Erich Fromm

I thought the following quote may be worth sharing. It was written by Erich Fromm in 1968 in a book called The revolution of hope: "The year 2000 may be...the beginning of a period in which man ceases to be human and becomes transformed into an unthinking and unfeeling machine" (Page 29 of the Perennial Library paperback edition, first published in 1974). I share it with you in order to stimulate thought and, if you are so inclined, to comment. My personal feeling is that Fromm was, as usual, close to the mark. I recognize that it is asking a lot to expect a generation to consider the possibility that it may have so gone off the rails that it has ceased to be human, or that it has been transformed into an unthinking and unfeeling machine. Obviously, it is not meant to be taken literally. What then did Fromm mean? How much truth is there in such a prediction?

The power of the pharmaceutical industry

If you've been reading the two previous posts on what it would mean to be conscious and to live in a sane society, I urge you to read the following from Dr Mercola's website:

http://www.mercola.com/2006/jun/13/how_drug_companies_deceive_you.htm

The sane society, mental health and the fully functioning person - Part II

The point I was coming to in the last post is that it is not an easy task to live in what we euphemistically and inaccurately call the real world. This is actually true for most people, I think. But it is absolutely true for anyone who has taken the first steps towards becoming conscious. After all, in our normal (that is, unconscious) state, we operate much as we have been conditioned to operate. We do not feel deeply and we do not think deeply. Our world values and thrives on superficiality, on the glitz and the glamour (including the seductive allure of clever words) rather than substance. This is essential, if things are to remain more or less as they are. John Dewey pointed out a century ago that every person who is able to think threatens the status quo, the institutions of whichever society such a person inhabits. The same can be said for a feeling person, that is, a person in touch with their own feelings (See Arthur Janov, The feeling child). Schools, preschools and childcare centres could not exist in anything like the form they do if we were able to think and feel authentically - that is, if we were conscious or awake. We would realise, also, that something like 95% of the institution of modern medicine (doctors and nurses, hospitals and pharmacies, drugs and surgery) is both unnecessary and dangerous, not to mention economically unsustainable.

As always with such sweeping statements, I have in mind very specific situations - things I observe on TV, in my community and even things in my own family, as well as the experience of runnung seminars. From where I stand, most people find it extremely difficult to see when the emperor is not wearing any clothes - which, in our society, is most of the time. The antidote is to educate ourselves by exposing ourselves to real information, rather than the propaganda that passes for news, to find some way to heal ourselves and then to create a daily spiritual practice, such as meditation and to create or participate in some kind of support group, consisting of people who are committed to our growth and further healing.

Australian readers will have noticed in last Sunday's newspaper an article that attempts to give the impression that it has been written to help parents protect their children from disease (Duncan Fine, "Needle in a haystack", The Sunday Telegraph, 4 June 2006, Page 25 of the "Body and Soul" section). I will do a detailed analysis of this article in my "vaccination" blog soon (See http://vaccinationissues.blogspot.com ). Here I only wish to point out that articles like this are nothing more than free advertisements for the pharmaceutical industry which manufactures vaccines. Their purpose is to induce fear - in this case, not merely the fear of disease, but even death - and to confuse parents who may have heard about some of the harm that can occur to babies and infants as a result of vaccines such as the MMR vaccine or those which contain the mercury preservative thimerosal. The well documented relationship between vaccination and autism is dismissed as due to flawed logic in spite of books like Evidence of harm by David Kirby - which is simply not mentioned!! - and Vaccines, autism and childhood disorders, by Neil Z Miller - also not mentioned. Instead of a balanced article, the author simply advises parents to consult their doctor if they are in any doubt. Parents are told to ignore "all the misinformation" they may have found on the internet. Unless one has almost unlimited time on their hands such blatent propaganda is difficult to assess (However, I have tried to demonstrate that, at least in the case of smallpox, the proposition that vaccination was responsible for its eradication is unfounded ( http://vaccinationissues.blogspot.com/2006/04/smallpox-and-vaccination.html ).

The vaccination bible, edited by Lynne McTaggart, points out that, because most doctors "fervently believe that vaccines are one of medical science's greatest success stories, responsible for wiping out many deadly infectious diseases", they do not acknowledge clear factual evidence demonstrating their ineffectiveness in preventing disease or the harm they can cause. Furthermore, their faith in the rightness of their cause "turns otherwise reasonable doctors or scientists into bullies and hysterics, shouting down dissenters, using emotional blackmail to bully parents into submission and resorting to emotive appeals, rather than common sense or fact, in arguing their popint of view" (Page 9). This is, indeed, what the Sunday Telegraph did last Sunday, simply stating as "fact" several things which are not only not supported by empirical evidence but are actually contradicted by it (See the article on smallpox as an example). As the late Dr Robert Mendelsohn wrote: "Much of what you have been led to believe about immunizations is not true" (How to raise a healthy child...In spite of your doctor. New York: Ballantine Books, 1984/1987, Page 230). In particular, the claim that we owe the eradication of disease to vaccination is not supported by scientific evidence. "There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease" (Page 231).[To be continued]

The sane society, mental health and the fully functioning person.

Some readers may recognise the three concepts that make up the title of today's post. "The sane society" is, of course, the title of Erich Fromm's wonderful book, published 50 years ago (1955 in the US and 1956 in the UK) following his seminal work, Escape from Freedom (1941), also published as The fear of freedom. Other concepts in Fromm's 1955 book are "the pathology of normalcy" and "mental health" - the latter clearly being distinct from the concept of normalcy. Carl Rogers introduced the concept of "the fully functioning person" in several works (See his book, On becoming a person, first published in 1961). I first read these works in my Honours year in Psychology in 1974, although I had been introduced to them as early as 1971, during my first year as a Psychology undergraduate. I re-read them after graduating, as part of my preparation for my PhD. I have observed and experienced nothing during the past 30 years to make me think that any of the essential things stated by Fromm or Rogers is outdated.

What Fromm called a "sane society", we have called a "conscious community". A conscious community is one that is made up of and governed by individuals who have mastered the art of "conscious living", that is people who are "conscious", or "awake", that is to say, people who are "mentally healthy" or, if you prefer, "fully functioning persons". My reason for spelling this out is simply to make the point that there is nothing new or radical in our concept of conscious living but, on the contrary, these ideas have been around for a very long time (The world's indigenous people - as, indeed, our own ancestors before the "Neolithic revolution" that occurred about 10,000 years ago - have always understood these ideas - They just didn't need words for them, since the state of being conscious - or awake or mentally healthy - was the norm until they were colonised. An essential component of the process of colonisation was - and is - the colonisation of people's consciousness, a process that continues in all those places where there is still a strong indigenous presence, as in Australia).

Why am I writing these things you may well ask? The reason is that I am daily struck by the difficulty - nay, the near impossibility - of communicating what it is that we mean by these things, not as an intellectual exercise, but as something that is at the very core - or heart - of the work that Harbans, Tracy and I do in our seminars, support groups and therapy sessions. We are in awe of the transformative experiences undergone by several individuals in our seminars and one-to-one therapy sessions - mirroring similar experiences we have observed on other personal growth seminars and workshops over the last twenty years or so - only to see, within a matter of weeks, something that appears to us as a "return to normal". I've written about this before, referring to the near-impossibility of remaining conscious, even if, by some miracle, we have managed to become conscious.

The reasons for this have also been referred to and seem obvious to me. We do not live in a sane society. We do not live in a conscious community. The structures that could support mental health (or physical health, for that matter) simply do not exist (See http://www.consciouslivingseminars.com/aug03_journal.html#A%20conscious%20community
for a description of what such a society might look like). On the contrary, almost everything in "the real world" has the effect (and the function) of disempowering us, of sowing the seeds of doubt, of making us unconscious - and filling our heads with nonsense masquerading as information, knowledge and, even, "scientific fact". The purpose of all this propaganda and unconscionable brainwashing is to convince us that we can not trust our own inner voice but must turn to "experts", professionals and other external authorities for guidance. We are taught to have blind faith in those charged with responsibility for protecting us from harm, even when their economic interests dictate otherwise. This process begins in the womb, before we are born, it continues in the family setting during the critical first three years of life (but, for more and more babies and infants, in the childcare centre), when our communications (such as crying) are not listened to or validated, it continues through preschool, school, university and the world of employment and is supported by the institutions of science, medicine and government. We are taught not to trust ourselves, our own, inner knowing (our Higher Self, or our inner physician, or our inner voice), but to have blind faith in the experts (scientists, doctors and other professionals, including government spokespeople, university professors and so on). [To be continued].