The Big Answer

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Ahead of his time, he advocates social planning at any level to be based on the true knowledge of man, his nature, and the real possibilities of its manifestations. We don’t need Freudian or Marxist theories; we need scientific facts. We need—and Toffler would certainly concur—the power of knowledge to be exercised more and the power of wealth and force to be exercised less. He says (it was 1968) that we need less bureaucracy and more humanism, but, more importantly, we need to rely less on government programs and social engineering and political leaders, and rely instead on the power of movements. Amen!

Fromm—who was born in the year 1900 and earned a PhD in sociology in 1922—prescribes that such movements should be furthered from groups/subcommunities of people who have character, deep convictions, are loving, are knowledgeable in relationship wisdom, and are great examples to emulate for the rest of society. These subcommunities would be connected to other subcommunities and, as a whole, would constitute the guts of the movement. These would be people who’ve attained the wisdom to live right and live happily, and others would learn from this and want the same for themselves. There would be no bureaucracies, government intervention, or social engineering to go woefully wrong. Democracy can hold such a movement happily enough, but democracy, as wonderful as it is, doesn’t automatically lead to transformative movements. The people must do this for themselves from the grassroots.

He sees the above as addressing the isolation that so many individuals face in the U.S. It allows individuals who care to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Registering for MC search and match

(Did we just hear someone say “MC”? See Why Register for an MC?. Fromm is basically—like the Tofflers—a guy way ahead of his time, an intellectual using his vast wisdom to lead the way to a benevolent future. This wisdom led him, in 1968, to describe MCs as the way to go to have such a future—a path of humanism and hope. It took until the mid-1980s for the author of The Big Answer website to come up with the MC concept—independently. But it is now 2017 and the evidence that has piled up supporting MCs as the best social structure of all has become overwhelming and undeniable. Read everything on our website—see for yourself! Fromm was a prescient genius!)

We are at a fork in the road, one fork toward the path of humanism and hope and wisdom, and the other toward neocon-led war, empire building, death, destruction, and environmental disaster. Choose.

Erich Fromm is a psychoanalist, psychologist and humanist with his PhD in sociology

Perhaps Fromm's certification as a psychoanalist as well as a psychologist, combined with his PhD in sociology, his tenure as a professor in various universities, his founding of the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in 1946 and Washington School of Psychiatry in 1943 put him in a unique position to see answers no one else could see—not that many people had such an extensive background in psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, sociology, religion, philosophy and humanism, and especially social psychology. In 1966, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year. He was a political activist in the international peace movement, fighting against the nuclear arms race.

Fromm was a prescient genius, conceptualizing core MC concepts in 1968—nearly 20 years before the author of The Big Answer website did

Like all of those who’ve demonstrated uncommon wisdom in the 20th century, he realized that authoritarianism is often the problem, never the solution. He was one of the first to realize, like Fritof Capra, that the ecological-holistic paradigm should replace the materialistically obsessed reductionistic-mechanistic paradigm. He was an early advocate of The Third Wave, with its knowledge as power, and win-win cooperation, and humanistic context, as opposed to the Second Wave, with its materialistic context and its mass man and power from wealth and coercion, although, of course, there were no such terms as the first, second, and third waves until the Tofflers coined them in their The Third Wave book in 1980. The Revolution Of Hope came out 12 years before that with some of the important concepts of Tofflers books—including his Powershift book. The Revolution Of Hope has some of the important key concepts of P.E.T., but it came out 2 years before Gordon's P.E.T. Parent Effectiveness Training book was published.

Fromm was for autonomy rather than conformity before most people had heard of these words. He advocated individuals being guided by the humanistic conscience of autonomous being rather than the mass-man guidance from the authoritarian conscience. His concepts reflect the best of Abe Maslow and David Riesman, and he taught people how to love one another better in his best-selling The Art of Loving. They broke the mold after they made Fromm. He was an original, a brilliant, prescient genius and one of the wisest people who ever lived.

Works by Erich Fromm

The art of loving
The Fear of Freedom
To Have or to Be?
The Sane Society
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
Man for Himself
Marx's Concept of Man
The forgotten language; an introduction to the understanding of dreams
Psychoanalysis and Religion
The Heart of Man
Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
You shall be as gods; a radical interpretation of the Old Testament
Beyond the chains of illusion: my encounter with Marx and Freud
The Revolution of Hope, Toward a Humanized Technology
The Art of Being
The Dogma of Christ
May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy
Greatness and Limitations of Freud's Thought
The crisis of psychoanalysis
The Art of Listening
Sigmund Freund's mission : an analysis of his personality and influence
Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium
On Disobedience: Why Freedom Means Saying "No" to Power
On Being Human
Love, Sexuality, and Matriarchy: About Gender
On Disobedience and Other Essays
The Pathology of Normalcy
Nature of Man (Problems of Philosophy)
Vom Haben zum Sein: Wege und Irrwege der Selbsterfahrung
For the Love of Life
Authentisch leben
(and dozens more German titles)