Fromm Essays: Hope

Erich Fromm

From The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology

2010

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First published by Harper & Row, Publishers, New York in 1968 as volume XXXVIII of the “World Perspectives” planned and edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen.

Copyright © 1968, 1970 by Erich Fromm

This publication follows the revised edition of 1970.

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Contents

Publisher’s Foreword

Preface

II. Hope

1. What Hope Is Not

2. The Paradox and Nature of Hope

3. Faith

4. Fortitude

5. Resurrection

6. Messianic Hope

7. The Shattering of Hope

End Notes

About the Author

Other Titles by Erich Fromm

Lantern Books Complete Catalogue

Publisher’s Foreword

As the present book is reissued, The American Mental Health Foundation celebrates its 86th anniversary. Founded in 1924, AMHF is dedicated to the welfare of people suffering from emotional problems, with a particular concern for individuals with special needs and the elderly. For many years, AMHF generally devoted its efforts to bettering quality of treatment and developing more effective methods, available even to low-income wage earners.

The major therapeutic advances and improved training methods are described in its existing publications: the series The Search for the Future. Two of these books are available on the AMHF Web site under the titles The Challenge for Group Psychotherapy (volume 1) and The Challenge for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Solutions for the Future (volume 2). Portions of these books are reprinted on its Web site in French and German, as they were published internationally (in addition to Italian editions), for a segment of the international community. These books were prepared by Dr. Stefan de Schill under the joint sponsorship of AMHF and The International Institute for Mental Health Research, Zurich and Geneva. Volume 3, written by Dr. de Schill and published by Prometheus Books in 2000, is entitled Crucial Choices—Crucial Changes: The Resurrection of Psychotherapy.

In 2009, AMHF Books published The Violent Person by Dr. Raymond B. Flannery Jr. This is a book for professionals as well as anyone with a concern for, and an interest in, the mechanisms of human violence, stress at the breaking point (PTSD), and the workings of the brain.

Under the supervision and direction of Dr. William Van Ornum, AMHF Books is an exciting new venture. Within the mission and under the auspices of The American Mental Health Foundation, AMHF Books publishes new research as well as works by classic authors.

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) famously remains one of the authoritative voices of the 20th century, a time that witnessed unprecedented changes and upheavals in our understanding of the inner, as well as political, landscape of the human race. AMHF Books is proud to be the publisher of this world-renowned figure, one that has shaped our culture well into a new century. On the thirtieth anniversary of Fromm’s death and hundred and tenth of his birth, AMHF Books celebrates his visionary humanism by reissuing two of his books, Revolution of Hope and The Heart of Man, and publishing two, Beyond Freud and The Pathology of Normalcy, for the first time.

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Preface

This book is written as a response to America’s situation in the year 1968. It is born out of the conviction that we are at the crossroads: one road leads to a completely mechanized society with man as a helpless cog in the machine—if not to destruction by thermonuclear war; the other to a renaissance of humanism and hope—to a society that puts technique in the service of man’s well-being.

This book is meant to clarify the issues for those who have not clearly recognized our dilemma, and it is an appeal to action. It is based on the conviction that we can find the necessary new solutions with the help of reason and passionate love for life, and not through irrationality and hate. It is addressed to a broad spectrum of readers with different political and religious concepts but sharing this concern for life and respect for reason and reality.

This book, like all my previous work, attempts to distinguish between individual and social reality and the ideologies that misuse and “co-opt” valuable ideas for the purpose of supporting the status quo. For many of the young generation who belittle the value of traditional thought, I should like to stress my conviction that even the most radical development must have its continuity with the past; that we cannot progress by throwing away the best achievements of the human mind, and that to be young is not enough!

Since this book deals with topics I have dealt with in various works in the past forty years, I could not avoid mentioning many of the same ideas. They are reorganized around the central issue: the alternatives to dehumanization. But this book contains also many new ideas that go beyond my previous thinking.

Since I am writing for a large audience, I have reduced quotations to the bare minimum, but I have quoted all authors who have influenced my thinking in writing this book. As a rule, I have also not made reference to those of my books that have a direct relevance to the material dealt with here. These are especially: Escape from Freedom (1941), Man for Himself (1947), The Sane Society (1955), The Heart of Man (1964)

The general approach taken in this book reflects the character of the central problem under consideration. While this is as it should be, it may at times pose some minor difficulty for the reader. The work attempts to bring together two problem areas that are often treated separately—human character structure, qualities, and potentialities, and contemporary social, political, and economic problems. The emphasis differs from section to section, but throughout a major objective is to integrate and interweave these discussions. This is done in the firm belief that a realistic and successful approach to the problems of contemporary American society is only possible if the analysis of our whole social system includes what is called in this book “the system Man.” I hope the reader will respond by overcoming the thought habits of compartmentalization and not find it too difficult to accompany me in the jumps from “psychology” to “sociology” and “politics,” and back again.

It remains to express my thanks to those who have read the whole manuscript repeatedly and made many editorial suggestions: to Ruth Nanda Anshen, to my wife, and to Raymond G. Brown, who in addition has assisted me with valuable suggestions in the field of economics. I also want to express my thanks to the publishers for their special efforts, which made it possible for the book to be published ten weeks after delivery of the manuscript.

E.F.

II. Hope

1. What Hope Is Not

Hope is a decisive element in any attempt to bring about social change in the direction of greater aliveness, awareness, and reason. But the nature of hope is often misunderstood and confused with attitudes that have nothing to do with hope and in fact are the very opposite. What is it to hope?

Is it, as many think, to have desires and wishes? If this were so, those who desire more and better cars, houses, and gadgets would be people of hope. But they are not; they are people lusty for more consumption and not people of hope.

Is it to hope if hope’s object is not a thing but a fuller life, a state of greater aliveness, a liberation from eternal boredom; or, to use a theological term, for salvation; or, a political term, for revolution? Indeed, this kind of expectation could be hope; but it is non-hope if it has the quality of passiveness, and “waiting for”-until the hope becomes, in fact, a cover for resignation, a mere ideology.

Kafka has beautifully described this kind of resigned and passive hope in a story in The Trial. A man comes to the door leading into heaven (the Law) and begs admittance from the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper says he cannot admit the man at the moment. Although the door leading into the Law stands open, the man decides that he had better wait until he gets permission to enter. So he sits down and waits for days and years. He repeatedly asks to be allowed in, but is always told that he cannot be allowed to enter yet. During all these long years the man studies the doorkeeper almost incessantly and learns to know even the fleas in his fur collar. Eventually, he is old and near death. For the first time, he asks the question, “How does it come about that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?” The doorkeeper answers, “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it.”

The old man was too old to understand, and maybe he would not have understood if he had been younger. The bureaucrats have the last word; if they say no, he cannot enter. If he had had more than this passive, waiting hope, he would have entered and his courage to disregard the bureaucrats would have been the liberating act which would have carried him to the shining palace. Many people are like Kafka’s old man. They hope, but it is not given to them to act upon their heart’s impulse, and as long as the bureaucrats do not give the green light they wait and wait. [1]

This kind of passive hope is closely related to a generalized form of hope, which might be described as hoping for time. Time and the future become the central category of this kind of hope. Nothing is expected to happen in the now but only in the next moment, the next day, the next year, and in another world if it is too absurd to believe that hope can be realized in this world. Behind this belief is the idolatry of “Future,” “History,” and “Posterity,” which began in the French Revolution with men like Robespierre, who worshiped the future as a goddess: I do nothing; I remain passive, because I am nothing and impotent; but the future, the projection of time, will bring about what I cannot achieve. This worship of the future, which is a different aspect of the worship of “progress” in modern bourgeois thought, is precisely the alienation of hope. Instead of something I do or I become, the idols, future and posterity, bring about something without my doing anything. [2]

While passive waiting is a disguised form of hopelessness and impotence, there is another form of hopelessness and despair which takes exactly the opposite disguise—the disguise of phrase making and adventurism, of disregard for reality, and of forcing what cannot be forced. This was the attitude of the false Messiahs and of the Putsch leaders, who had contempt for those who did not under all circumstances prefer death to defeat. In these days, this pseudo-radical disguise of hopelessness and nihilism is not rare among some of the most dedicated members of the young generation. They are appealing in their boldness and dedication but they become unconvincing by their lack of realism, sense of strategy, and, in some, by lack of love for life. [3]

2. The Paradox and Nature of Hope

Hope is paradoxical. It is neither passive waiting nor is it unrealistic forcing of circumstances that cannot occur. It is like the crouched tiger, which will jump only when the moment for jumping has come. Neither tired reformism nor pseudo-radical adventurism is an expression of hope. To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime. There is no sense in hoping for that which already exists or for what cannot be. Those whose hope is weak settle down for comfort or for violence; those whose hope is strong see and cherish all signs of new life and are ready every moment to help the birth of that which is ready to be born.

Among the confusions about hope one of the major ones is the failure to distinguish between conscious and unconscious hope. This is an error, of course, which occurs with regard to many other emotional experiences, such as happiness, anxiety, depression, boredom, and hate. It is amazing that in spite of the popularity of Freud’s theories his concept of the unconscious as been so little applied to such emotional phenomena. There are perhaps two main reasons for this fact. One is that in the writings of some psychoanalysts and some “philosophers of psychoanalysis” the whole phenomenon of the unconscious-that is, of repression-refers to sexual desires, and they use repression—wrongly—as synonymous with suppression of sexual wishes and activities. In doing so they deprive Freud’s discoveries of some of their most important consequences. The second reason lies probably in the fact that it is far less disturbing for the post-Victorian generations to become aware of repressed sexual desires than of those experiences like alienation, hopelessness, or greed. To use only one of the most obvious examples: most people do not admit to themselves feelings of fear, boredom, loneliness, hopelessness—that is to say, they are unconscious [4] of these feelings. This is so for a simple reason. Our social pattern is such that the successful man is not supposed to be afraid or bored or lonely. He must find this world the best of all worlds; in order to have the best chance for promotion he must repress fear as well as doubt, depression, boredom, or hopelessness.

There are many who feel consciously hopeful and unconsciously hopeless, and there are a few for whom it is the other way around. What matters in the examination of hope and hopelessness is not primarily what people think about their feelings, but what they truly feel. This can be recognized least from their words and phrases, but can be detected from their facial expressions, their way of walking, their capacity to react with interest to something in front of their eyes, and their lack of fanaticism, which is shown in their ability to listen to reasonable argument.

The dynamic viewpoint applied in this book to social-psychological phenomena is fundamentally different from the descriptive behaviorist approach in most social-science research. From the dynamic standpoint, we are not primarily interested in knowing what a person thinks or says or how he behaves now. We are interested in his character structure—that is, in the semi-permanent structure of his energies, in the directions in which they are channeled, and in the intensity with which they flow. If we know the driving forces motivating behavior, not only do we understand present behavior but we can also make reasonable assumptions about how a person is likely to act under changed circumstances. In the dynamic view, surprising “changes” in a person’s thought or behavior are changes that mostly could have been foreseen, given the knowledge of his character structure.

More could be said about what hope is not, but let us press forward and ask what hope is. Can it be described at all in words or can it only be communicated in a poem, in a song, in a gesture, in a facial expression, or in a deed?

As with every other human experience, words are insufficient to describe the experience. In fact, most of the time words do the opposite: they obscure it, dissect it, and kill it. Too often, in the process of talking about love or hate or hope, one loses contact with what one was supposed to be talking about. Poetry, music, and other forms of art are by far the best-suited media for describing human experience because they are precise and avoid the abstraction and vagueness of worn-out coins that are taken for adequate representations of human experience.

Yet, taking these qualifications seriously, it is not impossible to touch upon feeling experience in words that are not those of poetry. This would not be possible if people did not share the experience one talks about, at least to some degree. To describe it means to point out the various aspects of the experience and thus to establish a communication in which the writer and the reader know that they are referring to the same thing. In making this attempt, I must ask the reader to work with me and not expect me to give him an answer to the question of what hope is. I must ask him to mobilize his own experiences in order to make our dialogue possible.

To hope is a state of being. It is an inner readiness, that of intense but not-yet-spent activeness. [5] The concept of “activity” rests upon one of the most widespread of man’s illusions in modern industrial society. Our whole culture is geared to activity-activity in the sense of being busy, and being busy in the sense of busyness (the busyness necessary for business). In fact, most people are so “active” that they cannot stand doing nothing; they even transform their so-called leisure time into another form of activity. If you are not active making money, you are active driving around, playing golf, or just chatting about nothing. What is dreaded is the moment in which you have really nothing “to do.” Whether one calls this kind of behavior activity is a terminological question. The trouble is that most people who think they are very active are not aware of the fact that they are intensely passive in spite of their “busyness.” They constantly need the stimulus from the outside, be it other people’s chatter, or the sight of movies, or travel and other forms of more thrilling consumption excitements, even if it is only a new man or woman as a sexual partner. They need to be prompted, to be turned on, tempted, seduced. They always run and never stand. They always “fall for” and never get up. And they imagine themselves to be immensely active while they are driven by the obsession to do something in order to escape the anxiety that is aroused when they are confronted with themselves.

Hope is a psychic concomitant to life and growth. If a tree that does not get sun bends its trunk to where the sun comes from, we cannot say that the tree “hopes” in the same way in which a man hopes, since hope in man is connected with feelings and awareness that the tree may not have. And yet it would not be wrong to say that the tree hopes for the sunlight and expresses this hope by twisting its trunk toward the sun. Is it different with the child that is born? He may have no awareness, yet his activity expresses his hope to be born and to breathe independently. Does the suckling not hope for his mother’s breasts? Does the infant not hope to stand erect and to walk? Does the sick man not hope to be well, the prisoner to be free, the hungry to eat? Do we not hope to wake up to another day when we fall asleep? Does love making not imply a man’s hope in his potency, in his capacity to arouse his partner, and the woman’s hope to respond and to arouse him?

3. Faith

When hope has gone life has ended, actually or potentially. Hope is an intrinsic element of the structure of life, of the dynamic of man’s spirit. It is closely linked with another element of the structure of life: faith. Faith is not a weak form of belief or knowledge; it is not faith in this or that; faith is the conviction about the not yet proven, the knowledge of the real possibility, the awareness of pregnancy. Faith is rational when it refers to the knowledge of the real yet unborn; it is based on the faculty of knowledge and comprehension, which penetrates the surface and sees the kernel. Faith, like hope, is not prediction of the future; it is the vision of the present in a state of pregnancy.

The statement that faith is certainty needs a qualification. It is certainty about the reality of the possibility-but it is not certainty in the sense of unquestionable predictability. The child may be stillborn prematurely; it may die in the act of birth; it may die in the first two weeks of life. That is the paradox of faith: it is the certainty of the uncertain. [6] It is certainty in terms of man’s vision and comprehension; it is not certainty in terms of the final outcome of reality. We need no faith in that which is scientifically predictable, nor can there be faith in that which is impossible. Faith is based on our experience of living, of transforming ourselves. Faith that others can change is the outcome of the experience that I can change. [7]

There is an important distinction between rational and irrational faith. [8] While rational faith is the result of one’s own inner activeness in thought or feeling, irrational faith is submission to something given, which one accepts as true regardless of whether it is or not. The essential element of all irrational faith is its passive character, be its object an idol, a leader, or an ideology. Even the scientist needs to be free from irrational faith in traditional ideas in order to have rational faith in the power of his creative thought. Once his discovery is “proved,” he needs no more faith, except in the next step he is contemplating. In the sphere of human relations, “having faith” in another person means to be certain of his core—that is, of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes. In the same sense we can have faith in ourselves-not in the constancy of our opinions but in our basic orientation to life, the matrix of our character structure. Such faith is conditioned by the experience of self, by our capacity to say “I” legitimately, by the sense of our identity.

Hope is the mood that accompanies faith. Faith could not be sustained without the mood of hope. Hope can have no base except in faith.

4. Fortitude

There is still another element linked with hope and faith in the structure of life: courage, or, as Spinoza called it, fortitude. Fortitude is perhaps the less ambiguous expression, because today courage is more often used to demonstrate the courage to die rather than the courage to live. Fortitude is the capacity to resist the temptation to compromise hope and faith by transforming them-and thus destroying them-into empty optimism or into irrational faith. Fortitude is the capacity to say “no” when the world wants to hear “yes.”

But fortitude is not fully understood unless we mention another aspect of it: fearlessness. The fearless person is not afraid of threats, not even of death. But, as so often, the word “fearless” cover s several entirely different attitudes. I mention only the three most important ones: First, a person can be fearless because he does not care to live; life is not worth much to him, hence he is fearless when it comes to the danger of dying; but while he is not afraid of death, he may be afraid of life. His fearlessness is based on lack of love of life; he is usually not fearless at all when he is not in the situation of risking his life. In fact, he frequently looks for dangerous situations, in order to avoid his fear of life, of himself, and of people.

A second kind of fearlessness is that of the person who lives in symbiotic submission to an idol, be it a person, an institution, or an idea; the commands of the idol are sacred; they are far more compelling than even the survival commands of his body. If he could disobey or doubt these commands of the idol, he would face the danger of losing his identity with the idol; this means he would be running the risk of finding himself utterly isolated, and thus at the verge of insanity. He is willing to die because he is afraid of exposing himself to this danger.

The third kind of fearlessness is to be found in the fully developed person, who rests within himself and loves life. The person who has overcome greed does not cling to any idol or any thing and hence has nothing to lose: he is rich because he is empty, he is strong because he is not the slave of his desires. He can let go of idols, irrational desires, and fantasies, because he is in full touch with reality, inside and outside himself. If such a person has reached full “enlightenment,” he is completely fearless. If he has moved toward this goal without having arrived, his fearlessness will also not be complete. But anyone who tries to move toward the state of being fully oneself knows that whenever a new step toward fearlessness is made, a sense of strength and joy is awakened that is unmistakable. He feels as if a new phase of life had begun. He can feel the truth of Goethe’s lines: “I have put my house on nothing, that’s why the whole world is mine.” (Ich hab’ mein Haus auf nichts gestellt, deshalb gehoert mir die ganze Welt.)

Hope and faith, being essential qualities of life, are by their very nature moving in the direction of transcending the status quo, individually and socially. It is one of the qualities of all life that it is in a constant process of change and never remains the same at any given moment. [9] Life that stagnates tends to die; if the stagnation is complete, death has occurred. It follows that life in its moving quality tends to break out of and to overcome the status quo. We either grow stronger or weaker, wiser or more foolish, more courageous or more cowardly. Every second is a moment of decision, for the better or the worse. We feed our sloth, greed, or hate, or we starve it. The more we feed it, the stronger it grows; the more we starve it, the weaker it becomes.

What holds true for the individual holds true for a society. It is never static; if it does not grow, it decays; if it does not transcend the status quo for the better, it changes for the worse. Often we, the individual or the people who make up a society, have the illusion we could stand still and not alter the given situation in the one or the other direction. This is one of the most dangerous illusions. The moment we stand still, we begin to decay.

5. Resurrection

This concept of personal or social transformation allows and even compels us to redefine the meaning of resurrection, without any reference to its theological implications in Christianity. Resurrection in its new meaning—for which the Christian meaning would be one of the possible symbolic expressions-is not the creation of another reality after the reality of this life, but the transformation of this reality in the direction of greater aliveness. Man and society are resurrected every moment in the act of hope and of faith in the here and now; every act of love, of awareness, of compassion is resurrection; every act of sloth, of greed, of selfishness is death. Every moment existence confronts us with the alternatives of resurrection or death; every moment we give an answer. This answer lies not in what we say or think, but in what we are, how we act, where we are moving.

6. Messianic Hope

Faith and hope and this-worldly resurrection have found their classic expression in the messianic vision of the prophets. They do not predict the future, like a Cassandra or the chorus of Greek tragedy; they see the present reality free from the blindfolds of public opinion and authority. They do not want to be prophets but feel compelled to express the voice of their conscience-of their “knowing-with”—to say what possibilities they see and to show the people the alternatives and to warn them. This is all they aspire to do. It is up to the people to take their warning seriously and to change their ways, or to remain deaf and blind-and to suffer. Prophetic language is always the language of alternatives, of choice, and of freedom; it is never that of determinism, for better or worse. The shortest formulation of prophetic alternativism is the verse in Deuteronomy: “I put before you today life and death, and you chose life!” [10]

In the prophetic literature the messianic vision rested upon the tension between “what existed or was still there and what was becoming and was yet to be.” [11] In the post-prophetic period a change took place in the meaning of the messianic idea, making its first appearance in the Book of Daniel around 164 b.c.e. and in pseudo-epigraphical literature which was not incorporated in the collection of the Old Testament. This literature has a “vertical” idea of, salvation as against the “horizontal” [12] historical idea of the prophets. The emphasis is on the transformation of the individual and largely on a catastrophic end of history, occurring in a final cataclysm. This apocalyptic version is not that of alternatives but of prediction; not that of freedom but of determinism.

In the later Talmudic or rabbinical tradition the original prophetic alternativistic vision prevailed. Early Christian thought was more strongly influenced by the apocalyptic version of messianic thought, although, paradoxically, as an institution the Church usually retreated to a position of passive waiting.

Nevertheless in the concept of the “Second Coming” the prophetic concept remained alive and the prophetic interpretation of Christian faith has again and again found its expression in revolutionary and “heretical” sects; today the radical wing in the Roman Catholic Church, as well as in the various non-Catholic Christian denominations, shows a marked return to the prophetic principle, to its alternativism as well as to the concept that spiritual aims must be applied to the political and social process. Outside of the Church, original Marxist socialism was the most significant expression of the messianic vision in a secular language, only to be corrupted and destroyed by the communist distortion of Marx. In recent years the messianic element in Marxism has found its voice again in a number of socialist humanists, especially in Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Marxists and Christians have become engaged in a worldwide dialogue, based on the common messianic heritage. [13]

7. The Shattering of Hope

If hope, faith, and fortitude are concomitants of life, how is it that so many lose hope, faith, and fortitude and love their servitude and dependence? It is precisely the possibility of this loss that is characteristic of human existence. We start out with hope, faith, and fortitude—they are the unconscious, “no-thought” qualities of the sperm and the egg, of their union, of the growth of the fetus and its birth. But when life begins, the vicissitudes of environment and accident begin to further or to block the potential of hope.

Most of us had hoped to be loved—not just to be coddled and to be fed, but to be understood, to be cared for, to be respected. Most of us hoped to be able to trust. When we were little we did not yet know the human invention of the lie—not only that of lying with words but that of lying with one’s voice, one’s gesture, one’s eyes, one’s facial expression. How should the child be prepared for this specifically human ingenuity: the lie? Most of us are awakened, some more and some less brutally, to the fact that people often do not mean what they say or say the opposite of what they mean. And not only “people,” but the very people we trusted most-our parents, teachers, leaders.

Few people escape the fate that at one point or another in their development their hopes are disappointed—sometimes completely shattered. Perhaps this is good. If a man did not experience the disappointment of his hope, how could his hope become strong and unquenchable? How could he avoid the danger of being an optimistic dreamer? But on the other hand, hope often is shattered so thoroughly that a man may never recover it.

In fact, the responses and reactions to the shattering of hope vary a great deal, depending on many circumstances: historical, personal, psychological, and constitutional. Many people, probably the majority, react to the disappointment of their hopes by adjustment to the average optimism which hopes for the best without bothering to recognize that not even the good but perhaps, indeed, the worst may occur. As long as everybody else whistles, such people whistle too, and instead of feeling their hopelessness, they seem to participate in a kind of pop concert. They reduce their demands to what they can get and do not even dream of that which seems to be out of their reach. They are well-adjusted members of the herd and they never feel hopeless because nobody else seems to feel hopeless. They present the picture of a peculiar kind of resigned optimism that we see in so many members of contemporary Western society—the optimism usually being conscious and the resignation unconscious.

Another outcome of the shattering of hope is the “hardening of the heart.” We see many people—from juvenile delinquents to hard-boiled but effective adults—who at one point in their lives, maybe at five, maybe at twelve, maybe at twenty, cannot stand to be hurt any more. Some of them, as in a sudden vision or conversion, decide that they have had enough; that they will not feel anything any more; that nobody will ever be able to hurt them, but that they will be able to hurt others. They may complain about their bad luck in not finding any friends or anyone who loves them, but it is not their bad luck, it is their fate. Having lost compassion and empathy, they do not touch anybody—nor can they be touched. Their triumph in life is not to need anybody. They take pride in their untouchability and pleasure in being able to hurt. Whether this is done in criminal or legitimate ways depends much more on social factors than on psychological ones. Most of them remain frozen and hence unhappy until their lives run out. Not so rarely, a miracle happens and a thaw begins. It may simply be that they meet a person in whose concern or interest they believe, and new dimensions of feeling open. If they are lucky, they unfreeze completely and the seeds of hope that seem to have been destroyed altogether come to life.

Another and much more drastic result of shattered hope is destructiveness and violence. Precisely because men cannot live without hope, the one whose hope has been utterly destroyed hates life. Since he cannot create life, he wants to destroy it, which is only a little less of a miracle—but much more easy to accomplish. He wants to avenge himself for his unlived life and he does it by throwing himself into total destructiveness so that it matters little whether he destroys others or is destroyed. [14]

Usually the destructive reaction to shattered hope is to be found among those who, for social or economic reasons, are excluded from the comforts of the majority and have no place to go socially or economically. It is not primarily the economic frustration that leads to hate and violence; it is the hopelessness of the situation, the ever-repeated broken promises, which are just as conducive to violence and destructiveness. In fact, there is little doubt that groups which are so deprived and mistreated that they cannot even be hopeless because they have no vision of hope are less violent than those who see the possibility of hope and yet recognize at the same time that the circumstances make the realization of their hopes impossible. Psychologically speaking, destructiveness is the alternative to hope, just as attraction to death is the alternative to the love of life, and just as joy is the alternative to boredom.

Not only does the individual live by hope. Nations and social classes live through hope, faith, and fortitude, and if they lose this potential they disappear—either by their lack of vitality or by the irrational destructiveness that they develop.

Note should be taken of the fact that the development of hope or hopelessness in an individual is largely determined by the presence of hope or hopelessness in his society or class. However shattered an individual’s hope may have been in childhood, if he lives in a period of hope and faith, his own hope will be kindled; on the other hand, the person whose experience leads him to be hopeful will often tend to be depressed and hopeless when his society or class has lost the spirit of hope.

Today, and increasingly so since the beginning of the First World War, and perhaps specifically in America ever since the defeat of the Anti-imperialist League at the end of the last century, hope is disappearing fast in the Western world. As I said before, the hopelessness is covered up as optimism and, in a few, as revolutionary nihilism. But whatever a man thinks about himself is of little importance in comparison with what he is, with what he truly feels, and most of us are not aware of what we feel.

The signs of hopelessness are all here. Look at the bored expression of the average person, the lack of contact between people—even when they desperately try “to make contact.” Look at the incapacity to plan seriously for overcoming the ever-increasing poison of the city’s water and air and the predictable famine in the poor countries, not to speak of the inability to get rid of the daily threat to the lives and plans of all of us-the thermonuclear weapon. Whatever we say or think about hope, our inability to act or plan for life betrays our hopelessness.

We know a little about the reasons for this growing hopelessness. Before 1914 people thought that the world was a safe place, that wars, with their complete disregard for human life, were a matter of the past. And yet the First World War took place and every government lied about its motives. Then came the Spanish Civil War, with its comedy of pretensions both from the Western powers and from the Soviet Union; the terror of the Stalin system and the Hitler system; the Second World War, with its complete disregard for the lives of civilians; and the war in Vietnam, where for years the American government has tried to use its power to crush a small people in order to “save it.” And neither one of the great powers has made the one step that would have given hope to all: getting rid of its own nuclear weapons, trusting the others to be sane enough to follow suit.

But there are still other reasons for the increasing hopelessness: the formation of the totally bureaucratized industrial society and the powerlessness of the individual vis-à-vis the organization, which I shall deal with in the next chapter.

If America and the Western world continue in their state of unconscious hopelessness, lack of faith and of fortitude, it is predictable that they will not be able to resist the temptation of the big bang by nuclear weapons, which would end all problems—overpopulation, boredom, and hunger—since it would do away with all life.

Progress in the direction of a social and cultural order in which man is in the saddle depends on our capacity to come to grips with our hopelessness. First of all, we have to see it. And second, we have to examine whether there is a real possibility of changing our social, economic, and cultural life in a new direction that would make it possible to hope again. If there is no such real possibility, then indeed hope is sheer foolishness. But if there is a real possibility, there can be hope, based on examination of new alternatives and options, and on concerted actions to bring about the realization of these new alternatives.

End Notes

[1] The Spanish word esperar means at the same time waiting and hoping, and quite clearly it refers to that particular kind of passive hope that I am trying to describe here.

[2] The Stalinist concept that history decides what is right and wrong and good and evil is a direct continuation of Robespierre’s idolatry of posterity. It is the extreme opposite to the position of Marx, who said, “History is nothing and does nothing. It is man who is and does.” Or, in the Theses on Feuerbach, “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating.”

[3] Such hopelessness shines through Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon, 1955) and One-dimensional Man (Beacon, 1964). All traditional values, like love, tenderness, concern, and responsibility, are supposed to have had meaning only in a pre-technological society. In the new technological society—one without repression and exploitations—new man will arrive who will not have to be afraid of anything, including death, who will develop yet-unspecified needs, and who will have a chance to satisfy his “polymorphous sexuality” (I refer the reader to Freud’s Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex); briefly, the final progress of man is seen in the regression to infantile life, the return to the happiness of the satiated baby. No wonder that Marcuse ends up in hopelessness: “The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative. Thus it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal” (One-dimensional Man, p. 257).

These quotations show how wrong those are who attack or admire Marcuse as a revolutionary leader; for revolution was never based on hopelessness, nor can it ever be. But Marcuse is not even concerned with politics; for if one is not concerned with steps between the present and the future, one does not deal with politics, radical or otherwise. Marcuse is essentially an example of an alienated intellectual, who presents his personal despair as a theory of radicalism. Unfortunately, his lack of understanding and, to some extent, knowledge of Freud builds a bridge over which he travels to synthesize Freudianism, bourgeois materialism, and sophisticated Hegelianism into what to him and other like-minded “radicals” seems to be the most progressive theoretical construct. This is not the place to show in detail that it is a naive, cerebral daydream, essentially irrational, unrealistic, and lacking love of life.

[4] I want to stress that speaking of “the unconscious” is another form of alienated thinking and speaking. There is no such thing as “the unconscious,” as if it were an organ or a thing in space. One can be “conscious of” or “unconscious of” outer or inner events; that is, we deal with a psychic function, not with a localized organ.

[5] I owe the term activeness (instead of the usual term “activity”) to a personal communication from Michael Maccoby; correspondingly I use the term passiveness instead of passivity, when activeness or passive refers to an attitude or state of mind. I have discussed the problem of activity and passivity, especially in connection with the productive orientation, in several books. I want to call the reader’s attention to the excellent and profound discussion of activity and passivity in Metamorphosis by Ernest Schachtel (New York: Basic Books, 1959).

[6] In Hebrew the word “faith” (emunah) means certainty. Amen means “certainly.”

[7] The need for certainty will be discussed in Chapter III.

[8] The meaning of “rational” and “irrational” will be discussed in Chapter IV.

[9] This is not the place to discuss the question of definitions of organic life and inorganic matter, respectively, nor of the borderline between the two. Certainly, from the standpoint of present-day biology and genetics, traditional distinctions have become questionable; but it would be erroneous to assume that these distinctions have lost their validity; they need refinement rather than replacement.

[10] I have dealt with the nature of prophetic alternativism in great detail in You Shall Be as Gods (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967). Cf. also in the same book the discussion of the apocalyptic tendency in Jewish messianic thought, in contrast to the original alternativistic one (pp. 121 ff).

[11] Leo Baeck, Judaism and Christianity (New York: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1958), translated with an introduction by W. Kaufman.

[12] These terms have been used by Baeck, op. cit. Teilhard de Chardin in The Future of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1964) has attempted to construct a synthesis of these concepts.

[13] Ernst Bloch, in Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope), has more than anyone else recaptured the prophetic principle of hope in Marxist thought. A large number of the contemporary humanist-socialist authors have contributed to the volume Symposium on Socialist Humanism, edited by Erich Fromm (New York: Doubleday, 1965). Cf. also the English edition of the Yugoslav journal Praxis, and Dialogue, edited by G. Nenning, an international review published by Forum, which contains a dialogue between Christian and non-Christian Humanist.

The widespread assumption that Marx had a deterministic view of history, which said that socialism was inevitable, in my opinion is not correct. The impression of determinism arises from some formulations of Marx, which have their roots in his propagandistic, exhorting style, which is often intermingled with his analytic, scientific one. Rosa Luxemburg, perhaps the most brilliant of Marx’s theoretical interpreters, stressed the alternativistic viewpoint in the formulation of the “alternative between Socialism and Barbarism.”

[14] This problem and that of other manifestations of destructiveness are dealt with in detail in my forthcoming book, The Causes of Human Destructiveness.

About the Author

Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900 - March 18, 1980) was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

Other Titles by Erich Fromm

Published by American Mental Health Foundation Books

The Pathology of Normalcy

The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil

Beyond Freud: From Individual to Social Psychoanalysis

Lantern Books Complete Catalogue

 http://www.lanternbooks.com/pdfs/catalog_new.pdf

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