Fromm Here to Dystopia: Orwell, Afterward

i.

Kicking around our pad like many others is a paperback copy of 1984. For the heck of it in the doctor’s waiting room this week I read the Afterword there, written by Erich Fromm.

Fromm was a shrink who shrunk from Freud’s more strident theories on human behavior, theorizing that ‘freedom’ was a more essential part of the human complex than Siggy said.

[Truth Be Told [TBT]:I confused Erich Hoffer with Eric Fromm, as they both found a spot in the same cell in my brain… Hoffer was the author of The True Believer, a look at doctrinal Soviet-era communism, and was known as the Longshoreman Philosopher.

But Google set me right, and now I put Fromm and Hoffer into different brain cells. David Hofstetter was even more helpful in this.]

Fromm in Afterword places 1984 as chief among Dystopian works…tho the term he uses in 1961 is ‘negative utopia’. Utopian works beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, writes Fromm, build on a trust in Progress that arose as the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance. The shock to the system that was World War I opened the gates of Dystopian Fiction, and 1984, he continues.

George Orwell's 1984 he views as the expression of a mood and it is a warning - the mood it expresses is that of near despair about the future of man it's a mood that began to find traction after the senseless bloodbath of World War One in the 20th century “when millions died for the territorial ambitions the European powers” under the banner of making the world safe for democracy.

This stuff has a resonant ring today, right?

A special flavor to Orwell's treatise, Fromm notes, is its consciousness of the nuclear and thermonuclear bomb. To stop worrying and live: it's been a full-time job for civilization ever since its inception. But the darkness of the 1984 bomb has given way to something else. Just a reminder: Russia's President Vladimir Putin last Thursday took a co-pilot's seat in a nuclear-capable strategic bomber - but the Western world little noted.

ii.

When we read 1984 in school, it was clear that its indictment of de-humanism was not just aimed at Soviet Communism’s Totalitarian Oppression. This world of “Doublethink” [“the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one's mind, believing them and disbelieving them at the same time”] for the purpose of control and manipulation had its twin in the corporate culture of the day.

Writes Fromm: The West was becoming a “…centralized managerial industrial society of an essentially bureaucratic nature motivated by materialism only slightly mitigated by truly spiritual or religious concerns.”

That was also the take of the counter culture, the hippies, Woodstock Nation, or the Youth Movement – pick one. Like the IBM card, we did not want to be bent, folded or mutilated. I see the era as campaign for Renaissance in the spirit of humanism. What’s so funny?

If either Erich Fromm or Eric Hoffer came back down from the Valhalla of Psychology and asked me ‘Que pasa?,’ I’d say that All the bits and pieces of 1984 Fromm points to are jostled around in a different way today. There is massive distrust of systems, there is sense of media manipulation, there is epic materialism, there is lots of believing/disbelieving at the same time.