𝓜.𝓗

The crippling effect of giving status & wealth intrinsic value. Taken from my @medologyx lecture, "Leading in a Lost World", youtu.be/j47aqimmiZs?feature….

I was compelled to share the following excerpt from "The Art of Being" by Erich Fromm: "We must arrrive, then, at a first conclusion: In contrast to the generally accepted view, modern man is basically very helpless in relation to his world. He only appears powerful because he dominates nature to an extraordinary degree. But this domination is almost completely alienated; it is not the result of his real human powers but of the "megamachine", which enables him to achieve much without doing much or being much. Thus, modern man can be said to live in a symbiotic relationship with the world of machines. Inasmuch he is part of them, he is—or appears to be—powerful. Without them, standing by himself, using his own resources, he is as powerless as a little child. That is why he worships his machines: They lend him their strength, they create the illusion that he is a giant, when without them he is a cripple. When man in other ages believed that his idols gave him his strength, it was pure illusion, except that he projected his strength into the idol and received some of it back in the worship of it. In the worship of the machines it is basically the same. To be sure, Baal and Astarte were only what man thought they were; the idols were, as prophetic crtique put it, nothing but pieces of wood or stone, and their power was exclusively that of man's having transferred his own power to them and getting part of that power back from them. Machines, however, are not mere ineffective pieces of metal; they do create a world of useful things. Man is really dependent on them. But just as with the idols, it is he who invented, planned, and built them; they, like the idols, are the product of his imagination, of his technical imagination, which, coupled with science, has been able to create things which are realistically very effective—yet which have become his ruler."