To Have or To Be

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To Have or To Be

To Have or To Be (date) is a book by Author Name. It [insert description with references to LP concepts where appropriate]

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Overview

Introduction — "The Great Promise, Its Failure, and New Alternatives"

Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (1976), pp. 1–12.

The End of an Illusion

The Great Promise of the industrial age — unlimited progress, domination of nature, material abundance, maximum happiness, unrestricted freedom — operated as a secular religion, replacing the City of God with an "Earthly City of Progress." In LP terms, this religion of Progress is the legitimating ideology of the Regime of Accumulation: the structured system through which an Accumulating Class extracts Labour Value, propped up by a Mode of Reproduction (schools, media, religion, family) that naturalizes its logic. The Promise has failed on four counts: unrestricted satisfaction of desire does not yield well-being; individuals have become cogs in bureaucratic machines, manipulated by government, industry, and mass media; progress remains confined to rich nations while the global gap widens; and technical progress has produced ecological destruction and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Why Did the Great Promise Fail?

The failure rests on two psychological premises built into industrialism — in LP terms, the operating ethics of the Regime:

1. Radical Hedonism — the doctrine that life's aim is maximum pleasure, defined as satisfying any desire one happens to feel. Fromm contrasts this with the classical "Masters of Living", who distinguished subjectively felt wants from objectively valid needs whose fulfillment produces genuine well-being. This maps directly onto the SpiritWiki distinction between Seven Toxic Needs and Seven Essential Needs, needs whose sufficient satisfaction is required for a human being to mature, stay healthy, and realize full potential. Modern consumer society is history's largest hedonist experiment; the data are in, and it produces lonely, anxious, depressed, dependent people. The premise persists because the Regime requires it: twentieth-century capitalism runs on maximal consumption and growth, to the detriment of all life and even the planet.
2. Unlimited Egotism — the claim that selfishness and greed produce harmony and collective welfare. False: the egoist's character — insatiable, antagonistic, envious — guarantees class war and, globally, international war. "Greed and peace preclude each other."

These premises required an eighteenth-century rupture: economic behavior was severed from ethics, the economy became an autonomous machine, and the operative question shifted from "What is good for Man [sic]?" to "What is good for the growth of the system?" The system then legitimized itself with a false anthropology — egotism, selfishness, and greed declared innate. Fromm reverses this: these traits are products of social circumstances, not natural drives. (Maslow, cited approvingly on the SpiritWiki, reached the same conclusion: such impulses are "acquired and not instinctive," sick reactions to frustrated needs. This is the Regime's core ideological move: manufacture a damaged, compliant character structure, then call it human nature.

The Economic Necessity for Human Change

The character structure the system breeds is pathogenic — it produces sick people and, aggregating upward, a sick society. Fromm adds a second, harder argument from the Club of Rome reports (Meadows et al.; Mesarovic and Pestel): only drastic global economic change can avert catastrophe, and that change is possible only given "a new ethic and a new attitude toward nature" (p. 9). Human transformation is no longer merely an ethical demand but a survival condition:

"For the first time in history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of the human heart. However, a change of the human heart is possible only to the extent that drastic economic and social changes occur that give the human heart the chance for change and the courage and the vision to achieve it." (p. 10)

Is There an Alternative to Catastrophe?

Why the paralysis? Fromm offers three explanations: leaders stage conferences and resolutions that anesthetize conscience while changing nothing; system-generated selfishness makes leaders value personal success over social responsibility — greed "makes people stupid" even about their own interests; and the required changes feel so drastic that people prefer future catastrophe to present sacrifice (Koestler's warm-villa anecdote). A fourth cause motivates the book: the belief that no alternatives exist beyond corporate capitalism, Soviet-style socialism, or technocratic "fascism with a smiling face" — a belief sustained because nobody has seriously studied or tested new social models. The book's task is that analysis: the two modes of existence, having and being, as the foundation for a New Man [sic] and a New Society — or, in LP terms, the replacement of the Regime of Accumulation with a system oriented to needs satisfaction and connection.

Chapter I — "A First Glance: The Importance of the Difference Between Having and Being"

Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (1976), pp. 15–27

Setup

Common sense says having is natural: one must have things to live; a person can be "worth a million dollars." Yet the great Masters of Living — Buddha, Jesus, Master Eckhart, Marx — made the having/being alternative central: the goal is to be much, not to have much. Fromm's thesis: having and being are two fundamental modes of experience whose respective strengths determine individual character and social character (p. 16).

The Having Mode

Definition: in the having mode, one's relationship to the world is "one of possessing and owning, one in which [one wants] to make everybody and everything, including [oneself], [one's] property" (p. 24). Possession extends beyond things to knowledge, people, ideas, feelings.

Three illustrations:

• The flower test (pp. 16–19). Tennyson plucks the flower "root and all" to understand it — and kills it. Basho only looks carefully, letting it live; Goethe transplants it. Tennyson relates in the having mode (possession, even of knowledge); Basho and Goethe in the being mode.
• Language (pp. 20–22). Western speech increasingly replaces verbs with nouns: "I have a problem" for "I am troubled"; "I have insomnia" for "I cannot sleep." Activities cannot be possessed, only experienced; noun-speak eliminates the experiencing I and replaces it with an owned it — a marker of alienation. Marx and Engels made the same point against Bauer: turn love into a noun, a "goddess," and the loving person becomes a worshiper of an idol.
• Etymology (pp. 22–23). Many languages lack "to have" (Hebrew: jesh li, "it is to me"). Benveniste: "I have" develops with private property; societies with functional property — possession for use — do without it. Having is historical, not natural.

Consuming as having (pp. 26–27). Incorporation is the archaic form of possession; consumerism is its unlimited modern form — "swallowing the whole world." Consumption relieves anxiety but demands ever more, since each act quickly loses its satisfactoriness. The modern consumer's formula: I am = what I have and what I consume (p. 27).

The Being Mode

Fromm distinguishes two senses (p. 24):

1. Being as aliveness and authentic relatedness to the world — the mode "in which one neither has anything nor craves to have something, but is joyous, employs one's faculties productively, is oned to the world" (pp. 18–19). This is precisely the terrain of the SpiritWiki's Seven Essential Needs, and in particular the seventh need, Connection — which splits into Outer Connection (authentic relatedness to other people, community, and nature — Basho "one-ing" himself with the flower) and Inner Connection (alignment of the Bodily Ego with one's Spiritual Ego, the highest Self). The having mode starves both, undermines, destroys well being: possessions substitute for relatedness, and the experiencing self disappears into what it owns.
2. Being as essence versus appearance — from the Indo-European root es: "that which is authentic, consistent, true" (p. 24). To say something is refers to its true nature, not its deceptive surface.

Being is becoming. Against Parmenides, Plato, and the scholastics (being as permanent substance), Fromm sides with Heraclitus, Hegel, and the Buddha: "Living structures can be only if they become; they can exist only if they change" (p. 25). There is no being that is not at the same time becoming. This maps onto the SpiritWiki's concept of The Unfolding — the cosmos itself as the ongoing unfolding of consciousness, an eternal process rather than a fixed creation. Fromm's being-mode person is a local instance of that cosmic process: alive, changing, growing — a verb, not a noun.

Chapter II: Having and Being in Daily Experience

Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (1976), pp. 29–47

Property-centered society makes the having mode look like the only possible orientation, but it is not. Fromm demonstrates both modes through ordinary activities. The general pattern: having treats experience as a possession to be stored and defended, used against others; being treats it as an alive process to be entered and changed by.

Having is a process of accumulation.

Being is a process of unfolding.

• Learning. Having-mode students transcribe, memorize, and own statements; the material never becomes part of their thinking, and new ideas threaten their fixed stock. Being-mode students listen actively, respond, produce; they are different after the lecture than before (pp. 29–30).
• Remembering. Having-mode memory is mechanical association and external storage (notes, photographs — "alienated memory"); being-mode memory re-creates the experience, bringing it back to life (pp. 30–33).
• Conversing. Having-mode talkers defend opinions as property and display their "wares" (status, knowledge, connections); being-mode talkers prepare nothing, hold nothing back, respond spontaneously — dialogue ceases to be an exchange of commodities and becomes a shared coming-alive (pp. 33–34).
• Reading. One can consume a book for plot and answers, or read productively as a conversation with the author. Education trains the former: students acquire "cultural property" — they can repeat Plato but not question him (pp. 35–36).
• Authority. The key distinction: having authority versus being an authority. Rational authority rests on competence and fosters growth in others; irrational authority rests on power and exploits. In hierarchical societies, competence migrates into titles and uniforms — alienated authority propped up by propaganda that dulls critical thinking (pp. 36–39).
• Knowledge. "I have knowledge" versus "I know." Having knowledge is stockpiling information; knowing is penetrating surfaces, shattering illusions, enlightenment, common thread in the Buddha, the prophets, Jesus, Eckhart, Marx, Freud, and all those who operate in being-mode Optimum knowledge in the being mode is to know more deeply; in the having mode, to have more knowledge (p. 41).
• Faith. Having-mode faith is possession of an unproven answer, administered by a bureaucracy, traded for certainty — and God, so possessed, becomes an idol. Being-mode faith is not belief that but an inner orientation — one is in faith rather than has faith; its certainty rests on one's own experience, not submission (pp. 41–44).
• Loving. There is no such thing as "love" — only the act of loving: caring, knowing, responding, affirming; a process that increases aliveness. Having-mode "love" confines and controls the beloved. The courtroom example is marriage: courtship is being (each gives, attracts, lives, mutual satisfaction of needs); the contract converts the partner into property, effort stops, boredom begins, and the couple settles for jointly owning things — "a corporation in which the two egotisms are pooled" (p. 46).

Chapter III: The Testaments and Master Eckhart

Fromm shows the having/being alternative is the underground current of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

• Old Testament (pp. 48–53). Its central command: leave what you have; free yourself from all fetter; be! Abraham is ordered to abandon land and clan. The desert is the key symbol — the place of nomads who own only necessities. The manna story legislates against hoarding ("each gathered according to what he could eat" — to each according to their needs). (p. 49).
• The Shabbat is the tradition's purest being-institution: a day on which nothing is built or destroyed, no property is transferred, and one lives "as if one has nothing, pursuing no aim except being" (p. 51). The Messianic Time is the unending Shabbat: possession rendered meaningless. The Golden Calf is the counter-symbol — the people, unable to bear not-having, melt their gold into a visible idol.
• New Testament (pp. 54–59). More radical still: a movement of the poor that condemned wealth and power outright. The oldest gospel stratum ("Q") demands total liberation from the having structure — renunciation of property, of one's own rights, of judging others; all positive ethics rooted in being, sharing, solidarity. In the temptation story, Satan is the representative of consumption and power; Jesus, of being — and "not-having is the premise for being" (p. 57). The church fathers (Justin, Tertullian, Basilius, Chrysostomus) continued the condemnation of avarice and private luxury.
• Master Eckhart (pp. 59–65). The sharpest analyst of the two modes. His "spiritual poverty": one who wants nothing, knows nothing, has nothing — not asceticism but nonattachment. Wanting nothing = no craving, not even for God. Knowing nothing = forgetting that one knows — knowledge as penetrating activity, never as possession or dogma. Having nothing = not being bound to anything one owns, including one's own ego (Ich-bindung, "egoboundness"). Freedom from egoboundness is the condition of love and productive activity. Eckhart's being is "life, activity, birth, renewal, outpouring" (p. 65) — activity in the classic sense of expressing one's powers, not modern busyness. Fromm's generalization: in the having mode, what matters is not the objects craved but the attitude; anything — rituals, good deeds, knowledge — becomes "bad" when clutched into a chain (p. 64).

General statements across both chapters: Having is fundamentally an attitude, not an inventory — its object is interchangeable. Having deadens: it converts processes into things, persons into property, self into stock. Being enlivens: it is productive, responsive, processual; its precondition is the courage to let go of ego and possession.

Chapter III: The Testaments and Master Eckhart

Fromm shows the having/being alternative is the underground current of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

• Old Testament (pp. 48–53). Its central command: leave what you have; be! Abraham is ordered to abandon land and clan. The desert is the key symbol — the place of nomads who own only necessities. The manna story legislates against hoarding ("each gathered according to what he could eat" — to each according to their needs). The Shabbat is the tradition's purest being-institution: a day on which nothing is built or destroyed, no property is transferred, and one lives "as if one has nothing, pursuing no aim except being" (p. 51). The Messianic Time is the unending Shabbat: possession rendered meaningless. The Golden Calf is the counter-symbol — the people, unable to bear not-having, melt their gold into a visible idol.
• New Testament (pp. 54–59). More radical still: a movement of the poor that condemned wealth and power outright. The oldest gospel stratum ("Q") demands total liberation from the having structure — renunciation of property, of one's own rights, of judging others; all positive ethics rooted in being, sharing, solidarity. In the temptation story, Satan is the representative of consumption and power; Jesus, of being — and "not-having is the premise for being" (p. 57). The church fathers (Justin, Tertullian, Basilius, Chrysostomus) continued the condemnation of avarice and private luxury.
• Master Eckhart (pp. 59–65). The sharpest analyst of the two modes. His "spiritual poverty": one who wants nothing, knows nothing, has nothing — not asceticism but nonattachment. Wanting nothing = no craving, not even for God. Knowing nothing = forgetting that one knows — knowledge as penetrating activity, never as possession or dogma. Having nothing = not being bound to anything one owns, including one's own ego (Ich-bindung, "egoboundness"). Freedom from egoboundness is the condition of love and productive activity. Eckhart's being is "life, activity, birth, renewal, outpouring" (p. 65) — activity in the classic sense of expressing one's powers, not modern busyness. Fromm's generalization: in the having mode, what matters is not the objects craved but the attitude; anything — rituals, good deeds, knowledge — becomes "bad" when clutched into a chain (p. 64).

General statements across both chapters: Having is fundamentally an attitude, not an inventory — its object is interchangeable. Having deadens: it converts processes into things, persons into property, self into stock. Being enlivens: it is productive, responsive, processual; its precondition is the courage to let go of ego and possession.

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Author Books

• Man for Himself
• To Have or To Be

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