Self-Awareness
A unifying theme running throughout the text that touches upon individual subjects of analysis ranging from economics to psychology is self-awareness. To create a sane society requires that society to be aware of its sanity and be able to recognize insanity not just external to itself, but within itself. Imagine, for example, walking into an insane asylum in which both inmates and doctors could not be distinguished physically. The inmates would consider themselves every bit as sane as the doctors and while you as an outsider might be easily able to distinguish the difference, how would you ever convince the inmates? A sane society can only be attained when those within it can recognize their insanity.
Alienation
Alienation is the great threat to modern society. Men have created for themselves a society in which everything is available and nobody really works for anything; rather, they work for money to afford the things they need or, often, don’t really need at all. Whether working under the enforced conditions of a totalitarian society or the economic coercion of capitalism, people across the planet in the 20th century have become alienated not just from the work they do and the products and services they make, but the products and services they consume. The result is a sort of emotional and mental slavery rather than physical slavery: people have become robotic with only a sense of desperation separating them from emotionless machines doing the bulk of the actual work.
Conformity
Fromm identifies conformity as a dominant contributor to path toward humans becoming living robots. The willingness to conform is connected to laziness and self-protection, but also to the singularly more positive attribute of selflessness. In fact, the author even goes so far as to label selflessness a pathological condition of modern experience which was essentially unknown right into the 19th century. In the effort to conform to the sake progress, advancement and even the lofty goal of correcting the mistakes of selfishness of the past, mankind has faced an existential crisis in the 20th century that threatens nothing less than his own identity; both as individuals and humans.
