Sat Mar 23, 2024 11:33 pm by globalturbo
The Illuminati as a Necrophilous Mindset
Posted on February 19, 2016 by Deus Nexus
Erich Seligmann Fromm was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. Fromm was born in 1900, at Frankfurt am Main, the child of Orthodox Jewish parents. After the Nazi takeover in Germany, Fromm moved first to Geneva and then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York.
CREATORS AND DESTROYERS
By Erich Fromm | Source
First published in The Saturday Review, New York (04. January 1964)
People are aware of the possibility of nuclear war; they are aware of the destruction such a war could bring with it – and yet they seemingly make no effort to avoid it. Most of us are puzzled by this behavior because we start out from the premise that people love life and fear death. Perhaps we should be less puzzled if we questioned this premise. Maybe there are many people who are indifferent to life and many others who do not love life but who do love death.
There is an orientation which we may call love of life (biophilia); it is the normal orientation among healthy persons. But there is also to be found in others a deep attraction to death which, following Unamuno’s classic speech made at the University of Salamanca (1938), I call necrophilia. It is the attitude which a Franco general, Millán Astray, expressed in the slogan “Long live death, thus provoking Unamuno’s protest against this “necrophilous and senseless cry.“
Who is a necrophilous person?
He is one who is attracted to and fascinated by all that is not alive, to all that is dead; to corpses, to decay, to feces, to dirt. Necrophiles are those people who love to talk about sickness, burials, death. They come to life precisely when they can talk about death. A clear example of the pure necrophilous type was Hitler. He was fascinated by destruction, and the smell of death was sweet to him. While in the years of success it may have appeared that he wanted only to destroy those whom he considered his enemies, the days of the Götterdämmerung at the end showed that his deepest satisfaction lay in witnessing total and absolute destruction: that of the German people, of those around him, and of himself.
The necrophilous dwell in the past, never in the future. Their feelings are essentially sentimental; that is, they nurse the memory of feelings which they had yesterday – or believe that they had. They are cold, distant, devotees of “law and order.“ Their values are precisely the reverse of the values we connect with normal life; not life, but death excites and satisfies them.
If one wants to understand the influence of men like Hitler and Stalin, it lies precisely in their unlimited capacity and willingness to kill. For this they’ were loved by the necrophiles. Of the rest, many were afraid of them and so preferred to admire, rather than to be aware of, their fear. Many others did not sense the necrophilous quality of these leaders and saw in them the builders, saviors, good fathers. If the necrophilous leaders had not pretended that they were builders and protectors, the number of people attracted to them would hardly have been sufficient to help them seize power, and the number of those repelled by them would probably soon have led to their downfall.
While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional manner, the necrophilous principle is all that which does not grow, that which is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things. All living processes, feelings, and thoughts are transformed into things. Memory, rather than experience – having, rather than being – are what counts. The necrophilous person can relate to an object – a flower or a person – only if he possesses it; hence, a threat to his possession is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses contact with the world. That is why we find the paradoxical reaction that he would rather lose life than possession, even though, by losing life, he who possesses has ceased to exist. He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life. He is deeply afraid of life, because it is disorderly and uncontrollable by its very nature. The woman who wrongly claims to be the mother of the child in the story of Solomon’s judgment is typical of this tendency; she would rather have a properly divided dead child than lose a living one. To the necrophilous person justice means correct division, and they are willing to kill or die for the sake of what they call, justice. “Law and order“ for them are idols, and everything that threatens law and order is felt as a satanic attack against their supreme values.
The necrophilous person is attracted to darkness and night. In mythology and poetry (as well as in dreams) he is attracted to caves, or to the depth of the ocean, or depicted as being blind. (The trolls in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt are a good example.) All that is away from or directed against life attracts him. He wants to return to the darkness {23} of the womb, to the past of inorganic or subhuman existence. He is essentially oriented to the past, not to the future, which he hates and fears. Related to this is his craving for certainty. But life is never certain, never predictable, never controllable; in order to make life controllable, it must be transformed into death; death, indeed, is the only thing about life that is certain to him.
The necrophilous person can often be recognized by his looks and his gestures. He is cold, his skin looks dead, and often he has an expression on his face as though he were smelling a bad odor. (This expression could be clearly seen in Hitler’s face.) He is orderly and obsessive. This aspect of the necrophilous person has been demonstrated to the world in the figure of Eichmann. Eichmann was fascinated by order and death. His supreme values were obedience and the proper functioning of the organization. He transported Jews as he would have transported coal. That they were human beings was hardly within the field of his vision; hence, even the problem of his having hated or not hated his victims is irrelevant. He was the perfect bureaucrat who had transformed all life into the administration of things.
But examples of the necrophilous character are by no means to be found only among the inquisitors, the Hitlers and the Eichmanns. There are any number of individuals who do not have the opportunity and the power to kill, vet whose necrophilia expresses itself in other and (superficially seen) more harmless ways. An example is the mother who will always be interested in her child’s sickness, in his failures, in dark prognoses for the future; at the same time she will not be impressed by a favorable change nor respond to her child’s joy, nor will she notice anything new that is growing within him. We might find that her dreams deal with sickness, death, corpses, blood. She does not harm the child in any obvious way, yet she may slowly strangle the child’s joy of life, his faith – in growth, and eventually infect him with her own necrophilous orientation.
My description may have given the impression that all the features mentioned here are necessarily found in the necrophilous person. It is true that such divergent features as the wish to kill, the worship of force, the attraction to death and dirt, sadism, the wish to transform the organic into the inorganic through “order“ are all part of the same basic orientation. Yet so far as individuals are concerned, there are considerable differences with respect to the strength of these respective trends. Any one of the features mentioned here may be more pronounced in one person than in another. Furthermore, the degree to which a person is necrophilous in comparison with his biophilous aspects and the degree to which a person is aware of necrophilous tendencies and rationalizes them vary considerably from person to person.
Yet the concept of the necrophilous type is by no means an abstraction or summary of various disparate behavior trends. v The necrophilous person, if he dares to be aware of what he feels, expresses the motto of his life when he says: “Long live death!“
The opposite of the necrophilous orientation is the biophilous one; its essence is love of life in contrast to love of death. Like necrophilia, biophilia is not constituted by a single trait but represents a total orientation, an entire way of being. It is manifested in a person’s bodily processes, in his emotions, in his thoughts, in his gestures; the biophilous orientation expresses itself in the whole man.
The person who fully loves life is attracted by the process of life in all spheres. He prefers to construct, rather than to retain. He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new to the security of finding the old confirmed. He loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty. His approach to life is functional rather than mechanical. He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations. He wants to mold and to influence by love, by reason, by his example – not by force, by cutting things apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things. He enjoys life and all its manifestations, rather than mere excitement.
Biophilic ethics has its own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life (this is the main thesis of Albert Schweitzer, one of the great representatives of the love of life – both in his writings and in his person), and all that enhances life. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, {24} cuts it into pieces. Thus it is from the standpoint of lifeethics that the Bible mentions as the central sin of the Hebrews: “Because thou didst not serve thy Lord with joy and gladness of heart in the abundance of all things.“
The conscience of the biophilous person is not one of forcing oneself to refrain from evil and to do good. It is not the superego described by .Freud, a strict taskmaster employing sadism against oneself for the sake of virtue. The biophilous conscience is motivated by its attraction to life and joy; the moral effort consists in strengthening the life-loving side in oneself. For this reasons the biophile does not dwell in remorse and guilt, which are, after all, only aspects of selfloathing and sadness. He turns quickly to life and attempts to do good.
Spinoza’s Ethics is a striking example of biophilic morality. “Pleasure,“ he says, “in itself is not bad but good; contrariwise, pain in itself is bad.“ And in the same spirit: “A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.“ Love of life underlies the various versions of humanistic philosophy. In various conceptual forms these philosophies are in the same vein as Spinoza’s; they express the principle that the same man loves life; that man’s aim in life is to be attracted by all that is alive and to separate himself from all that is dead and mechanical.
The dichotomy of biophilia-necrophilia is the same as Freud’s life-and-death instinct. I believe, as Freud did, that this is the most fundamental polarity that exists. However, there is one important difference. Freud assumes that the striving toward death and toward life are two biologically given tendencies inherent in all living substance that their respective strengths are relatively constant, and that there is only one alternative within the operation of the death instinct – namely, that it can be directed against the outside world or against oneself. In contrast to these assumptions I believe that necrophilia is not a normal biological tendency, but a pathological phenomenon – in fact, the most malignant pathology that exists in mail.
What are we, the people of the United States today, with respect to necrophilia and biophilia? Undoubtedly our spiritual tradition is one of love of life. And not only this. Was there ever a culture with more love of “fun“ and excitement, or with greater opportunities for the majority to enjoy fun and excitement? But even if this is so, fun and excitement is not the same as joy and love of life; perhaps underneath there is indifference to life, or attraction to death?
To answer this question we must consider the nature of our bureaucratized, industrial, mass civilization. Our approach to life becomes increasingly mechanical. The aim of social efforts is to produce things, and. in the process of idolatry of things we transform ourselves into commodities. The question here is not whether they are treated nicely and are well fed (things, too, can be treated nicely); the question is whether people are things or living beings.
People love mechanical gadgets more than living beings. The approach to man is intellectual-abstract. One is interested in people as objects, in their common properties, in the statistical rules of mass behavior, not in living individuals. All this goes together with the increasing role of bureaucratic methods. In giant centers of production, giant cities, giant countries, men are administered as if they were things; men and their administrators are transformed into things, and they obey the law of things. In a bureaucratically organized and centralized industrialism, men’s tastes are manipulated so that they consume maximally and in predictable and profitable directions. Their intelligence and character become standardized by the ever-increasing use of tests, which select the mediocre and unadventurous over the original and daring.
Indeed, the bureaucratic-industrial civilization that has been victorious in Europe and North America has created a new type of man. He has been described as the “organization man“ and as homo consumens. He is in addition the homo mechanicus. By this I mean a “gadget man,“ deeply attracted to all that is mechanical and inclined against all that is alive. It is, of course, true that man’s biological and physiological equipment provides him with such strong sexual impulses that even the homo mechanicus still has sexual desires and looks for women. But there is no doubt that the gadget man’s interest in women is diminishing. A New Yorker cartoon pointed to this very amusingly: a sales girl trying to sell a certain brand of perfume to a young female customer recommends it by remarking, “It smells like a new sports car.“
Indeed, any observer of men’s behavior today will confirm that this cartoon is more than a clever joke. There are apparently a great number of men who are more interested in sports-cars, television and radio sets, space travel, and any number of gadgets than they are in women, love, nature, food; who are more stimulated by the manipulation of non-organic, mechanical things than by life. Their attitude toward a woman is like that toward a car: you push the button and watch it race. It is not even too far-fetched to assume that homo mechanicus has more pride in and is more fascinated by, devices that can kill millions of ,people across a distance of several thousands of miles within minutes than he is frightened and depressed by the possibility of such mass destruction.
Homo mechanicus still likes sex {25} and drink. But all these pleasures are sought for in the frame of reference of the mechanical and the unalive. He expects that there must be a button which, if pushed, brings happiness, love, pleasure. (Many go to a psychoanalyst under the illusion that he can teach them to find the button.) The homo mechanicus becomes more and more interested in the manipulation of machines, rather than in the participation in and response to life. Hence he becomes indifferent to life, fascinated by the mechanical, and eventually attracted by death and total destruction. This affinity between the love of destruction and the love of the mechanical may well have been expressed for the first time in Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909). “A roaring motor-car, which looks as though running on a shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. … We wish to glorify war – the only health-giver of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that kill the contempt for woman.“
Briefly then, intellectualization, quantification, abstractification, bureaucratization, and reification – the very characteristics of modern industrial society – when applied to people rather than to things are not the principles of life but those of mechanics. People living in such a system must necessarily become indifferent to life, even attracted to death. They are not aware of this. They take the thrills of excitement for the joys of life and live under the illusion that they are very much alive when they only have many things to own and to use. The lack of protest against nuclear war and the discussion of our “atomologists“ of the balance sheet of total or half-total destruction show how far we have already gone into the “valley of the shadow of death. 2
To speak of the necrophilous quality of our industrial civilization does not imply that industrial production as such is necessarily contrary to the principles of life. The question is whether the principles of social organization and of life are subordinated to those of mechanization, or whether the principles of life are the dominant ones. Obviously, the industrialized world has not found thus far an answer, to the question posed here: How is it possible to create a humanist industrialism as against the bureaucratic mass industrialism that rules our lives today?
The danger of nuclear war is so grave that man may arrive at a new barbarism before he has even a chance to find the road to a humanist industrialism. Yet not all hope is lost; hence we might ask ourselves whether the hypothesis developed here could in any way contribute to finding peaceful solutions. I believe it might be useful in several ways. First of all, an awareness of our pathological situation, while not yet a cure, is nevertheless a first step. If more people became aware of the difference between love of life and love of death, if they became aware that they themselves are already far gone in the direction of indifference or of necrophilia, this shock alone could produce new and healthy reactions.
Furthermore, the sensitivity toward those who recommend death might be increased. Many might see through the pious rationalizations of the death lovers and change their admiration for them to disgust. Beyond this, our hypothesis would suggest one thing to those concerned with peace and survival: that every effort must be made to weaken the attraction of death and to strengthen the attraction of life. Why not declare that there is only one truly dangerous subversion, the subversion of life? Why do not those who represent the traditions of religion and humanism speak up and say that there is no deadlier sin than love for death and contempt for life? Why not encourage our best brains – scientists, artists, educators – to make suggestions on how to arouse and stimulate love for life as opposed to love for gadgets? I know love for gadgets brings profits to the corporations, while love for life requires fewer things and hence is less profitable. Maybe it is too late. Maybe the neutron bomb, which leaves entire cities intact, but without life, is to be the symbol of our civilization. But again, those of us who love life will not cease the struggle against necrophilia.
2 I suggest an empirical program of research: 1) construct a good depth questionnaire that permits the differentiation of the necrophilic from the biophilic orientation; 2 ) apply this questionnaire to a stratified sample of the population of the United States; 3) find out what the percentage of both main orientations and the most important mixtures between them are; 4) correlate the psychological orientation with political attitudes especially those to war and peace, to find out whether the thesis presented here is corroborated by the statistical evidence; 5) study the correlations between the necrophilic and biophilic orientations with other factors like education, social status, philosophy of life, etc., in order to see which actors seem to have a causal relation to the two orientations, respectively; 6) form pilot groups and study which conditions and changes lead to a change in orientation.
Thanks to: https://deusnexus.wordpress.com
Posted on February 19, 2016 by Deus Nexus
Forward by Deus Nexus:
Erich Fromm theorized that humanity is divided along a psychological polarity, between what he called necrophilous persons (those that love darkness and death) and biophilous persons (those who love Life). As a Jew escaping Nazi Germany, Fromm was no doubt influenced by the horrors he might have witnessed during World War II.
It’s not difficult to understand why Fromm’s theories have fallen out of favor in the modern psychological world, or why most of us have never heard of him before. Although his ideas may seem dated and somewhat oversimplified, Erich Fromm’s theories are extremely relevant to the world we live in today, because the psychopaths who run our world have insulated themselves from detection, and created a culture where the recognition of such evil no longer exists.
No doubt, Erich Fromm would have had a great deal in common with J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, as Fromm’s descriptions of the necrophilous person mirrors the dark mechanical mindset of Tolkien’s Dark Lord Sauron and his army of loyal minions, whereas Tolkien’s Hobbits and Elves represent the simple joys of life and a great love of the natural world.
“The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things.”“The necrophilous person can relate to an object – a flower or a person – only if he possesses it; hence, a threat to his possession is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses contact with the world.”“Necrophilia constitutes a fundamental orientation; it is the one answer to life that is in complete opposition to life; it is the most morbid and the most dangerous among the orientations to life of which man is capable. It is true perversion; while living, not life but death is loved–not growth, but destruction.”
These quotes are taken from the article below, written by Erich Fromm, published in the Saturday Review in 1964.
To understand the necrophilous mindset is to understand the illuminati, a psychological mindset that works in complete opposition to the rest of humanity, and thus is almost unfathomable to so many who are still asleep.
This necrophilous mindset transcends the label of stereotypical satanism. It extends to our corporate and consumer-based culture, to our materialism, to our rampant ecological destruction, to our reductionist and mechanism-based science, to our destructive and inorganic food systems, our poisonous medical practices, to our authoritarian education system, not to mention the sensory worship of torture and death that is ever-present in our mainstream media. Is this the illuminati’s goal, to completely transform the world to a necrophilous orientation? Will humanity simply sleep walk into their nightmare?
A biophilous love of life, no matter how dormant, is still a tremendous spiritual force deep within the psychological makeup of the rest of the world.
About Erich Fromm
Fromm’s writings were notable as much for their social and political commentary as for their philosophical and psychological underpinnings.
Fromm believed that freedom was a fundamental aspect of human nature. He observed that embracing our freedom of will was healthy, whereas escaping freedom through the use of escape mechanisms was the root of psychological conflicts. Authoritarianism is giving control of oneself to another. By submitting one’s freedom to someone else, this act removes the freedom of choice almost entirely. Lastly, destructiveness is any process which attempts to eliminate others or the world as a whole, all to escape freedom. Fromm said that “the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it”.
The word “biophilia’ was frequently used by Fromm as a description of a productive psychological orientation and “state of being”. For example, in an addendum to his book The Heart of Man: Its Genius For Good and Evil, Fromm wrote as part of his famous Humanist Credo:
“I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom.”
The concept of biophilia was used by Fromm as an inverse to necrophilia, the love of darkness, death, and corruption.
By Erich Fromm | Source
First published in The Saturday Review, New York (04. January 1964)
People are aware of the possibility of nuclear war; they are aware of the destruction such a war could bring with it – and yet they seemingly make no effort to avoid it. Most of us are puzzled by this behavior because we start out from the premise that people love life and fear death. Perhaps we should be less puzzled if we questioned this premise. Maybe there are many people who are indifferent to life and many others who do not love life but who do love death.
There is an orientation which we may call love of life (biophilia); it is the normal orientation among healthy persons. But there is also to be found in others a deep attraction to death which, following Unamuno’s classic speech made at the University of Salamanca (1938), I call necrophilia. It is the attitude which a Franco general, Millán Astray, expressed in the slogan “Long live death, thus provoking Unamuno’s protest against this “necrophilous and senseless cry.“
Who is a necrophilous person?
He is one who is attracted to and fascinated by all that is not alive, to all that is dead; to corpses, to decay, to feces, to dirt. Necrophiles are those people who love to talk about sickness, burials, death. They come to life precisely when they can talk about death. A clear example of the pure necrophilous type was Hitler. He was fascinated by destruction, and the smell of death was sweet to him. While in the years of success it may have appeared that he wanted only to destroy those whom he considered his enemies, the days of the Götterdämmerung at the end showed that his deepest satisfaction lay in witnessing total and absolute destruction: that of the German people, of those around him, and of himself.
The necrophilous dwell in the past, never in the future. Their feelings are essentially sentimental; that is, they nurse the memory of feelings which they had yesterday – or believe that they had. They are cold, distant, devotees of “law and order.“ Their values are precisely the reverse of the values we connect with normal life; not life, but death excites and satisfies them.
If one wants to understand the influence of men like Hitler and Stalin, it lies precisely in their unlimited capacity and willingness to kill. For this they’ were loved by the necrophiles. Of the rest, many were afraid of them and so preferred to admire, rather than to be aware of, their fear. Many others did not sense the necrophilous quality of these leaders and saw in them the builders, saviors, good fathers. If the necrophilous leaders had not pretended that they were builders and protectors, the number of people attracted to them would hardly have been sufficient to help them seize power, and the number of those repelled by them would probably soon have led to their downfall.
While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional manner, the necrophilous principle is all that which does not grow, that which is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things. All living processes, feelings, and thoughts are transformed into things. Memory, rather than experience – having, rather than being – are what counts. The necrophilous person can relate to an object – a flower or a person – only if he possesses it; hence, a threat to his possession is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses contact with the world. That is why we find the paradoxical reaction that he would rather lose life than possession, even though, by losing life, he who possesses has ceased to exist. He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life. He is deeply afraid of life, because it is disorderly and uncontrollable by its very nature. The woman who wrongly claims to be the mother of the child in the story of Solomon’s judgment is typical of this tendency; she would rather have a properly divided dead child than lose a living one. To the necrophilous person justice means correct division, and they are willing to kill or die for the sake of what they call, justice. “Law and order“ for them are idols, and everything that threatens law and order is felt as a satanic attack against their supreme values.
The necrophilous person is attracted to darkness and night. In mythology and poetry (as well as in dreams) he is attracted to caves, or to the depth of the ocean, or depicted as being blind. (The trolls in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt are a good example.) All that is away from or directed against life attracts him. He wants to return to the darkness {23} of the womb, to the past of inorganic or subhuman existence. He is essentially oriented to the past, not to the future, which he hates and fears. Related to this is his craving for certainty. But life is never certain, never predictable, never controllable; in order to make life controllable, it must be transformed into death; death, indeed, is the only thing about life that is certain to him.
The necrophilous person can often be recognized by his looks and his gestures. He is cold, his skin looks dead, and often he has an expression on his face as though he were smelling a bad odor. (This expression could be clearly seen in Hitler’s face.) He is orderly and obsessive. This aspect of the necrophilous person has been demonstrated to the world in the figure of Eichmann. Eichmann was fascinated by order and death. His supreme values were obedience and the proper functioning of the organization. He transported Jews as he would have transported coal. That they were human beings was hardly within the field of his vision; hence, even the problem of his having hated or not hated his victims is irrelevant. He was the perfect bureaucrat who had transformed all life into the administration of things.
But examples of the necrophilous character are by no means to be found only among the inquisitors, the Hitlers and the Eichmanns. There are any number of individuals who do not have the opportunity and the power to kill, vet whose necrophilia expresses itself in other and (superficially seen) more harmless ways. An example is the mother who will always be interested in her child’s sickness, in his failures, in dark prognoses for the future; at the same time she will not be impressed by a favorable change nor respond to her child’s joy, nor will she notice anything new that is growing within him. We might find that her dreams deal with sickness, death, corpses, blood. She does not harm the child in any obvious way, yet she may slowly strangle the child’s joy of life, his faith – in growth, and eventually infect him with her own necrophilous orientation.
My description may have given the impression that all the features mentioned here are necessarily found in the necrophilous person. It is true that such divergent features as the wish to kill, the worship of force, the attraction to death and dirt, sadism, the wish to transform the organic into the inorganic through “order“ are all part of the same basic orientation. Yet so far as individuals are concerned, there are considerable differences with respect to the strength of these respective trends. Any one of the features mentioned here may be more pronounced in one person than in another. Furthermore, the degree to which a person is necrophilous in comparison with his biophilous aspects and the degree to which a person is aware of necrophilous tendencies and rationalizes them vary considerably from person to person.
Yet the concept of the necrophilous type is by no means an abstraction or summary of various disparate behavior trends. v The necrophilous person, if he dares to be aware of what he feels, expresses the motto of his life when he says: “Long live death!“
The opposite of the necrophilous orientation is the biophilous one; its essence is love of life in contrast to love of death. Like necrophilia, biophilia is not constituted by a single trait but represents a total orientation, an entire way of being. It is manifested in a person’s bodily processes, in his emotions, in his thoughts, in his gestures; the biophilous orientation expresses itself in the whole man.
The person who fully loves life is attracted by the process of life in all spheres. He prefers to construct, rather than to retain. He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new to the security of finding the old confirmed. He loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty. His approach to life is functional rather than mechanical. He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations. He wants to mold and to influence by love, by reason, by his example – not by force, by cutting things apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things. He enjoys life and all its manifestations, rather than mere excitement.
Biophilic ethics has its own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life (this is the main thesis of Albert Schweitzer, one of the great representatives of the love of life – both in his writings and in his person), and all that enhances life. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, {24} cuts it into pieces. Thus it is from the standpoint of lifeethics that the Bible mentions as the central sin of the Hebrews: “Because thou didst not serve thy Lord with joy and gladness of heart in the abundance of all things.“
The conscience of the biophilous person is not one of forcing oneself to refrain from evil and to do good. It is not the superego described by .Freud, a strict taskmaster employing sadism against oneself for the sake of virtue. The biophilous conscience is motivated by its attraction to life and joy; the moral effort consists in strengthening the life-loving side in oneself. For this reasons the biophile does not dwell in remorse and guilt, which are, after all, only aspects of selfloathing and sadness. He turns quickly to life and attempts to do good.
Spinoza’s Ethics is a striking example of biophilic morality. “Pleasure,“ he says, “in itself is not bad but good; contrariwise, pain in itself is bad.“ And in the same spirit: “A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.“ Love of life underlies the various versions of humanistic philosophy. In various conceptual forms these philosophies are in the same vein as Spinoza’s; they express the principle that the same man loves life; that man’s aim in life is to be attracted by all that is alive and to separate himself from all that is dead and mechanical.
The dichotomy of biophilia-necrophilia is the same as Freud’s life-and-death instinct. I believe, as Freud did, that this is the most fundamental polarity that exists. However, there is one important difference. Freud assumes that the striving toward death and toward life are two biologically given tendencies inherent in all living substance that their respective strengths are relatively constant, and that there is only one alternative within the operation of the death instinct – namely, that it can be directed against the outside world or against oneself. In contrast to these assumptions I believe that necrophilia is not a normal biological tendency, but a pathological phenomenon – in fact, the most malignant pathology that exists in mail.
What are we, the people of the United States today, with respect to necrophilia and biophilia? Undoubtedly our spiritual tradition is one of love of life. And not only this. Was there ever a culture with more love of “fun“ and excitement, or with greater opportunities for the majority to enjoy fun and excitement? But even if this is so, fun and excitement is not the same as joy and love of life; perhaps underneath there is indifference to life, or attraction to death?
To answer this question we must consider the nature of our bureaucratized, industrial, mass civilization. Our approach to life becomes increasingly mechanical. The aim of social efforts is to produce things, and. in the process of idolatry of things we transform ourselves into commodities. The question here is not whether they are treated nicely and are well fed (things, too, can be treated nicely); the question is whether people are things or living beings.
People love mechanical gadgets more than living beings. The approach to man is intellectual-abstract. One is interested in people as objects, in their common properties, in the statistical rules of mass behavior, not in living individuals. All this goes together with the increasing role of bureaucratic methods. In giant centers of production, giant cities, giant countries, men are administered as if they were things; men and their administrators are transformed into things, and they obey the law of things. In a bureaucratically organized and centralized industrialism, men’s tastes are manipulated so that they consume maximally and in predictable and profitable directions. Their intelligence and character become standardized by the ever-increasing use of tests, which select the mediocre and unadventurous over the original and daring.
Indeed, the bureaucratic-industrial civilization that has been victorious in Europe and North America has created a new type of man. He has been described as the “organization man“ and as homo consumens. He is in addition the homo mechanicus. By this I mean a “gadget man,“ deeply attracted to all that is mechanical and inclined against all that is alive. It is, of course, true that man’s biological and physiological equipment provides him with such strong sexual impulses that even the homo mechanicus still has sexual desires and looks for women. But there is no doubt that the gadget man’s interest in women is diminishing. A New Yorker cartoon pointed to this very amusingly: a sales girl trying to sell a certain brand of perfume to a young female customer recommends it by remarking, “It smells like a new sports car.“
Indeed, any observer of men’s behavior today will confirm that this cartoon is more than a clever joke. There are apparently a great number of men who are more interested in sports-cars, television and radio sets, space travel, and any number of gadgets than they are in women, love, nature, food; who are more stimulated by the manipulation of non-organic, mechanical things than by life. Their attitude toward a woman is like that toward a car: you push the button and watch it race. It is not even too far-fetched to assume that homo mechanicus has more pride in and is more fascinated by, devices that can kill millions of ,people across a distance of several thousands of miles within minutes than he is frightened and depressed by the possibility of such mass destruction.
Homo mechanicus still likes sex {25} and drink. But all these pleasures are sought for in the frame of reference of the mechanical and the unalive. He expects that there must be a button which, if pushed, brings happiness, love, pleasure. (Many go to a psychoanalyst under the illusion that he can teach them to find the button.) The homo mechanicus becomes more and more interested in the manipulation of machines, rather than in the participation in and response to life. Hence he becomes indifferent to life, fascinated by the mechanical, and eventually attracted by death and total destruction. This affinity between the love of destruction and the love of the mechanical may well have been expressed for the first time in Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909). “A roaring motor-car, which looks as though running on a shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. … We wish to glorify war – the only health-giver of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that kill the contempt for woman.“
Briefly then, intellectualization, quantification, abstractification, bureaucratization, and reification – the very characteristics of modern industrial society – when applied to people rather than to things are not the principles of life but those of mechanics. People living in such a system must necessarily become indifferent to life, even attracted to death. They are not aware of this. They take the thrills of excitement for the joys of life and live under the illusion that they are very much alive when they only have many things to own and to use. The lack of protest against nuclear war and the discussion of our “atomologists“ of the balance sheet of total or half-total destruction show how far we have already gone into the “valley of the shadow of death. 2
To speak of the necrophilous quality of our industrial civilization does not imply that industrial production as such is necessarily contrary to the principles of life. The question is whether the principles of social organization and of life are subordinated to those of mechanization, or whether the principles of life are the dominant ones. Obviously, the industrialized world has not found thus far an answer, to the question posed here: How is it possible to create a humanist industrialism as against the bureaucratic mass industrialism that rules our lives today?
The danger of nuclear war is so grave that man may arrive at a new barbarism before he has even a chance to find the road to a humanist industrialism. Yet not all hope is lost; hence we might ask ourselves whether the hypothesis developed here could in any way contribute to finding peaceful solutions. I believe it might be useful in several ways. First of all, an awareness of our pathological situation, while not yet a cure, is nevertheless a first step. If more people became aware of the difference between love of life and love of death, if they became aware that they themselves are already far gone in the direction of indifference or of necrophilia, this shock alone could produce new and healthy reactions.
Furthermore, the sensitivity toward those who recommend death might be increased. Many might see through the pious rationalizations of the death lovers and change their admiration for them to disgust. Beyond this, our hypothesis would suggest one thing to those concerned with peace and survival: that every effort must be made to weaken the attraction of death and to strengthen the attraction of life. Why not declare that there is only one truly dangerous subversion, the subversion of life? Why do not those who represent the traditions of religion and humanism speak up and say that there is no deadlier sin than love for death and contempt for life? Why not encourage our best brains – scientists, artists, educators – to make suggestions on how to arouse and stimulate love for life as opposed to love for gadgets? I know love for gadgets brings profits to the corporations, while love for life requires fewer things and hence is less profitable. Maybe it is too late. Maybe the neutron bomb, which leaves entire cities intact, but without life, is to be the symbol of our civilization. But again, those of us who love life will not cease the struggle against necrophilia.
Notes:
1 Creators and Destroyers” was first published in: The Saturday Review, New York (04. January 1964), pp. 22-25. Numbers in {brackets} indicate the change to the next page. – Copyright © 1964 by Erich Fromm; Copyright © 2004 by The Literary Estate of Erich Fromm, c/o Rainer Funk, Ursrainer Ring 24, D-72076 Tuebingen, Fax: +49-7071-600049, E-mail: frommfunk[atsymbol] aol.com.2 I suggest an empirical program of research: 1) construct a good depth questionnaire that permits the differentiation of the necrophilic from the biophilic orientation; 2 ) apply this questionnaire to a stratified sample of the population of the United States; 3) find out what the percentage of both main orientations and the most important mixtures between them are; 4) correlate the psychological orientation with political attitudes especially those to war and peace, to find out whether the thesis presented here is corroborated by the statistical evidence; 5) study the correlations between the necrophilic and biophilic orientations with other factors like education, social status, philosophy of life, etc., in order to see which actors seem to have a causal relation to the two orientations, respectively; 6) form pilot groups and study which conditions and changes lead to a change in orientation.
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