On Disobedience_ Why Freedom Means Saying _No_ to Power - Erich Fromm [13]
Working hours have been reduced from seventy to forty hours per week in the last hundred years, and with increasing automation an ever-shorter working day may give man an undreamed-of amount of leisure. Basic education has been brought to every child; higher education to a considerable percentage of the total population. Movies, radio, television, sports, and hobbies fill out the many hours which man now has for his leisure.
Indeed, it seems that for the first time in history the vast majority—and soon all men—in the Western world will be primarily concerned with living, rather than with the struggle to secure the material conditions for living. It seems that the fondest dreams of our forefathers are close
to their realization, and that the Western world has found the answer to the question what the “good life” is.
While the majority of men in North America and Western Europe still share this outlook, there are an increasing number of thoughtful and sensitive persons who see the flaws in this enticing picture. They notice, first of all, that even within the richest country in the world, the U.S.A., about one-fifth of the population does not share in the good life of the majority, that a considerable number of our fellow citizens have not reached the material standard of living which is the basis for a dignified human existence. They are aware, furthermore, that more than two-thirds of the human race, those who for centuries were the object of Western colonialism, have a standard of living from ten to twenty times lower than ours, and have a life expectancy half that of the average American.
They are struck by the irrational contradictions which beset our system. While there are millions in our own midst, and hundreds of millions abroad, who do not have enough to eat, we restrict agricultural production and, in addition, spend hundreds of millions each year in storing our surplus. We have affluence, but we do not have amenity. We are wealthier, but we have less freedom. We consume more, but we are emptier. We have more atomic weapons, but we are more defenseless. We have more education, but we have less critical judgment and convictions. We have more religion, but we become more materialistic. We speak of the American tradition which, in fact, is the spiritual tradition of radical humanism, and we call “un-American” those who want to apply the tradition to present-day society.
However, even if we comfort ourselves, as many do, with the assumption that it is only a matter of a few generations until the West and eventually the whole world will have reached economic affluence, the question arises: What has become of man and where is he going if we continue on the road our industrial system has taken?
In order to understand how those elements by which our system succeeded in solving some of its economic problems are leading to an increasing failure to solve the human problem, it is necessary to examine the features which are characteristic of twentieth-century capitalism.
Concentration of capital led to the formation of giant enterprises, managed by hierarchically organized bureaucracies. Large agglomerations of workers work together, part of a vast organized production machine which, in order to run at all, must run smoothly, without friction, without interruption. The individual worker and clerk become a cog in this machine; their function and activities are determined by the whole structure of the organization in which they work. In the large enterprises, legal ownership of the means of production has become separated from the management and has lost importance. The big enterprises are run by bureaucratic management, which does not own the enterprise legally, but socially. These managers do not have the qualities of the old owner—individual initiative, daring, risk-taking—but the qualities of the bureaucrat—lack of individuality, impersonality, caution, lack of imagination. They administer things and persons, and relate to persons