Remembering The Sane Society: An American Lament

ABSTRACT

Erich Fromm’s book The Sane Society was published in 1955, the second year of President’s Eisenhower’s administration, but had a profound impact on the ideas and agendas of social activists during the 60s and 70s, including this author. Its central theses were that the middle-class prosperity characteristic of that era masked a “pathology of normalcy,” and that capitalism transforms active citizens into passive consumers by compelling people to fill their material needs in ways that are at variance with their existential or human needs. The result is a dramatic diminution of their critical faculties, an atrophy of conscience, and the proliferation of a “marketing character,” a kind of alienated, hedonistic lifestyle whose emptiness is palliated by the consumption of ever larger quantities of consumer goods. Fromm’s analysis still rings true in some respects, but the middle-class prosperity and bland uniformity of opinion he critiqued began to wane in the late 1970s, gradually giving way to sharp extremes of poverty and wealth. The resulting political polarization has now reached a critical point, where the future of American democracy – or what little is left of it – is now in peril. So, as we approach 2025, Fromm’s analysis of America in the mid-20th century must be updated and modified to fit the contours of contemporary social realities. In so doing, however, we discover that American society is even more alienated, more atomized and fragile than it was in Fromm’s day.

KEYWORDS:

• Alienation
• authoritarian populism
• consumerism
• the pathology of normalcy

When I was 15 years old, I was often struck by the dizzying assortment of books in my parents’ study. Neither of them had a university education, yet their library included works by Martin Buber, C. S. Lewis, Soren Kierkegaard, and Gershom Scholem, religious scholars who rubbed shoulders there with militant atheists like Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre. Poetry by John Milton, John Donne, William Blake and Robert Frost nestled alongside Omar Khayyam, Khalil Gibran, Rabindranath Tagore, Japanese Haiku, Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton. Novels by Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley accompanied Penguin editions of Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Zola and de Beauvoir, novelists Hugh McLennan, Mordechai Richler, William Falkner, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Books about Asian philosophy by Lao Tzu, Christopher Isherwood and D. T. Suzuki co-mingled comfortably with books by or about Malcolm X, I. F. Stone, essays by Arthur Koestler, and plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. Lastly, there were several books by Sigmund Freud. Carl Jung and Erich Fromm.

One day, out of curiosity, I picked up a copy of Erich Fromm’s book The Sane Society (Fromm, 1955). Despite my youth, I found it absolutely intriguing. As I neared the end of it, I told my English teacher what I was reading, and she invited me to do a book review of it to present to my classmates. The big day came, but only three, perhaps four of my classmates listened attentively (with grave expressions!) to my somewhat anguished presentation, while the remainder of the class – about 25 students – grew bored and restless, talking in stage whispers so I knew that their attention was elsewhere. Then, toward the end of my presentation, loud laughter broke out among the class clowns, who shared a hearty joke at my expense, and my teacher called my presentation to an abrupt halt. Not a very promising beginning!

It took a while to realize that the demoralization I felt subsequently was actually a symptom of alienation. That sense of alienation – from most of my peers at the time, and from the educational system that enveloped us all – intensified in the ensuing months, reaching a sickening crescendo one year later. So, in the summer of 1971, after months of vacillating, I dropped out of high school and enrolled in a “free school” modeled loosely on A. S. Neill’s experimental school Summerhill, where I focused on English, history and philosophy. After one year, I left that anarchic environment and my parent’s home as well, making a meager living on the fringes of the counterculture, offering Yoga and guitar lessons to raw beginners, working odd jobs in vegetarian restaurants, bakeries, gardening and landscaping companies, picking up new skills and new friends, including some gifted and creative people much older than I; people who introduced me to spiritual, political and psychotherapeutic ideas, practices and groups of various kinds.

My immersion in the counterculture lasted three years, during which time I studied psychology and political theory; often on my own, but sometimes in dialogue with friends who, like me, were intellectually curious but not keen on acquiring a university education. I read The Sane Society (Fromm, 1955) for solace and inspiration at least three times during my lengthy “psychosocial moratorium,” each time discovering something exciting or something new that hadn’t dawned on me on the previous occasion. Having re-read the book again later – twice more for my dissertation, which later became my first book – I no longer experience that lively sense of surprise when I thumb through its pages. Reading Fromm again is still a pleasure, but it is now like returning home to visit an old friend. But at the time, in a very real sense, The Sane Society (Fromm, 1955) provided the template for my future education. Indeed, I was so captivated by it that when I finally (and somewhat reluctantly) enrolled in university, I resolved to study the Bible and Greek philosophy, Marxism and utopian socialism, psychoanalysis and the social sciences, largely thanks to Fromm’s early influence.

What struck me then – and strikes me still – was Fromm’s contention that an entire society can be mad, and that “adjustment” to a deeply disordered society – one that is largely unaware of and indifferent to its own perversity – constitutes a “pathology of normalcy.” Of course, in this context, the term “normalcy” denotes something more akin to a chronic, low-grade deficiency disease than it does to genuine health. Normalcy – (more commonly referred to as normality, nowadays) – in Fromm’s sense entails the absence of severe inner or interpersonal conflict and glaring symptomatology, on the one hand, and a state of statistical averageness or conformity with prevailing cultural norms and expectations, on the other (Fromm, 1955).

Fromm sometimes called this mode of adaptation “automaton conformity”; a lifestyle that reduces internal suffering and ongoing tension or friction with one’s environment to a tolerable minimum, but only at the expense of one’s development as an honest, intact and responsive human being. As an alternative to this kind of socially patterned defect, Fromm advocated what Martin Luther King Jr. later called “creative maladjustment.” In a seldom cited address to the American Psychological Association’s annual meetings in September of 1967, less than a year before his assassination, the 38-year-old Reverend King said:

There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence. (King, 1967)

Reverend King then went on to propose the creation of an International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Sadly, he was far too engaged in the (still ongoing!) struggle for civil rights and voting rights for African Americans to create such an organization himself.

But the parallels between Fromm and Reverend King do not end here! On the contrary. Reverend King went on to say:

Men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream;” or as maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who in the midst of his vacillations finally came to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; or as maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, could scratch across the pages of history, words lifted to cosmic proportions, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice. (King, 1967)

Here then is another profound parallel between Reverend King and Erich Fromm. Though he declared himself to be an “atheistic mystic,” Fromm’s ethical sensibilities were rooted deeply in the Prophetic tradition. Despite the contemptuous dismissals he received from many “orthodox” Marxists who aligned themselves with Moscow, Fromm interpreted Karl Marx in this light as well, linking Marx’s concept of alienation to the Biblical concept of idolatry (Burston, 1991; Fromm, 1961). He often said that “Man does not live by bread alone” (Deuteronomy, 8:2–3), and claimed to be an atheist who was nevertheless doing “God’s work” through his unusual combination of scholarship and social activism. This rare combination of traits and talents won him many admirers during his lifetime, but prompted most members of the psychoanalytic profession to dismiss him as an oddity, an outlier or an intellectual lightweight out of envy, indifference or sheer spite. And no wonder! To the best of my knowledge, Reverend King called publicly on American psychologists to question adjustment to society and promote creative maladjustment on merely one occasion. Fromm called on psychoanalysts to do so repeatedly, throughout his entire career – first in The Sane Society (1955), then again, five years later, in Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (1962), and again in The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970) a decade after that. And by that time, by his own admission, his optimism for the human prospect and his belief in the “perfectibility” of the human species – a belief that I, for one, do not share – had dimmed appreciably. But to the end of his life, he maintained that the psychoanalytic profession’s reluctance or unwillingness to explore and address “the pathology of normalcy” represented a betrayal of the radical dimension of Freud.

As some may remember, Fromm’s concept of alienation was extremely influential in the fifties and sixties, and drew considerable inspiration from some posthumously published essays by the young Karl Marx known as The Paris Manuscripts or as The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Drawing on the master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Marx contended that human beings spontaneously seek to “objectify” their mental and physical powers in the products of their labor. The process of “objectifying” oneself in this voluntary way is a form of self-affirmation and self-expression that is highly prized in optimal circumstances. According to Marx, workers only become estranged from work, from others, from their own bodies and nature itself when they are rendered utterly expendable or virtually interchangeable with any number of their competitors in the labor market. Reduced to abstract “labor power,” their humanity is diminished and their individual contributions unrecognized, rendering them powerless to influence the process of production, the way their products are used or applied, and even claim their fair share of the rewards (Fromm, 1961).

Fromm’s “diagnosis” of alienation in The Sane Society certainly drew on Marx’s critique of classical political economy. But like the younger Marx, he also stressed that capitalism obligates people to fill their material needs in ways which, more often than not, are completely at variance with their existential or human needs; needs for core-to-core relatedness, for creativity and transcendence, for rootedness, identity and a framework of orientation and devotion, i.e. a sense of cosmological coherence and a moral compass. Instead of addressing those needs adequately, capitalism deforms the human spirit, inculcating the “normal” American citizen with hoarding and exploitative character traits, depicted in the character of the (as yet unrepentant) Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, thwarting their efforts to become fully human and alive, and to achieve self-actualization (Burston, 1991).

If the stingy, grasping, callous character of Scrooge typified the social character of 19th and early 20th century capitalism, Fromm said that the self-estrangement characteristic of more advanced capitalist societies is expressed through mindless consumerism and the proliferation of the “marketing character.” According to Fromm, it was this character orientation, and not authoritarianism, that constituted the “pathology of normalcy” of post-WWII America.

To grasp Fromm’s point here, remember that unlike a country fair or farmer’s market, the modern market is not a place of actual meeting – a place where consumers get to know the producers of goods, appraise their wares carefully, and negotiate directly with them. In modern (“mass”) markets, producers and consumers are utterly disconnected from each other, encircled on either side by armies of “middle men” involving supply chains and marketers. Moreover, in mass markets the packaging, presentation and advertising of goods assumes unprecedented importance. Since they cannot trust individual producers, whose work and products they know intimately, people now rely on brand names and labels, and in due course, image and perception start to overshadow reality in the judgment of most consumers (Fromm, 1947, chapter 6).

So unlike its ancient and medieval counterparts, the modern mass market is an utterly impersonal (though extremely complicated) mechanism that dictates to producers and consumers how – or even if – they can engage in their respective roles (Fromm, 1941/1965, 1955). And among the various commodities that are bought and sold in this context is human labor itself. Moreover, and more to the point, perhaps, people in search of stable employment in an anonymous and unpredictable labor market must market themselves aggressively to avert failure and unemployment, often regardless of their knowledge and ability (or lack thereof). Now making a “good impression,” having the right “personality” or creating the right image may become much more important to one’s survival than the possession of substantive knowledge or skill.

Quite apart from encouraging shameless self-promotion, mass markets for human labor compel workers to experience and treat themselves and others as commodities, or as mere bundles of attributes that may or may not be in demand at the moment, but are in any case bereft of any intrinsic value. Work performed under these circumstances is just as alienating as work performed in early industrial factory conditions, albeit for different reasons, and in different ways. Adults who work in conditions like these become desperately dependent on their currency and success to maintain their self-esteem. The kind of chronic, low-grade de-personalization they experience, and inflict on others in turn, prompts them to lose their critical faculties and their moral compass, and become “marketing characters” (Fromm, 1994, chapter 6). People like these are highly adaptable, often friendly and tolerant on the surface, but lack deep convictions, and are incapable of genuine love or intimacy. Their critical faculties are impaired, because they reflexively treat all opinions and points of view as being of equal value. And above all, they are inclined to follow the pleasure principle, and to palliate the pain of their aimless existences through the ceaseless consumption of consumer goods.

Fromm’s analysis of middle America in the mid-1950s had considerable merit. And much of it still applies today. That being said, it must be conceded that in 1955, when The Sane Society was published, America actually embraced a much kinder, gentler version of capitalism than the one we must endure nowadays. After all, in the post WWII economic boom, the middle-class was growing steadily, trade unions flourished, and low skilled or unskilled laborers, even high school dropouts, could find a trade and earn a decent living. They could even afford to retire in relative comfort and security, in most cases without acquiring a college degree. Income inequality was merely a fraction of what it is today, and while the threat of nuclear war loomed on the horizon, the degradation of our ecosystems and the devastating climate disasters occurring every day in some corner of the globe was merely the stuff of science fiction. Silent Spring, by Pittsburgh native Rachel Carson, gave us the first intimation of what lay in store for us, but was only published seven years later (Carson, 1962).

Finally, it bears remembering that The Sane Society was published halfway into the first term of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Presidency. As Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, Eisenhower fought fascism in the most direct way possible from 1942 until the war’s end. During two terms of office, from 1953 to 1961, he completely de-segregated the American Armed Services, famously sending Federal Troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling to integrate schools in 1954. He was also known to say: “There must be no second class citizens in this country” – (a sentiment that is clearly not shared by President Trump and his followers) – and left office issuing a prescient warning to American citizens about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”

Despite Fromm’s support for Eisenhower’s Democratic rival, Adlai Stevenson, and despite Fromm’s penetrating critique of consumerism and conformity in the 1950s, I hope I am forgiven for saying that, in some respects, Eisenhower’s America was comparatively sane by contrast with the United States today. Comparisons like these are risky, of course, because the mindless conformity and bland uniformity of opinion that distressed Fromm – and many of his perceptive contemporaries – is nowhere to be found in America now. In the time that elapsed between the Eisenhower and Trump administrations, the American electorate became intensely polarized; more so than at any time since the American Civil War. Partisan politics have become so deeply envenomed and entrenched that any sense of the common good seems to have vanished from the political scene. Authoritarian populism, brazen corruption and wild conspiracy theories are so prevalent that we are now teetering on the brink of fascism, and a complete breakdown of the rule of law.

To grasp how far we’ve regressed since the Eisenhower era, just consider Donald Trump’s incoherent foreign policy, his fervent embrace of tyrants, and his contempt for America’s intelligence agencies, which sounded the alarm about Russia’s (ongoing) attempts to undermine our democracy. President Eisenhower would never have countenanced that! Consider the fact that Trump crippled the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory capabilities, though ever escalating climate disasters and looming mass extinctions (our own included) are approaching from just over the horizon. Consider Trump’s shrill demonization of racial minorities and the country’s failure to pass sensible gun legislation to curb mass shootings in our schools (The list goes on and on …).

Moreover, consider the reports (from reliable sources) that Trump utters at least 12 or 13 falsehoods a day. Who knows precisely how many of Trump’s distortions are deliberate lies, and how many are the products of delusions, self-deception and confabulation? Certainly not me. But many of his lies, big and small, are obviously calculated to deflect blame and anger away from himself and toward external scapegoats in classic authoritarian style. Furthermore, during his term in office, and in complete defiance of the American constitution, Trump claimed more than once that he has all the authority, but bears none of the responsibility for the rising death toll which made the United States, the wealthiest country in the world, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. No clearer statement of Trump’s anti-democratic attitude or intentions could be possible. In genuine democracies, executive authority and responsibility always go hand in hand – a fact which no previous President would have had the effrontery to deny. (As Eisenhower’s predecessor, President Truman, said famously: “The buck stops here”). And though Trump’s support may be weakening, the fact that so many Americans still pledge their unwavering support to him is a frightening commentary on American culture, and attests to the steep (and accelerating) decline of public education here since The Sane Society was published.

Let’s face it. Until recently, most people believed that the hallmark of a good education – be it a religious, scientific or humanistic education – was a truth-loving disposition. The idea that a truth-loving disposition is a product of – or alternatively, perhaps, a prerequisite to – a deep and sound education begins with Socrates and Plato, and is closely linked to a belief in the emancipatory power of truth, or the idea that “The truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). During the early 20th century, Mahatma Gandhi stressed another closely related theme that animated many brave and committed activists, namely, that a truth-loving disposition and a loving disposition are closely aligned; that hatred flourishes among lies, but is greatly diminished by the power of truth. Is this a logically demonstrable proposition or a testable hypothesis?

No, probably not. But even if some of Trump’s falsehoods were inadvertent, the product of wishful thinking or an overactive imagination, the torrent of nonsense he unleashed daily on Twitter and Fox News created a wave of hatred and violence in the United States unlike anything we’ve seen since the resurgence of the KKK in the second and third decades of the 20th century. Unlike Donald Trump, who seemed comfortable spewing lies incessantly, President Eisenhower would probably have been embarrassed if he had uttered as many as 13 falsehoods over the course of an entire year, never mind a single day. And he made a determined effort to govern by diminishing, rather than intensifying, class and racial divisions in the United States. The contrast could not be starker. Indeed, at the end of the day, Trump’s paranoid and divisive rhetoric resembles that of Eisenhower’s shabby contemporary and rival, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, a hate-mongering publicity hound who delighted in amassing power by destroying lives, and whose assistant, the infamous Roy Cohn, was actually Trump’s political mentor in the 1980s.

Had they lived long enough to witness this sickening spectacle, Fromm’s erstwhile colleagues, Horkheimer and Adorno, would have described Trump and his base as “pseudo-conservatives,” rather than the real thing. Indeed, Horkheimer wrote that:

… a true conservatism which takes man’s spiritual heritage seriously is more closely related to the revolutionary mentality, which does not simply reject that heritage but absorbs it into a new synthesis than it is to the radicalism of the Right which seeks to eliminate them both. (Horkheimer, 1972, pp. viii–ix)

Fromm did not actually utter these words, but these were his sentiments exactly. Granted, conservatives value cultural cohesion and continuity over reckless and headlong efforts to change society and discard the past. But as Fromm frequently reminded us, many things in our cultural heritage are intrinsically worth preserving, and we do ourselves and our children a disservice if we imagine that our ancestors’ ideas, insights and accomplishments should be discarded on the dust-heap of history. “History is bunk”, said industrialist Henry Ford. So, let’s not forget that in 1938, as the world lurched toward the bloodiest conflict in human history, Adolf Hitler awarded Henry Ford the Grand Order of the German Eagle, the highest honor he could bestow on a non-German civilian.

Whatever else we may say about it, capitalism is a social system that relies on relentless and incessant technological innovation to promote competition and profit. Surely that has not changed. And as Marx observed long ago, dramatic technological upgrades in our means of transportation, communication, in manufacture and medicine, which are often greeted as unmixed blessings, invariably transform our modes of relatedness to others and to our natural environment – what little is left of it! – in dramatic, unexpected and often adverse ways, creating unforeseen crises; newer, deeper forms of estrangement and self-estrangement that are even more difficult to fully understand and address, much less to reverse. Think, for example of the transhumanist or posthumanist movement, as it is sometimes called.

In 1934, Lewis Mumford, one of Fromm’s favorite American thinkers, discerned what he said is an inexorable movement in human history toward the eventual merger of men and their machines, and said that in the future, most people would probably greet this eventuality as “progress” (Mumford, 1934). This grim prediction seemed far-fetched at the time but is now on the verge of coming true. And many extremely wealthy and influential people are doing everything in their power to hasten that day (God help us!). If their efforts do effect a merger of man and machine, as seems likely, it will intensify our collective derangement, our alienation from nature and our own raw humanity in ways that we can only imagine at present (Burston, 2017).

With all these worrisome developments unfolding right before our eyes, we may ask ourselves, is the world even more alienated, more insane than it was in Fromm’s day? Is there still a chance of saving democracy and creating a sane society? The answer to the first question, I believe, is undoubtedly “yes.” To the second question, I fear it is only – “well, perhaps.” But one thing is certain. If our kind are going to survive the 21st century, we must acknowledge our losses carefully, not idealize the past, or succumb to the lure of nostalgia, looking back too fondly on the “good old days.” That is no way forward.

With those thoughts in mind, consider the popularity of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, whose book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, became a runaway bestseller in 2018. Peterson commands a vast and adoring online following, and recommends a return to 1950s’ masculinity codes and approaches to parenting young children (Peterson, 2018). He blames the current crisis in the Liberal Arts entirely on the Left, and counsels young people to refrain from criticizing the world (and to avoid activism of any kind) until they have actually “accomplished something”, by which he means become gainfully employed, married with children (Burston, 2020). He probably has scant respect for brave and outspoken teenagers like Greta Thunberg, Emma Gonzalez, Alex Wind and their counterparts and supporters around the world, who are determined to recall our sick and ailing world to its senses, to stop climate change and gun violence. (Shame on them, and on their parents, Peterson seems to say).

So, looking back from my personal vantage point, the book I read for solace and inspiration as a teenager has become a sad reminder of how deeply the West has regressed as a culture since the mid-20th century. And this massive cultural regression coincides with unprecedented (and accelerating) technological progress! Meanwhile, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Empire, globalization and the ascendance of neo-liberal economic policies, the rise of the internet – none of these things bestowed the blessings and benefits we were promised they would. If anything, they have done the opposite, unleashing a Pandora’s box of social and political evils we are still ill equipped to understand, much less to contain or remedy effectively.

Another factor that contributes mightily to our current malaise are the neo-liberal economic policies unleashed in the Clinton era, which create undreamed of wealth for a tiny fraction of the world’s population, and economic stagnation or a steep decline in standards of living for the vast majority of the world’s population. Of course, the United States is not alone in this respect. All across the globe, the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth generates political instability, because centrist parties are increasingly identified with policies that promote the interests of the proverbial 1% at the expense of ordinary citizens. The diminished trust in mainstream political parties fuels extremism on both sides of the political spectrum. In addition, rising sea levels and prolonged periods of drought caused by climate change are causing catastrophic weather events, failing crops and chronic shortages of food and water. These steadily deteriorating environmental conditions are already feeding into violent conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, sending large waves of refugees to Europe and the United States seeking asylum.

In the midst of these convergent and overlapping crises, the Far Right exploits the sense of victimization felt by middle and working class people by providing them with scapegoats in the form of refugees from other cultures (or minorities in their midst) who are depicted as dangerous or expendable, rather than as full-fledged human beings who are entitled to dignity and human rights. Indeed, the far Right has persuaded a vast swathe of middle and working class voters all across the world to deny or ignore the existence of climate change, and to turn on those who are even more unfortunate and vulnerable than themselves, vilifying those members of society that still insist on fair and decent treatment for those who are most harmed by climate change, corruption and crime, rather than addressing the root causes of our social and economic ills. As a result, xenophobia, nativism, and hostility to immigrants, minorities and indigenous peoples run rampant, propelling far right nationalist and populist governments to power in India, Israel, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Turkey, and the Philippines. Furthermore, parties that embrace and espouse these attitudes are steadily gaining popularity, and pose serious electoral challenges to ruling parties and governing coalitions throughout Europe and Scandinavia.

What would Fromm say about our current situation? Honestly, I am not sure. Though he was prescient in many ways, Fromm may not have anticipated either the severity or the complexity of the dilemmas we face today. Why? Perhaps because in 1955, when The Sane Society was published, he (and many of his contemporaries) really imagined that middle-class prosperity was actually here to stay.

In any case, whatever its shortcomings, I remain deeply grateful for The Sane Society. What a gift Fromm gave us! The high hopes he cherished for humanistic social transformation in the 1950s, which kindled so much activism and innovations in the 1960s and 1970s, may seem absurdly optimistic in retrospect. But living as we do in the midst of a world-wide pandemic, many people hope that the lifestyle changes imposed on us by collective lockdown, and the increased awareness of the failings and inequities of contemporary capitalism (especially in the United States) will help to rekindle our humanistic values and galvanize the population to press legislators and politicians to save and transform our dying world for the better. Let us pray they are right. Only something like this can prevent our collective descent into chaos.

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Daniel Burston

Daniel Burston, Ph.D., holds doctorates in Social and Political Thought and Psychology from York University, Toronto, and teaches psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991), Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Postmodern University (Palgrave MacMillen, 2020) and Anti-Semitism and Analytical Psychology: Jung, Politics and Culture (Routledge, 2021). More recently, he co-edited an anthology entitled Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis: From the Frankfurt School to Contemporary Critique (Routledge, 2022) with Jon Mills.