You may be correct.
The older I get the more I realize that Erich Fromm got it right way back in 1955. We are indeed doing all that we can to escape from freedom and are indeed far, far away from being “The Sane Society.” It blows my mind that I did not find his books until 1969 and most people appear to have still never heard of him. Society in general appears to be living up to Fromm’s reasoning. Here is a pertinent quote from his book “The Sane Society,” that pretty much spells out what the book is all about, as well as what society is all about today–just as much as it was in 1955.
“It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of metal pathology does not make these people sane.”
He goes on to discuss all the things that humans use to alienate themselves from their true selves. Things like greed, the lust for power and even religion are all present wherever alienation is to be found.
“What is common to all these phenomena—the worship of idols, the idolatrous worship of God, the idolatrous love for a person, the worship of a political leader or the state, and the idolatrous worship of the externalizations of irrational passions—is the process of alienation. It is the fact that man does not experience himself as the active bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished “thing,” dependent on powers outside of himself, unto whom he has projected his living substance.”
So who exactly ARE the real aliens here on earth?
It is pretty clear we are more than likely pretty much all insane.
By Charles Buell