The Sane Society
Fromm offers a complete and systematic exploration of his "humanistic psychoanalysis." In so doing, he counters the profound pessimism for our future that Freud expressed and sets forth the goals of a society in which the emphasis is on each person and on the social measures designed to further function as a responsible individual.
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7recommend
12mentions
8people
2012–2023years
83% recommend17% neutral
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- If you're looking for more, i have some recommendations for longer stuff around personal growth and insights:
- Erich Fromm, The Art Of Loving. It's about how love (romantic, interpersonal) is not rosy but hard, hard work. All of Fromm's writing is amazing, but this one (for me) had the most personal impact. Another great one is Fromm's The Sane Society.
- Kishimi/Koga's The Courage To Be Disliked. It's classified as self-help, but it's more a pop-psychology summary of Adlerian Psychotherapy. We can choose not to be the product of trauma, or our surroundings. We may get pushed into negative corners by our upbringing, but then we get too comfortable in those negative corners to push ourselves out. The title alludes to a person who has no friends and has a negative image of himself, maybe he's that lonely because he is afraid of being rejected/disliked. He is lonely and miserable, but he is comfortable in the loneliness. It takes courage and hard work on yourself to move out of those holes.
- Hillman/Ventura's We've had a Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy And The World's Getting Worse. In a nutshell, the problem is not always with the individual, often it's just the environment; mindfulness will only get you so far if the house is on fire.
- Becker's The Denial Of Death. We know we die but we don't realise that. How do we generate meaning in the presence of death? There are 'good' (a life project, pushing societies' boundaries) and 'bad' ways (hedonism, drugs etc.). What are the necessary illusions we should create for ourselves to keep pushing?
- Social philosophy/psychology, or cultural anthropology, is mind-bending to me.
Erich Fromm's The Sane Society - on how society impacts people's mental health, and how to build towards a sane society
Fromm's The Art Of Loving - an analysis of different kinds of loves, trying to dispel pop culture's lies about love, and love is actually hard work
Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death - on how not our fear, but our complete denial of death existing leads to the weirdest outcomes in our society
Then there's political stuff -
Orwell's Essays, any large-ish collection. I find Orwell to be a much, much better non-fiction writer than fiction writer. Extremely insightful into political processes.
Robert Caro's books, perhaps the first The Years Of Lyndon B Johnson. Can't get better insights into how power works on a local and not-so-local level.
Popper's Open Society and its enemies, hard to summarise - a defense of Western society in light of the then-ongoing WW2. You probably saw the paradox of tolerance a few times pop up, that's from that book, among a ton of other stuff.
- > If you're interested in Weber, you might find Erich Fromm interesting as well
I did read his "Sane Society" just recently and he was almost like a revelation to me, I didn't know about "Escape From Freedom" and the story behind it, I'll sure be checking it out, thanks for the recommendation!
- "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, "To Have or to Be?" and "Sane Society" by Erich Fromm, "Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt, and before that several books by Sebastian Haffner about the Nazis, who also had a very keen eye for the things that truly mattered, as unflattering as they are.
- Great picks. I started Coddling this week - I've learnt so much already. Incredibly insightful. Haidt's Happiness Hypothesis was the best book I'd read in a while, also highly recommended. It's about much more than just happiness, but how our mind/self/consciousness/emotions work.
Escape from Freedom (also known as Fear of Freedom) is great, as are a lot of Fromm's books. He's my favourite psychologist, and by a long way favourite Frankfurt School writer. I also love Man for Himself, The Sane Society, To Have or To Be, The Art of Loving. He's wonderfully BS-free, combining insights into psychology, society, work, politics etc.
- Some books I enjoyed and which could be beneficial:
- Borges' Aleph, and his essays (for example Other Inquisitions). He was fascinated about concepts programming is famous for now, he would have loved recursion
- Mann's The Wizard And The Prophet. He uses the life of two highly influential scientists (Borlaug and Vogt) as exemplars for two ways of viewing progress, one highly focused on technological progress, one being sceptical of technological progress
- Wachter-Boettcher's Technically Wrong, about implicit biases in modern technology and how that excludes or mistreats people. Some good lessons if you want to start a company and get as many customers as possible ;) Similar book with more academic stringency: Weapons Of Maths Destruction
- Roman's Writing That Works, non-fiction/memo/email advice from big advertising guys, lots of good advice on getting your point across
- Fromm's The Art Of Loving & The Sane Society, two non-fiction books from a sociologist/psychologist on how to work on your relationships (i.e., love as a movie concept doesn't exist, it's mostly very hard work and self-critique), and how society as a whole has very broken goals. Becker's The Denial Of Death (on how fear of death is a major drive in life) comes from a similar place
- Wilson's How To Teach Programming - delves deeply into the psychology of learning and how to build stable communities, it's available for free so why not
- Statistics books are always good to mend your thinking! My favorite layman's introduction is Motulsky's Intuitive Biostatistics (no formulas, plain English), for a non-practitioner Wheelan's Naked Statistics is probably better
- Seth Godin wrote lots of good business books, pick one (I liked Linchpin)
- If you haven't read them yet, get the 'classics' of software management: The Mythical Man-Month, and Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
- Cuckoo's Egg is a marvellously fun non-fiction book about a programmer tracking a hacker in the 80s, one of the first international computer crime cases, featuring tons of fun low-tech hacks
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