Erich Fromm (1900 – 1980), was one of the four major influences on the development of my ideas in the early 1980s, as I set out to use my skills as an information systems architect to design a life-enhancing global economy that would give everyone on the planet the opportunity to realize their fullest potential as human beings before our inevitable demise. The others at that time were David Bohm, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Arthur Koestler.
By looking at business through the eyes of information systems architects, rather than through the financial models of economists, accountants, and bankers, such a Sharing Economy is theoretically possible. It would need to be developed in harmony with the fundamental law of the Universe, which Heraclitus aptly called the Hidden Harmony and I call the Principle of Unity or Cosmic Equation.
One of Fromm’s most important books was The Sane Society from 1956, as a successor to the wartime The Fear of Freedom, Escape from Freedom in the USA. The titles of the first two chapters are ‘Are we sane?’ and ‘Could a society be sick?’ Fromm answered them with a resounding ‘NO’ and ‘YES’, respectively. Humanity is thus suffering from a ‘pathology of normalcy’. As Fromm said:
The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
But what is this sickness that most are suffering from? Well, we first need to note that this is not a physical illness, but a psychospiritual disorder. As Fromm wrote in Man for Himself in 1947, we humans are the least instinctive of all the animals. Using the metaphor of a computer, very few of our thoughts and actions are hard-wired. The innate instincts and automatic reflexes of babies to suck, grasp, cry, and respond to stimuli mostly disappear within the first few months of life.
Our learning – corresponding to software and data in computers – mostly determines the way that we view the world and ourselves, and hence our behaviour. Our minds, stimulated by the Divine Power of Life, determine how we think and act, far more than our brains. To Fromm, therefore, life is an art, as Rainer Funk highlighted in one of his three biographies, as his literary executor. In Fromm’s words:
Not only medicine, engineering, and painting are arts; living itself is an art—in fact, the most important and at the same time the most difficult and complex art to be practiced by man. Its object is not this or that specialized performance, but the performance of living, the process of developing into that which one is potentially. In the art of living, man is both the artist and the object of his art; he is the sculptor and the marble; the physician and the patient.
However, I did not discover the essential nature of this sickness until 1992, when I bought two books in an esoteric bookshop in central Stockholm. In Mysticism, F. C. Happold tells us, “To Jew, Christian, and Moslem, a gulf is felt to exist between God and man, Creator and created, which can never be crossed. To assert that ‘Thou’ art ‘That’ [as esoteric Hindus do] sounds blasphemous”. And in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, Elaine Pagels points out, “Even the mystics of Jewish and Christian tradition who seek to find their identity in God often are careful to acknowledge the abyss that separates them from their divine Source.”
These observations changed my life, as I had found the root cause of conflict and suffering that I had been searching for since I was seven years of age. Humans have been fighting each other for millennia, suffering grievously as a consequence, because people have become experientially and cognitively separate from Divine Reality.
This is rather strange because no one can return Home to Wholeness – as the union of Wholeness and Oneness – for nobody has ever left Home. By transcending the categories, we can realize the Genuine Identity that we share with all other beings. Who we think we are is nothing in the illusory world of form. In Reality, we are not our bodies, minds, or souls.
So what name can we give this deep wound in the collective and cultural psyche? Well, is there any other word than schizophrenia ‘split mind’, from a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) base meaning ‘to cut’, also the root of science, through Latin scīre ‘to know’, in the sense that to know means ‘to separate one thing from another, to discern’.
So science in particular, and human learning in general, is more focused on analysis, separating things into parts, than synthesis, bringing them all together in Wholeness. This divisive approach to learning arises from a psychological sense of separation, a constricted sense of identity, which Fromm called alienation, from French aliéné ’mentally ill’.
As Fromm regarded life as an art, to heal science of schizophrenia, out of touch with Reality, we thus need to use our creative artistic abilities to turn analysis into synthesis. For art derives from Latin ars ‘skill, way, method’, from the PIE base *ar– ‘to fit together’, also the root of order and harmony.
But how can we heal our split souls? Well, in 1975 in his greatest masterpiece To Have or To Be? Fromm turned to the mystics, particularly Meister Eckhart and Shakyamuni Buddha, having focused on the works of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx during the early years of his psychosocial studies, begun with his Ph.D. thesis at the age of 22, titled ‘Jewish Law, A Contribution to the Sociology of Diaspora-Judaism’.
Specifically, he said that if we are to avoid psychological and economic catastrophe, we can do no better than be guided by the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, which Fromm likened to the four-step medical practice:
- Symptoms: We are suffering and are aware that we are.
- Cause: We recognize the origin of our ill-being.
- Cure: We recognize that there is a way to overcome our ill-being.
- Remedy: We accept that in order to overcome our ill-being we must follow certain norms for living and change our present practice of life.
This is something that many millions are seeking and practising today.
But Fromm went even further. Because of our fragmented, specialist minds, humanity is also suffering from delusion with a false conception of the Universe, as the Totality of Existence, as Spinoza also observed. So Fromm said that we also need a psychospiritual science of humanity if we are to bring about much-needed social reconstruction. However, he was uncertain of success, saying,
Whether such a change from the supremacy of natural science to a new social science will take place, nobody can tell. If it does, we might still have a chance for survival, but whether it will depends on one factor: how many brilliant, learned, disciplined, and caring men and women are attracted by the new challenge to the human mind.
Fromm went on to say that he saw only a two per cent chance of such a radical transformation in consciousness coming about, a goal that no business executive or politician would regard as worthwhile pursuing. Nevertheless, he went on to say, “If a sick person has even the barest chance of survival, no responsible physician will say, ‘Let’s give up the effort,’ or will use only palliatives. On the contrary, everything conceivable is done to save the sick person’s life. Certainly, a sick society cannot expect anything less.”
Integral Relational Logic (IRL), as the commonsensical art and science of intelligence and consciousness, is the framework for the humanistic science that Fromm called for. IRL also encapsulates the new type of thinking that is essential if humankind is to survive and move to higher levels, as Einstein said in 1946. He then went on to write, “Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars.”
The initial inspirations for this universal system of thought and reason were the relational model of data, which Ted Codd introduced in 1970, and a business modelling method that I learned about in 1980 in IBM. This had partially evolved from Jay W. Forrester’s Industrial Dynamics, also a predecessor to the computer modelling methods that the Club of Rome presented in 1972 in Limits to Growth.
However, Forrester famously told members of the U.S. Congress in 1970 that mental models developed by humans are inferior to computer models, where “uncertainty is totally eliminated …. Given a stated set of assumptions, the computer traces the resulting consequences without doubt or error.”
This is nonsense, of course, as many intuitively know. In contrast, tech billionaires are investing billions of dollars in building sprawling, energy-hungry data centres to promote products with so-called artificial intelligence (AI). So, could the art and science of humanity help to bring some sanity to the world? recognizing that we humans have a potential for the awakening of intelligence far in excess of machines, which can never originate novelty.
Well, this could happen by ‘Catalysing the emergence of a human revolution’, which is the slogan of The Fifth Element, which is a communications channel for the Club of Rome, seeking “to ask new questions about the crises humanity is facing”.
Fromm began his own questioning at the age of 18, having just lived through the horrors of the First World War. As he tells us in Beyond the Chains of Illusion, he “was obsessed by the question of how war was possible, by the wish to understand the irrationality of human mass behavior, by a passionate desire for peace and international understanding”. As a ‘deeply troubled young man’, he “had become deeply suspicious of all official ideologies and declarations, and filled with the conviction ‘of all one must doubt’,” not unlike Descartes.
Inspired by his studies of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud as a child, and his understanding that human behaviour is not ‘hard-wired’, Fromm later said in You Shall Be as Gods that freedom begins with the freedom to disobey—to say ‘no’. By viewing the human condition in its historical context, Fromm wrote,
Only by going through the process of alienation can man overcome it and achieve a new harmony. This new harmony, the new oneness with man and nature, is called in the prophetic and rabbinic literature “the end of the days,” or “the messianic time.” It is not a state predetermined by God or the stars; it will not happen except through man’s own effort. The messianic time is the historical answer to the existence of man. He can destroy himself or advance toward the realization of the new harmony. Messianism is not accidental to man’s existence but the inherent, logical answer to it—the alternative to man’s self-destruction.
In this regard, Fromm made a clear distinction between priests and prophets, who speak directly from God, in contrast to priests, who claim to speak the word of God, but actually widen the split between humanity and Divinity. For Yehuda Berg tells us that the Zohar, the primary Kabbalistic text, “warned that the ‘governing religious authority’ would always try to prevent the people from claiming the spiritual power that was rightly theirs.” Such authorities would “act as an intermediary between man and the divine”. For if they allowed people to “connect directly to the infinite, boundless Light of Creation” that “would mean their demise as gatekeepers to heaven”.
The first step in such an awakening of superintelligence is to say an emphatic ‘NO’ to conflict-ridden, either-or systems of thought, which inevitably lead to war and suffering. In contrast, when we live in harmony with the fundamental law of the Universe, as the Principle of Unity, we know that Love is the Divine Essence we all share, in keeping with Fromm’s most popular book The Art of Loving.
Such a liberating experience is revelatory or apocalyptic, for apocalypse derives from Greek apokalupsis, from apokaluptein ‘to uncover’ or ‘to reveal’, from the prefix apo ‘from, away’ and kaluptra ‘veil’. So, apocalypse literally means ‘drawing the veil away from’, indicating the disclosure of something hidden from the mass of humanity, with a one-sided view of life, based on ego-, ethno-, and anthropocentric identities. Rather, when we live in union with the Divine, we can say, with John of Patmos in Revelation, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.”