Letter 2025 #6: Alienation and Tyranny are Unnatural
Beauty outside is beauty within you
Dear Friend
We shall see in due course, as determined by karmic law, what the consequences of all the changes are that are coming out of the new presidency this year in the USA. Whatever one’s perspective, there is surely no argument that much change is taking place, and at a giddying pace too!
I am personally super optimistic about the course of our world for the first time in all my life (with the caveat that personally speaking I’m an optimistic person in my own life). I’ve been closely following the geo-political scene since the mid-1990s, while exploring and learning about the human condition, while spiritually evolving all this time, and I feel a huge dark cloud that has been hanging over our whole humankind has lifted.
While there may yet be many perils, now—and I mean RIGHT NOW!—there are so many opportunities to live a great life, according to our own skills and dreams, and by following our own purpose and doing so with passion and positive energy. And be sure about it, when we make positive changes to our own life, we are contributing to the positive evolution of all our world.
For me, in very simple terms, there are two things for us (all of humanity) to realise when looking at the bigger picture today:
we are still truly in big trouble as a species, with evidence of this in abundance across all areas of human endeavour: in a nutshell we have perverted our intelligence, living with our finger on the self-destruct button
the only true solution is A Spiritual Revolution: the inquiry into, and transformation of, the human being’s inner world, which is urgently needed to counteract the effects of the rapidly developing Digital Revolution that is rapidly advancing technology in the external world; we need our soul to make us whole, we need to understand our own mind, body, soul and consciousness to ensure the Digital Revolution does not destroy us in this new Information Age, but rather liberates us from decades or centuries of being suppressed from living out our dreams and fulfilling our unique purpose in life with passion.
We should also realise there is always a time lag between action and reaction, cause and its effect. When we get a cold, we have not fallen ill, we were ill; now we are healing. The cold is the human body’s natural intelligence detoxifying itself of all the rubbish and poison we’ve put into our body and mind. When we thought we were healthy, we were accumulating illness, when we think we are falling ill we are actually in healing mode.
So it is with the whole world as a single entity/organism, and the same for the whole of humanity as a single entity/organism. With this in mind, let’s turn to our extract for this week’s Letter, and it comes from Erich Fromm, in his brilliant book The Sane Society, published in 1955. So, take note, his words were written seven decades before now… don’t be thinking our troubles only started in the last generation or so!
I am quoting from the penultimate chapter called Roads to Sanity, in which he spends the final quarter of the book outlining how we can solve our collective problems which he had explored, analysed and articulated during the preceding portion of the book. Fromm is one of the very top psychoanalysts of the 20th century.
Furthermore, this is the second of his seminal books of the time; it followed the one he published in 1941, called Escape From Freedom, which is described like this on Amazon:
“If humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism. This is the central idea of Escape from Freedom, a landmark work by one of the most distinguished thinkers of our time, and a book that is as timely now as when first published in 1941.”
He then wrote The Sane Society over a decade later. (Sadly I lost the first book when I broke my own rule by lending out one of my books, and, naturally enough, it never came back to me and I have no idea who I lent it to!)
The Sane Society by Erich Fromm
Pre-Reading Task
If you keep going back, looking for the causes of symptoms, the causes of what we see today, further and further back until you reach THE single root cause of all humankind’s troubles, what do you think this mother of all causes is?!
When you’ve had a think, read the extract and then do the task after it.
Reading Task
As you read the extract, consider how prescient Fromm’s analysis was the best part of a century ago.
The bold parts are my emphasis.
“In the various critical analyses of Capitalism we find remarkable agreement. While it is true that the Capitalism of the 19th century was criticised for its neglect of the material welfare of the workers, this was never the main criticism. What Owen and Proudhon, Tolstoy and Bakunin, Durkheim and Marx, Einstein and Schweitzer talk about is man, and what happens to him in our industrial system. Although they express it in different concepts, they all find that man has lost his central place, that he has been made an instrument for the purposes of economic aims, that he has been estranged from, and has lost the concrete relatedness to, his fellow men and to nature, that he has ceased to have a meaningful life. I have tried to express the same idea by elaborating on the concept of alienation and by showing psychologically what the psychological results of alienation are; that man regresses to a receptive and marketing orientation and ceases to be productive; that he loses his sense of self, becomes dependent on approval, hence tends to conform and yet to feel insecure; he is dissatisfied, bored, and anxious, and spends most of his energy in the attempt to compensate for or just to cover up this anxiety. His intelligence is excellent, his reason deteriorates and in view of his technical powers he is seriously endangering the existence of civilisation, and even of the human race.
If we turn to views about the causes for this development, we find less agreement than in the diagnosis of the illness itself. While the early 19th century was still prone to see the causes of all evil in the lack of political freedom, and especially of universal suffrage, the socialists, and especially the Marxists stressed the significance of economic factors. They believe that the alienation of man resulted from his role as an object of exploitation and use. Thinkers like Tolstoy and Burckhardt on the other hand, stressed the spiritual and moral impoverishment as the cause of Western man's decay; Freud believed that modern man's trouble was the over-repression of his instinctual drives and the resulting neurotic manifestations. But any explanation which analyses one sector to the exclusion of others is unbalanced, and thus wrong. The socio-economic, spiritual and psychological explanations look at the same phenomenon from different aspects, and the very task of a theoretical analysis is to see how these different aspects are interrelated, and how they interact.
What holds true for the causes holds, of course, true for the remedies by which modern man's defect can be cured. If I believe that ‘the’ cause of the illness is economic, or spiritual, or psychological, I necessarily believe that remedying ‘the’ cause leads to sanity. On the other hand, if I see how the various aspects are interrelated, I shall arrive at the conclusion that sanity and mental health can be attained only by simultaneous changes in the sphere of industrial and political organisation, of spiritual and philosophical orientation, of character structure, and cultural activities. The concentration of effort in any of these spheres, to the exclusion and neglect of others, is destructive of all change.”
Post-Reading Task
I think the word Fromm uses a lot, alienation—which he describes that man “has been estranged from, and has lost the concrete relatedness to, his fellow men and to nature, that he has ceased to have a meaningful life”—sums up the mother of all causes for all our troubles in the world, both in our own lives and humanity as a collective whole. Would you agree or disagree with me? Think about your own understandings of, and experiences in, life to help you clarify your own thinking.
How related are you in your relationships with others, and with nature? Is there room for improvement? To the extent that you may feel lonely, disconnected and unhappy in this life of yours, do you now feel, upon reflection, that this is an unnatural state to be in?
In my second bit of bolded text of the first paragraph, Fromm describes some of the consequences of this alienation, namely that: man becomes a consumer and stops being a producer or creator; man loses understanding of who he is; and out of this he depends on others for approval and validation, thereby putting himself at the mercy of others, leading to his insecurity, leading to unhappiness, apathy and anxiety. From your perspective of and vantage point in life, what do you think of what Fromm is saying here? Does it ring true for you to some extent? For those around you? In general within all of humankind?
What is the practical solution to this alienation?
My commentary on the extract
Fromm says our alienation is a case of us having lost our connection; we have become disconnected. We can clearly infer that we previously had connection and were not alienated; that such a connection is natural, while the feeling of alienation arises from an unnatural approach to, and relationship with, life.
I have taken it to be true for ages that the mother of all our problems, the root cause of all our troubles and conflicts, is an erroneous ‘understanding’ in our psyche—meaning in our subconscious mind and therefore hidden from us, without our awareness of—we are living as separate beings. We ‘feel’ separated from others, from the world itself, and so we inevitably suffer much loneliness and unhappiness as a result. Nature’s laws tell anybody inquiring into them that everything is actually interconnected. Therefore, even though we are interconnected with each other and with the whole web of life and the whole universe beyond, we ‘believe’ that we are separate beings, and we believe that human beings are separate from the rest of the world’s web of life.
As Fromm shows, this is not natural, and therefore we are not living naturally, and therefore we are likely to be in an almost perpetual state of stress. We are not aligned with our true nature. Our beliefs (coming from education and media), even though subconsciously held, are detrimental to us and our wellbeing. This would easily explain why there is so much sickness, angst and emptiness in the bodies, minds and souls of human beings everywhere.
It also tells us why we have the term RIP - rest in peace, which we say to those who have now died. Why can’t we have LIP - live in peace?? Because we don’t understand who we naturally are and so cannot find inner peace in our life!!!
This to me is the core of it all: we don’t know who we are, therefore we don’t understand how life works, therefore we hold a ‘wrong relationship’ with life.
In the second paragraph of the extract, we hear of various causes for this alienation and wrong relationship:
lack of political freedom
economically exploited
spiritually and morally bankrupt
repressing our instincts.
Fromm touches upon it in the third paragraph, but he laments that over many centuries man has tried to fix things by focussing on one or another cause, when in fact we need to simultaneously address all causes. This is another one of my core messages in my own book, that we must elevate our soul to make us whole, to overcome this alienation that society pushes onto all of us. We are holistic beings, with five dimensions to our life - do you remember what they are?! We have our body, our ego-mind (subconscious and conditioned), our intelligence-mind (conscious and free), our soul, and the external world within our overall entity of who we truly are.
Next week I will bring you the next bit of Fromm’s writing, which looks into this in more detail.
Either way, and pertaining to question 4 in the post-reading task, the practical solution is to become aware of our stressors and our conflicts within our own life, to realise that we hold onto a gigantic misunderstanding, and to then heal ourselves by paying attention to all dimensions of our being.
Summing that up: become aware of the problem, learn about the root causes, take action to heal.
When you know who you are, you don’t need to seek approval of, or validation from, others; you have validation from your divine mother and father: Earth and the universe. They birthed you, they invited you to have a life, so make them happy and you will be happy!
Only those who are conflicted within will have conflicts with others.
That pretty much means everybody, until at the individual level we consciously remove this stupid idea that we are separate from everything and everybody else (and related to this, the arrogant idea that we are more powerful, more intelligent and more important than the natural world).
That needs a full reappraisal and relearning and reconstruction of our life, and that means a second education, and that means A Spiritual Revolution!
There is, quite literally, no time like the present. 2025 is the year for transformation and healing, and at a worldwide level, I believe this healing process began in 2020 when the human world went into meltdown and locked itself up. That for me was the height of our insanity that Fromm warned us of all those decades ago. That was humankind plumbing the depths of our despair and ignorance. Now we are rising like phoenixes from the ashes in rapidly increasing numbers. Make sure you do your own healing, and thus on board with the mission of healing all humankind.
Interestingly that whole pandemic (plannedemic) just so happened to take place at the outset of the year 2020, and 2020 has the meaning of optimal vision, clear and full sight and vision…
Enjoy your weekend and week, enjoy the show, and enjoy manifesting yourself and your dreams and your potential. Stop hiding your best, stop hiding yourself, and burst forth with song and passion!!!
Till next week.
Philip
