"We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them"
About this Quote
Fromm lands the knife where modern life pretends it has skin: our relationship to the world has been flattened into use. “A world of things” isn’t just consumer clutter; it’s a diagnosis of consciousness. The line turns on “only connection,” a deliberately absolute phrase that forces a bleak inventory of what counts as contact. Not understanding, not care, not reverence, not even curiosity - just manipulation and consumption, the twin verbs of an economy that treats reality as a vending machine and the self as its hungriest customer.
The subtext is moral but not preachy. Fromm isn’t scolding people for liking objects; he’s warning that a society organized around having will quietly erode the capacity for being. When the primary skills we’re rewarded for are extracting value and optimizing utility, everything else starts to look irrational: lingering, listening, repairing, honoring limits. Even relationships can slide into this logic - networking as consumption, intimacy as a kind of personal “use case.”
Context matters: Fromm is writing out of mid-century capitalism’s triumphal phase, with mass production, advertising, and Cold War technocracy remaking everyday life. As a psychoanalyst and humanist, he’s tracing how social structures shape inner life: alienation isn’t merely a feeling but a training regimen. The brilliance of the sentence is how it implicates us without letting us hide behind abstraction. If “only connection” is manipulation or consumption, then the crisis isn’t scarcity. It’s impoverished attention.
The subtext is moral but not preachy. Fromm isn’t scolding people for liking objects; he’s warning that a society organized around having will quietly erode the capacity for being. When the primary skills we’re rewarded for are extracting value and optimizing utility, everything else starts to look irrational: lingering, listening, repairing, honoring limits. Even relationships can slide into this logic - networking as consumption, intimacy as a kind of personal “use case.”
Context matters: Fromm is writing out of mid-century capitalism’s triumphal phase, with mass production, advertising, and Cold War technocracy remaking everyday life. As a psychoanalyst and humanist, he’s tracing how social structures shape inner life: alienation isn’t merely a feeling but a training regimen. The brilliance of the sentence is how it implicates us without letting us hide behind abstraction. If “only connection” is manipulation or consumption, then the crisis isn’t scarcity. It’s impoverished attention.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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