Erich Fromm on the Psychology of Capitalism
Our world is turning us into mass products. We should resist
Erich Fromm, philosopher and social psychologist, points out that capitalism, in order to work, requires a large population of identical consumers with identical taste. This is opposed to the vision of a human life as individual, unique, and valuable in its uniqueness.
This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.
I’ve recently been rereading the German/American psychologist Erich Fromm. He was famous in the 60s and 70s for his application of psychoanalysis to whole societies, diagnosing in a doctor’s terms what was wrong with modern life as it goes on all around us.
One passage that made me think was this:
This is a fascinating thought. When we think of modern industrial society, we always think of it from the perspective of production: we think of factories churning out clothes, assembly lines pushing out endless rows of identical cars, household goods and toys, industrial farming covering vast fields with one uniform crop. All these, the triumph of the modern, Western world order, have led to constantly falling prices for everyday commodities, and have made it possible that we all own a car, TVs, computers, and closets full of cheap clothes.
What we don’t normally think about is that all that mass production also requires a mass consumption — and, consequently, a mass consumer: us.
Producing millions of identical yellow T-shirts would make no commercial sense if there weren’t millions of consumers willing to look the same in their identical yellow T-shirts. And the same goes for cars, mobile phones, and even the most personal expressions of one’s personality and life: social media accounts (or, for that matter, Medium articles), all looking the same, all designed to one template, framed by a Facebook or Instagram layout and published under the same logo, in the same font, and often even using exactly the same pictures, taken from the free image websites, Pixabay or Unsplash.
The philosophy of Karl Marx (1818-1883) has been hugely influential throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. One of his best known concepts is the idea of “alienation” that describes how, in capitalist societies, human beings get estranged from their work and from themselves because of the way the production of goods is organised.
Isn’t this remarkable? We have collectively almost entirely given up our distinctive personalities and tastes. We have, in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, allowed ourselves to be pressed into the mould of the industrial mass-consumer so thoroughly, that we now don’t even realise that something is very strange. One billion different people across the globe, belonging to thousands of different cultures, hundreds of different religions, all sport the same personal homepage on Facebook, all use the same blue buttons to express themselves (Like, Add Friend, or Buy Now), all wear exactly the same clothes (LV, H&M, Nike) and training shoes (Adidas, and Nike again), all drive the same kind of car and use the same type of phone.
This is the darker, hidden side of the industrial mass production coin: that the mass production of goods is actually, indirectly, a mass production of the consumer, without whom it wouldn’t be possible to sell those goods. Industrial society is not only creating its fabulous, glittery consumer paradise for us. It is, at the same time, creating us in its image, diminishing us, pressing us from a mould just as rigid as that used in its factories. At the end of this process, we are a product, just as much as the stuff that comes out of the factory doors, devoid of individual taste, perfectly matched to what the production lines churn out.
We have become nothing more than the demand to our industrial society’s supply.
Imagine now, for a moment, a different world. A place where we all are free and encouraged to develop our own personalities. To wear whatever clothes we individually like, clothes which we make ourselves or that we purchase from small, boutique artisans. A society in which each of us speaks the language of their own place, rather than being forcibly shoehorned into the cheapest version of “simple English”. A world in which we consume local foods, what grows right here and now, in the fields around our home towns, rather than having to abandon our own traditions and being forced to like McDonalds, Lays and Coke, the same list of ten basic foods across the world, from Michigan to the Middle East and the Middle Kingdom. Imagine a world in which people are allowed to like wildly different music, different movies, in which their Internet pages actually look like records of an irreplaceable, individual life, instead of imperfect, bad copies of each other.
Each person’s life on Earth is an infinitely valuable chance at a unique interpretation, at one human being’s version of what it means to be alive. It is a cosmic event that will never repeat itself in exactly the same way. It is the opportunity for each one of us to become what we were meant to be: to understand life at our own terms, to be creative, to be loud or thoughtful, respectful or irreverent, to speak Gaelic, Arabic, Greek or Finnish, to paint our lives in watercolour, charcoal or as a wild, explosive blockbuster movie, to be a Bach sonata, a Taylor Swift song, a gospel, or a wild rap.
We shouldn’t let consumer society take this one chance away from us. Our one chance to be really, truly, ourselves.
Return to The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.
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