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Rabbi Nobel as Youth Leader
(2024)
Should We Hate Hitler?
(2024)
Erich Fromm is not generally associated with policy positions and politics. Yet, Fromm was an early proponent of guaranteed income as an important practical entitlement necessary if greater human freedoms were to be realized. The article traces the development of the idea of basic (or guaranteed income) in US social movement history going back to the 1960s and including the writings of Erich Fromm on this topic. It argues that the concept of guaranteed income flows easily from, and is consonant with, Fromm’s humanistic philosophy overall. Four reasons are offered, including those that are politically, ethically and pragmatically oriented, as to why providing basic income to all citizens has major advantages over the kind of economic precarity and anxieties that many people currently experience. Lastly, after making a multi-dimensional case for guaranteed income, the article responds to a common objection – namely, if basic income became universally available, people would not wish to work. Quite to the contrary, and as empirical experiments have shown, Fromm’s ideas suggest that guaranteed income would encourage people to work with increased commitment and passion and that more positive than negative consequences would ensue from the concept becoming a widespread and much more generally accepted public policy.
This article reviews Fromm’s view of human nature that is the basis for his existential humanism. Fromm’s core idea was that the combination of minimal instinctual endowment, enormous expansion of our neocortex, and being born in a helpless state created a set of existential contradictions or dichotomies. The main contradiction or dichotomy is being part of nature yet transcending it by being aware of our mortality. Not being able to go back to the previous “harmony” with nature, humans must develop their capacity for reason, symbolic capacities, imagination and human solidarity or regress to symbiotic and incestuous ties. I make two main arguments. I show that instead of losing our instincts, humans retain three social instincts that we share with other social species, namely attachment instincts (and forming attachment bonds), affiliation to groups (group instinct) and sexual instincts. I show how these three instincts have been significantly transformed in relation to our great ape relatives making us a more flexible, adaptive, cooperative and ultrasocial species. Second I describe a new evolutionary paradigm in which genes and culture coevolve and influence each other, also known as the dual inheritance model. The main effect of this dual inheritance is that cultures, like genes, transmit information and knowledge from one generation to the next. The cumulative effect of cultural knowledge transmitted through thousands of generations is that we develop new modes of production, new technologies, art forms, and new cultural rituals and practices. To which we must adapt. This new view of what made us human puts Fromm’s view of human nature and his radical humanism on a stronger sociobiological foundation. I close by making the argument that our group instinct is both our greatest strength and greatest weakness, making us a species with a >genius for good and evil<.