"The love of life is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group. The person who has a love of life prefers to construct rather than to retain. He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new rather than to find confirmation of the old. He loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty. He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations. He wants to mold and to influence by love, reason, and example; not by [...] the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things. Love of life is so much a biologically given quality in man that one should assume that, aside from a small minority, it can always come to the fore, although usually only under special personal and historical circumstances. We need to create the conditions that would make the growth of man, this unfinished and uncompleted being - unique in nature - the supreme goal of all social arrangements. Genuine freedom and independence and the end of all forms of exploitative control are the conditions for mobilizing the love of life, which is the only force that can defeat the love for death." - Erich Fromm in "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness"
Posted on: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 22:57:46 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015