“Most people pretend that they are happy, even to themselves because if you are unhappy, you are considered a failure. So you must wear the mask of being satisfied or happy because otherwise you lose credit on the market, you’re no longer a normal person or a capable person.”

—  Erich Fromm

Kontext:
Most people pretend that they are happy, even to themselves because if you are unhappy, you are considered a failure. So you must wear the mask of being satisfied or happy because otherwise you lose credit on the market, you’re no longer a normal person or a capable person. But you just have to look at people. You only have to see how behind the mask there is unrest, irritability, anger, depression, insomnia, unhappiness, what the french called “malaise”: already at the outset of the century one spoke of “malaise of the century”. This is what Freud called “the unease in culture”. But it’s not the unease in culture, it’s the unease in bourgeois society that turns people into workhorses and [ignores] all that is important: the ability to love, to be there for oneself and others, to think, not to be a tool for the economy, but the end of all economic activity. That is what makes people the way they are.

I think it’s a common fiction that people share, that the modern person is happy. But this isn’t only my observation, it can be found in a range of people, and you only need to open your eyes yourself and not be deceived by appearances.
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Last update April 22, 2025. History

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Erich Fromm 119
German social psychologist and psychoanalyst 1900–1980

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„A nyní se zeptám zvláštní otázku: kdo je tím nejpilnějším biskupem a duchovním v celé Anglii, který ve své úřadě převyšuje všechny ostatní? Mohu vám říci, že vím, kdo to je, znám ho dobře. (…) Řeknu vám to: je to ďábel. Ten je tím nejpilnějším kazatelem ze všech, je vždy ve své farnosti, přebývá zde každého času, nikdy ho nenaleznete nečinného. (…) A jeho úřadem ke stavět překážky náboženství, zachovávat pověrčivost, ustanovovat modlářství a učit všemožné papeženectví. (…) Ó, kéž by naši duchovní byli tak pilni rozsévat sémě dobrého učení jako je Satan pilen rozsévat koukol.
[(en) And now I would ask a strange question: who is the most diligentest bishop and prelate in all England that passeth all the rest in doing his office? I can tell for I know him who it is; I know him well. (...) I will tell you: it is the devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all other; he is never out of his diocese; he is never from his cure; ye shall never find him unoccupied. (...) And his office is to hinder religion, to maintain superstition, to set up idolatry, to teach all kind of popery. (…) O that our prelates would be as diligent to sow the corn of good doctrine as Satan is to sow cockle and darnel.]“

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Dílo
Source: LATIMER, HUGH. Sermons by Hugh Latimer, sometime Bishop of Worcester, Martyr, 1555. Cambridge University Press, 1844. S.70-1. Dostupné online https://archive.org/stream/sermonsbyhughlat01lati#page/70/mode/2up/ (anglicky).

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