[Erich Fromm looking stern, below a quotation from The Sane Society]
Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total…
Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before.
He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built.
The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being.
He is owned by his creations, and his lost ownership of himself.
Minor thing.
I remember children going outside to play.
There were almost no kids in the park near me after all that snow. Didn’t see one snowman.
That is one of the things Fromm comments on in The Sane Society (and a bit in The Art of Loving too).
Modern society suppresses our spontaneity, it tries to convince us that having is as fulfilling as being. Especially in childhood, choices of activities can’t be self-directed when you are going through social conformity training. They get replaced by passive consumption of commodities. Fromm did predict that those tendencies would only worsen over time, which indirectly predicted how our society would start resenting children, removing kids from the streets, asking for child-free spaces everywhere.
Alienation also includes separating people from nature and self-directed activities. I do not plan to have kids myself, but I am doing my best to help my nephews (and great nephews fuck I’m getting old) enjoy being as much as they enjoy having. Not in a pushy way, just encouraging their curiosity and logistically helping them try things that aren’t welcome in third places anymore.
I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again.
The movie “Stand By Me” is going to be age restricted because it depicts unsupervised children. Today all the parents would be arrested.
