Erich Fromm – Normal people are the sickest
– […] if you just open your eyes, you see it. That is, most people pretend that they are happy, even to themselves, because if you are unhappy, you are considered a failure. So you must wear the mask of being satisfied, or happy, because otherwise you lose credit on the market, you’re no longer a normal person or a capable person. But you just have to look at people. You only have to see how behind the mask there is unrest, irritability, anger, depression, insomnia, unhappiness, what the french called “malaise”: already at the outset of the century one spoke of “malaise of the century” (ed. also see the expression “mal de vivre”). This is what Freud called “the unease in culture”. But it’s not the unease in culture, it’s the unease in bourgeois society that turns people into workhorses and [ignores] all that is important: the ability to love, to be there for oneself and others, to think, not to be a tool for the economy, but the end of all economic activity. That is what makes people the way they are.
I think it’s a common fiction that people share, that the modern person is happy. But this isn’t only my observation, it can be found in a range of people, and you only need to open your eyes yourself and not be deceived by appearances.
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Normal people are the sickest, and sick people are the healthiest. That may sound witty or perhaps exaggerated, but I’m quite serious, it’s not just an amusing formula. The sick person reveals that certain human things aren’t yet so suppressed, that they come into conflict with the cultural patterns, and create symptoms through this friction. The symptom, like pain, is only an indication that something is wrong. One is lucky to have a symptom. The symptom, like pain, is only an indication that something is wrong. One is lucky to have a symptom. One is lucky to be in pain when something is wrong. We know if you did not feel pain, you’d be in a very dangerous situation. But a great many normal people have adapted so much that they have abandoned everything that is their own. They’ve become so alienated, so much instruments and robotic, that they no longer sense conflict at all. That is, their actual feeling, love, and hate are so much repressed or so much atrophied that they give the image of a chronic mild schizophrenia.
– Do you see the causes for this in our society?
– Well, the causes seem to me to be quite obvious. Our society is built upon the principle that the aim of life is greater production as compensation and by necessity, greater consumption, and that the economy, the progress of the economy and of technology are the aims that we live for, not the person! What benefits people is of little interest, if one thinks about what the aim is, what it amounts to. Not even what is harmful to people plays a role. This is notorious: many of our advertisements promote things which are extremely deadly and harmful.
Erich Fromm in an interview