Go Back   Flash Flash Revolution: Community Forums > General Discussion > Critical Thinking
Register FAQ Community Calendar Today's Posts Search

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 07-14-2007, 11:15 PM   #1
Kilroy_x
Little Chief Hare
FFR Veteran
 
Kilroy_x's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Colorado
Age: 32
Posts: 783
Send a message via AIM to Kilroy_x
Default Desire for social order as Pathology

The truth is that all human passions, both the "good" and the "evil," can be understood only as a person's attempt to make sense of his life. Change is possible only if he is able to "convert himself" to a new way of making sense of life by mobilizing his life-furthering passions and thus experiencing a superior sense of vitality and integration to the one he had before. Unless this happens he can be further domesticated, but he cannot be cured. But even though the life-furthering passions are conducive to a greater sense of strength, joy, integration, and vitality than destructiveness and cruelty, the latter are as much an answer to the problem of human existence as the former. Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint. He can be called a warped and sick man who has failed to achieve a better answer to the challenge of having been born human, and this is true; he can also be called a man who took the wrong way in search of his salvation.

These considerations by no means imply, however, that destructiveness and cruelty are not vicious; they only imply that vice is human. They are indeed destructive of life, of body and spirit, destructive not only of the victim but of the destroyer himself. They constitute a paradox: they express life turning against itself in the striving to make sense of it. They are the only true perversion. Understanding them does not mean condoning them. But unless we understand them, we have no way to recognize how they may be reduced, and what factors tend to increase them.

Such understanding is of particular importance today, when sensitivity toward destructiveness-cruelty is rapidly diminishing, and necrophilia, the attraction to what is dead, decaying, lifeless, and purely mechanical, is increasing throughout our cybernetic industrial society. The spirit of necrophilia was expressed first in the literary form by F.T Marinetti in his Futurist Manifesto of 1909. the same tendency can be seen in much of the art and literature of the last decades that exhibits a particular fascination with all that is decayed, unalive, destructive, and mechanical. The Falangist motto, "Long live death," threatens to become the secret principle of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine constitutes the very meaning of progress, and where the living person becomes an appendix to the machine.

This study tries to clarify the nature of this necrophilous passion and the social conditions that tend to foster it. The conclusion will be that help in any broad sense can come only through radical changes in our social and political structure that would reinstate man to his supreme role in society. The call for "law and order" (rather than for life and structure) and for stricter punishment of criminals, as well as the obsession with violence and destruction among some "revolutionaries," are only further instances of the powerful attraction of necrophilia in the contemporary world.

Quotes taken from "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness" by Erich Fromm.


Questions: In what sense does Fromm use the word Necrophilia?

How applicable are classical Psychological perspectives in the face of modern biological information, including population thinking?

What are some possible examples of the desire for "law and order" being placed above respect for life?

What are some alternative explanations for the behaviors Fromm lists?
Kilroy_x is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)
 

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump



All times are GMT -5. The time now is 11:50 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.1
Copyright ©2000 - 2021, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright FlashFlashRevolution