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THE ANATOMY OF HUMAN DESTRUCTIVENESS by Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm practices a unique type of psychiatry. He takes psychoanalysis that is usually applied to the individual and applies it to society as a whole. He figures the mental problems that plague mankind are of epidemic proportions, and are too universal to apply to the individual alone. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness Erich Fromm does a comprehensive study of the cause of human destructiveness.

He does not study the violence and destruction associated with self defense, or even the senseless killings of an individual serial killer, because animals sometimes engage in such wanton violence. He concentrates on the violence that is associated only with humans like war, bombing of cities, and weapons of mass destruction. He distinguishes between violence out of fear and violence from cruelty, perversion and hate.

He does a case study of Hitler and his top generals and advisor. His conclusions on each case study are different, for instance with Hitler he found Hitler’s problems were not a result of his upbringing or his family life. Erich Fromm diagnosed Hitler with a sickness he calls necrophilia, not the act of having sex with the dead, but a psychological form of the disease where the patient loves death.

In the end Erich Fromm determined the cause of human destructiveness comes from the thwarting of a powerful drive humans have to be understanding, caring, giving, loving. When this drive in us is prevented from exercising itself by the environment we live in, it manifests itself in hate, cruelty, and destruction. He likens it to a balloon being blown up. When you pinch the balloon to stop the air from coming to the top it shoots off in a side expansion from the pressure from the incoming air. When we are not able to express love, we express hate. If we aren’t able to be caring, we become cruel. If we don’t hold life as sacred, then we hold death as sacred. Instead of a love of life, we develop a love of death.
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

THE ART OF LOVING By Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm was a psychologist. He examines love in The Art of Loving. He breaks it up into all its parts and gives an analytical examination of all its components. His premise is love is an art that has to be learned. A modern misconception is people believe they are capable of love without having to learn the art. Like any art, he says, to learn it takes devotion and commitment. If a person were to try and practice any other art without studying it, that person would fall flat on their face. Yet everyone attempts to love without learning how to love, which is why so many relationships end up in failure.

Eric Fromm talks about the two poles; masculinity with discipline and overview, and femininity with nurturing and intimacy. If the individual learns to incorporate both poles into his/her being he/she becomes more complete. We learn to incorporate the two poles from our mothers and fathers, and from our relationships with the opposite sex. Art of Loving says when we become adults we have to learn to be our own fathers and our own mothers.

Erich Fromm talks about the sex drive and orgiastic sex. He says primitive people used to have sex orgies with the whole tribe every so often to alleviate the sex drive, so people could get back to the hard work of survival. He compares it with promiscuous and casual sex in the modern world. He talks abut true love with your mate as a superior way to alleviate the sex drive. The trouble with orgiastic sex, he says, is it only relieves the drive for a short while then you need another dose. True love is not transient and causes long term satisfaction and fulfillment.

Erich Fromm in Art of Loving says to love is to give. You can’t give if you don’t care. To be able to care you have to have respect for your fellow man. Erich Fromm defines respect as regard, consideration, and concern. He uses a metaphor of two mothers to define real caring. One mother looks at her baby sleeping and adores it, but doesn’t bother to change its diaper and allows it to get a rash. The other mother adores her baby too and changes its diaper on time. Real caring isn’t just a feeling but it involves regard, consideration, and concern of the object of ones caring coupled with a fitting action. He says giving is not just money or time but giving of oneself. By that he means “to draw from everything you’ve learned” and use it to help the well being of another with no reward in mind. Fromm says to reach love is like climbing a ladder. The rungs of the ladder starting at the bottom are respect, knowledge, caring, giving, and love. You can’t reach the next rung of the ladder without incorporating the rung before it.

Erich Fromm says real love is not only loving a person for what they are, but also loving them for what they can be. Erich Fromm says love is active. He defines active as sitting in a room alone for a period of time and contemplating. He says running all over town, seeing people, attending meetings etc. is passive. Contemplating the object of your love, that is to regard their situation, to consider what they’ve been through, what they’re going through, and what their facing and being concerned with their well being is active. Erich Fromm says there are three kinds of love; self love, romantic love, and brotherly love. Self love is working hard to make your self a better person. Romantic love is loving your mate, which includes love for your children. Brotherly love is caring about the suffering in the world and trying to make the world a better place. He says true love includes all three loves. If you love your mate (and children) you love yourself and your fellow man. In real true love they can’t be separated. Eric Fromm takes on the biggest problem of our times, love, with a soberness and intelligence that makes it a must reading for any serious individual. It is a great book, a classic.
The Art of Loving

ORIGINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS by Dr. Julian Jaynes

In ‘Origins of Consciousness’ Dr. Jaynes said the ability to see the world in metaphors and not the use of language is where conciousness originated. It gave us the space we needed to reflect on the world instead of just reacting to it. He claims this changed us from fearful, confused, and obedient followers to individuals with a conscious. Julian Jaynes says that man, with the power to reflect on the world, had evolved into consciousness by being able to determine his own fate.

Jaynes says Jesus preached to the peasants to help them become conscious. Jesus’ parables were metaphors and he tried to show them that man has the power to live in a world of justice, love, and peace. When Jesus was confronted by the ruling class, mainly the church, he chastised them for not helping the peasants instead of exploiting them.

Jaynes says that conscious man had two ways he could go. He could be good or he could not be good. Jaynes says Jesus was calling on man to become conscious and use his consciousness to be good and make the world right. Jaynes argues that man today is like the peasants of Jesus’ time as a result of super technology and modern man’s inability to comprehend it, and his dependence on an elite class of government, business, and military leaders guided by experts and scientists. Jaynes argues that modern man has regressed in consciousness.

THE NEW INDUSTRIAL STATE by John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith was the foremost economist of the 20th century. He was Roosevelt’s price czar in the New Deal and the architect who set our economy into Keynesian economics that pulled us out of the Great Depression and managed our booming post war economy. He was General Douglas MacArthur’s chief economic advisor when they occupied Japan after World War 11, and is responsible for designing Japan's new economy that led to Japan’s prosperity in the 70’s and 80’s. Galbraith was John Kennedy’s friend, teacher, and his Ambassador to India. He is credited with pulling India out of poverty and starvation to become the most powerful economy of the developing nations in the world.

The New Industrial State shows how the free marketplace does not exist anymore when it comes to the large multi-national corporations, who account for seventy percent of the modern world economy. The other thirty percent still operate on a market (supply and demand) economy, but not the big corporations. Because of the new high tech machinery in manufacturing being so expensive to buy and operate, corporations can no longer afford to depend on the vagaries or whims of the marketplace or the dictates of an owner/operator.

Galbraith uses the example of Ford Motors introducing the Mustang to the market to illustrate his point in the book. To manufacture a new model in the car industry requires all the machinery to be set to certain specifications that can’t ever be changed. This machinery is so expensive that if the new model fails in the marketplace the corporation could go bankrupt.

So they eliminate all competition. They own the upstream and downstream elements of production, from the suppliers of raw material to their own retail outlets. They eliminate the need for banks and finance by keeping a large retained earnings from stockholder dividends. They reduce competition in the marketplace by using exorbitant funds on advertising to make sure we buy the product.

All decisions are made by committees of specialists and experts, eliminating the authority majority stockholders and CEOs have over the manufacturing of a product. The new state, as described in the The New Industrial State, is not capitalism and is not socialism. It is a controlled market economy.
The New Industrial State (The James Madison Library in American Politics)

THE PRIZE by Daniel Yergin

The Prize is the story of oil, the complete story from the beginning to the present. Learn the true story of Rockefeller and the break up of Standard Oil. Learn the history of the world from a different perspective. Oil is King in the modern industrial world. Oil fuels the world, without oil everything stops. Learn how WWII was won by shooting down all the tankers at sea heading for Japan or Germany. They literally ran out of gas. The Prize gives you the real picture of what is happening in the Middle East and how it got that way. The history of oil is the history of the modern world.
The Prize : The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL By E.F. Schumacher

E.F. Schumacher was an economist. Small is Beautiful takes on modern capitalism. Economics is a foreign language to most of us, but E.F. Schumacher brings it down to earth and makes it accessible to everyone. Small is Beautiful explains how modern capitalism is one kind of capitalism. Schumacher calls it maximizing profits capitalism. All decisions are based on making as much profits for the company as can possibly be made. This forces everything to run on short term interests. Considerations like quality, or damage to the environment, or increases in employee wages to keep up with cost of living, or public safety are considered uneconomic. They interfere with maximizing profits.

Schumacher says there are alternative forms of capitalism that allow long term investments that take into consideration what is best for society at large. The main alternative he offers strikes at the heart of capitalism, the private enterprise. He believes the workers should own the enterprise and in lieu of wages they share equally in the profits. He believes everything should be kept small which is where he gets the title of the book. He believes the profits should give the owners/workers a comfortable living and no more. If the profits get bigger then the enterprise should lower the prices to keep the profit at the level to give its owners a comfortable living.

If the profits should keep increasing then the enterprise should consider opening a second, third, or fourth enterprise, perhaps in other towns or countries what ever the situation calls for. Instead of turning it into a chain outfit they would make the workers in the new enterprise the owners with the same philosophy of keeping the profits small enough to only provide the workers with a good living by slashing prices.

This idea would require the investor, the capitalist, to be magnanimous enough to accept only his share of the profits for his investment. In his book Schmacher profiles a businessman who did just that with great success. The book also addresses aid to developing nations.
Small is Beautiful

SPIRIT AND POVERTY By Mitch Carter

Spirit and Poverty redefines the world. This website was designed to compliment the book Spirit and Poverty. It is about individuality, consciousness, world problems and world solutions, love, war, philosophy, and politics.

spiritandpoverty cover

PROLOGUE
About the Author
The Dirty People
Airwaves
With No Explanation
A Vow to My Heart
Our Love Will Range
I'd Rather Die Free
Something Went Wrong
He Set the World in Motion

SPIRIT AND POVERTY by Mitch Carter

THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION By Will And Ariel Durant

Go to the history section of any library, and you will see eleven huge volumes of The Story of Civilization. These books were written by Will and Ariel Durant. Unlike most history books, Will Durant’s books do not document the advance of civilization through wars, dates, and the rise and fall of nations. He documents the advancement of civilization through philosophers and their philosophies.

Art and political institutions, including the development of nations, were heavily influenced by philosophy. For instance, Thomas Jefferson and the American Revolution were influenced by the writings of the philosopher John Locke. Parts of the Declaration of Independence are verbatim from John Locke’s writings. John Locke in turn was influenced by the writings of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

For over a thousand years before Locke and Hobbes the church ruled under the paradigm of Plato’s philosophy that man is wicked and needs to be governed. The church and the monarchy ruled civilization by divine right. The advancement of art and science during the Renaissance challenged the church and royalty’s claim to divine right. Hobbes, in an effort to stop the democracies that were forming and causing revolutions, which he felt threatened the survival of mankind during the middle of the 17th century, wrote his thesis on the nature of man. He created a model of what natural man without laws or civilization would live like. Under his model man would be in a constant state of war without laws to govern him. It would lead to the inevitable destruction of man. Therefore, he reasoned, man gives up his right to govern himself at birth. His argument was that man has to abide by the laws of civilization, even if they or the ruler are tyrannical, because to do otherwise would be suicide.

Locke took up his argument and said, “If man gives his consent to be governed at birth, then that government’s duty is to protect the individual rights of each citizen. If these inalienable rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are not protected, then it is the duty of the individual to overthrow that government and replace it with a government that does protect his rights. Thus we had the American Revolution.
The Story of Civilization

THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY By Will Durant

The Story of Philosophy profiles 15 of the most notable philosophers in history. Will Durant begins with the Greek philosphers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy by far the most important philosopher through all of history was Spinoza. Spinoza’s philosophy overthrew the iron grip the church had on man by proving that salvation and redemption are an individual experience.

Spinoza had many insights in the book, but one that stands out is his pleasure/pain principle. All the philosophers were trying to figure out the right way to live. They all used pleasure to designate when one is living right and pain with living wrong. Spinoza defined pleasure and pain. He said pleasure is when the individual is going from a lesser to a greater. Pain is when an individual is going from a greater to a lesser. Spinoza grew up and lived in the Jewish section of Amsterdam in the mid 1600’s. He was excommunicated from the Jewish religion when he was 17 for criticizing Judaism in his writings. No one in the Jewish community was allowed to talk to him again. He lost his girlfriend, the only girl he ever loved, and he was never with another woman again. He died a virgin.

He spent his life alone in a small cottage studying and writing. He supported himself grinding opticals for telescopes. He became the most respected scholar of his times. He was a scientist, a mathematician, and a philosopher. After his excommunication he wrote more books criticizing Judaism fiercely. Then he turned on Christianity. He dissected the bible and traced its origins and pointed out its falseness and fallacies.

He praised the parables of Jesus and said "Jesus was the only man that ever lived who truly had the knowledge of God". Spinoza said to fight your enemy with love and not hate is more powerful. When you defeat your enemy with hate they resent you for a long time. If you defeat them with love they are beholding to you. After assailing Christianity and Judaism he turned his writing toward finding the right way to live.

Spinoza said Life is a force of energy that flows through all living things. He says through consciousness the individual has to strive to connect with this Life energy. He said when the individual is able to connect with this Life energy flowing through the world, it is nurturing, and makes him/her stronger, and he/she feels joy.

His writing went beyond the boundaries of any writing of his times and hasn’t been surpassed even in writing up to today. One of the last philosophers in Will Durants Story of Philosophy was Santayana in the 1950's. He said "In the end Spinoza was the only real philosopher."
Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers