardwired into the human mind as a result of millions of years of evolution. The desire to conform is a given; it is a built-in component to human survival that automatically kicks into gear at the sign of threat. Replace conformity with anarchy and the species would likely have died out before it ever got around to discovering fire. That is the primitive nature of man; evolution has also been slowly weeding it out ever since it was no longer an absolute necessity for the preservation of the species. Authoritarianism, which thrives on conformity, is therefore definitively anti-evolutionary. Being yourself is great the individual; not so much for maintaining rules and laws.
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
The book and his argument draws to a conclusion with another parallel with Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche who infamously declared “God is dead” toward the close of the 19th century. Things had changed a lot in the intervening half-century give or take. Interestingly, both men center their argument with a master/slave dialectic. Nietzsche’s “herd” is comprised of “slaves” who reject thinking for themselves and his pronouncement indicated a spiritual death of mankind rather than a literal death of a deity. Fromm’s slaves are humans who have become so alienated from everything that they have become emotional robots destined for self-destruction as a result of discovering their automated, alienated lives are not just meaningless, but something much worse: boring.
