In an essay entitled “The Present Human Condition”, Erich Fromm observed that our modern society “needs men who cooperate easily in large groups, who want to consume more and more and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience, yet are willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction; men who can be guided without force, led without leaders, be prompted without aim… This kind of man, modern industrialism has succeeded in producing.” Harsh words, but accurate.

Flash forward to the year 2009 and do we see any demonstrable change in our lives? Do we resemble those remarks?

Well, I must confess, the description is too apt for my liking. After reading that essay, I began to think about my own life, and the lives of the people around me. We all seem so stressed out, beaten down. There seems to be less time than ever to do more.

Well, more communicating, for one thing. In 1955, the major pathways of communication by individuals were by letter, for the exchange of less time sensitive communications, or by phone, for more immediate needs; mass communication was accomplished by television and radio. Computers were only found in large, corporate settings because technology was too big to carry. In 2009, we have television, personal computer internet, fixed landline telephones and portable cellular phones, as well as other, fading technological options, such as pagers (why have a pager if you can call someone directly?).

We are more connected through more technology than we have ever been. But are we communicating? I see people walking down the street talking, constantly talking; I hear what is being said, but lot of what I hear is rather mundane. Sometimes, I would rather not hear what is being said, but I don’t seem to have a choice. I went to the movies last week, and even after the pre-movie announcement told people to turn off their cellular phones, there were incoming calls and people answering them, reflexively.

Email is a wonderful invention! I love being able to send a friend a message and get one back so much more quickly than by old fashioned letter. But, these days, I find, my friends don’t have much time to reply to my messages, because they have too much to do, and too many other messages that need to be sorted through. Occasionally, I get an email that contains a software destructive virus, gumming up my computer, or otherwise causing expense and inconvenience. Or, because I belong to a group that I want to keep in touch with, we exchange emails because phone conversations between multiple members is not as functional. On the other hand, a 30-60 email thread is sometimes less effective than a five minute discussion with one or two of the key players.

Letters are very old fashioned, so much so that no one has time to write them any longer. One must wonder if future archeologists will be able to discover any footprint at all from the present generation, as regards day-to-day life. The Post Office delivers only advertising circulars and bills to my door, as well as packages of things I have ordered by; if it were not for the advertising circulars, the Post Office would have to quit operations.

If I am in a waiting room for some sort of appointment, I am greeted by a plasma television screen that broadcasts an endless stream of infomercial about procedures, products, ways to prepare vegetables or chatty witticisms. It is rather alarmingly like the two-way telescreens in Orwell’s 1984. Frighteningly enough, all of this loud technology has been made just for me, to satisfy my desires and to allow me freedom of choice.

The phone rings, and we answer. The email comes, and we answer. The text message comes, and we answer. The bill comes in the mail, and we pay it, and while we are writing checks, we respond to the direct mail request from one of dozens of charity requests we might receive during a week. We sort our garbage into different colored bins, and line them up on the street. Absently. Reflexively.

It occurred to me, at some point, that I spend too much time communicating not very much of substance and even more time following up on loose threads of communications. Reflexively, absently, we serve our technology; our technology does not serve us.

The Modern Myth of Connectivity, Cohesion and Community

There is no mistaking the fact that the average person has become caught up in the sticky web of the “information age.” The biggest sales pitch of the late 20^th Century was that the “information super-highway” would connect people to more of the information that they crave, and that it would, moreover, all be free! In the great American tradition of “keeping up with the Jones,” the public has joined en masse in a run of materialistic hubris that has yet to play itself out. With technological advances dictating ever shorter and shorter times between the next best proprietary version, not just the United States, but every so-called “advanced” or “developed” society that has embraced the computer age has been culpable in contributing to polluting the planet in what may be an irreparable way, and has furthered defined the “anatomy of human destructiveness” that Erich Fromm observed and theorized about throughout his work, particularly in Escape From Freedom, The Sane Society and To Have Or To Be.

The pay-off for this has been what I call the myth of greater connectivity, cohesion, and community. While it is truly marvelous and useful to be able to reach a friend or business colleague on the other side of the world by phone or email, perhaps a lot of our communication that way is not so urgent. In reality, we have become spastic post-modern prisoners of our gadgets and gizmos. We are, in our Facebook world, tethered to Blackberries, iPhones and various species of laptops, just as unfulfilled and isolated as ever we were. We flinch at the first jingle of our cell phones and answer them reflexively, no matter what we are doing or who we are with. Texting has replaced face-to-face conversation. The cynical joke is that we now have more technologically advanced ways to evade contact with other people than ever before. The modern existential dilemma is that we live in fear of being out of touch. We live in fear.

Because we are so focused on our personal image of being up-to-date and “with it”, we have really trapped ourselves in little technological bubbles of false self-importance, losing sight of the world around us, cutting ourselves off from deeper connections with people. We have put the responsibility for defining ourselves and for understanding the world around us on others.

Craving for deeper connection, we are easily manipulated in the marketplace and also, by extension, at the polling places. This manipulation occurs in the most cunning way. The general message is usually something like, “we have what you want, and we want you to have it!” And we have fallen for it hook, line and sinker. “Freedom of choice!” the ad banners loudly proclaim.

How is has this been accomplished? Don’t laugh (for one thing, it is not funny!), but behavior analysis of organizations and behavior modification. We are back to B.F. Skinner and the operant perspective, but expanded to account for political behaviors. Kacmar and Baron (1999) observed that political activities have two common aspects: (1) actual motivations behind behaviors are often hidden from the target of the behavior and (2) political behaviors tend to occur when there is competition over limited resources, perhaps especially when there weak or unclear rules as to how the resources are to be allocated. Political behaviors are either enacted toward the upper end of a hierarchy or networked laterally.

Political Action at the Click of a Mouse

Since 1996, facilitating political action by computer has become a big business trend. The 2008 presidential election saw greater use of political websites than ever before. The non-profit world of “causes” was probably at the forefront of this movement toward electronic politics, offering information about causes. Some sites are more interactive than others. The on-line PAC MoveOn.org has developed an interesting “political talk” approach, definitely of the persuasive variety. Interested parties add their email addresses to the list serve, and the PAC keeps the list serve primed with all the latest news and information. Barber (1984) noted that when political talk is limited to persuasion, where individual participants do not have the freedom to participate with equality of reciprocity, the service to democracy is thin.  The approach of MoveOn.org is interesting in that it appears to allow participants the opportunity of face-to-face discussion via local parties and discussion groups (where funds can be raised), but there is little evidence that participation in these groups ultimately results in a group consensus. Instead, the consensus is directed from the top by the use of persuasive email campaigns that often start with a complaint about something “the opposition” has done that should outrage us in some way (for example, a few months ago, I received a message that started out: “Did you hear what Rush Limbaugh said about Obama’s recovery plan?”). The participants are then asked, no—actually, they are directed—to write in to their Congress people or sign a petition.

These are very effective campaigns of persuasion, but do they serve a greater democratic consensus or are do they actually serve a more shallow democracy? And if the latter is true, who are the people defining our democratic action for us (first massaging us by telling us they know we are thoughtful and responsible and reasonable people) telling us what we should be thinking and how we can act on behalf of whatever that is? Could this be lobbying masquerading as democracy?

But, PACs are not the only political entities making use of persuasive political talk. Think about all the email you receive from your Congress persons. Somewhere along the line, you signed up or you wrote in, and your email address was captured, so that you are on the list-serve of some politico who sends you personal notes at intervals. Do they have time to do this? No, of course not. They are busy doing their work. And have press aids or other assistants to write these informative, and sometimes persuasive, letters about the latest legislation they want you to support.

Our Choices, Made By Others

While we are busy keeping up with all the messages from all their various streams and avoiding our work by playing computer solitaire, we are missing what is going on in plain sight. It starts at the municipal level and in the workplace, and permeates every aspect of our living:

We have put our faith in our municipal civic leaders to make decisions on how best to run our communities. We don’t tend to watch these activities closely, we are busy with other things. Then we find out that our city is going bankrupt because the city staff has sold out to developers.

We have put our faith in our union leaders to make decisions that are in our best interest. We let them tell us how to vote, we let them lead collective bargaining. We don’t tend to watch these activities closely because, well, we are working and we think, this is why we have leaders, so that they can look out for us. Then we find out that our leaders have collectively bargained our jobs to other shores, dealt away our health care benefits and pilfered our pensions.

We put our faith in our government regulatory agencies to provide safeguards for our health and safety. They are professionals, we think to ourselves, and we don’t have time, like they do, to do the studies and all the reading. Then we find out that expensive drugs have been put on the market (and widely advertised by all our communication streams) that cause greater health risks than the conditions that the drugs were supposed to alleviate. But we don’t find this out until lots of people end up in the hospital or, worse, die.

We put our faith in our political party leaders to know what we want, what is good for everyone, what is equitable and just. This is why we belong to the party—we don’t have time to keep up with all the issues that our party leaders are on top of day in and day out. We vote they way the party tells us to vote. And then we find out that the party that we have had faith in doesn’t have the backbone to vote in a way that makes life equitable and just.

All Systems Failing

I walk down the street in my town, and the streets are in bad shape; maintenance has been deferred, because the town does not have the money to make the repairs. And even if the town had money to make the repairs, they had to layoff the workers who would do the work.

The cable company keeps double billing me. I call in, but have to wade through a complex phone system to get a customer service person who can talk to me incoherently about my bill. In the old days, there was a line you could call for billing, a line you could call for service; now there is a single phone number and an alphabet soup of exchanges one must make by push button on the phone to direct the call to the right person. Once you get to “the right person” chances are you will be redirected to yet another individual—and the phone connection might be lost, so you have to start the entire process over again.

The Internal Revenue Service reminds me of the telephone exchange in Kafka’s The Castle, where you speak into the receiver, but it is unclear if anyone is at the other end of the line and no one answers your query; in the case of the IRS, you send in paperwork that is never acknowledged, but requests for more paperwork and more money come to you, and none of them ever seem to find true resolution, but lead instead to further requests. There is no way for an individual to investigate what is happening or not happening, and one cannot work with a single agent to resolve an issue from beginning to end. There is no way to determine if what is being done on your case is accurate or inaccurate, just or unjust.

What I allude to, by way of these vague hypothetical examples, is that we believe we live in a land that proclaims freedom and choice. But our choices are determined for us, perhaps most of all by large companies who stock miles of store shelves with consumer items we must purchase if we want to prove to our neighbors that we are free and have choice. Now that I have purchased the plasma television that is digital, not analog, I am told that I am sucking up too much of our precious energy and that this is bad, but there is no going back—analog is gone now. Was that a real choice?

I am free and have the choice to pay for sustainable housing, health insurance, college education, the latest technological gizmos, the ecologically sound car, organic snack foods. But what does this mean? And if I cannot afford to do this, what will happen to me? If society cannot afford to do these things, what will happen to it?

Where This Leaves Us and What Can Be Done

If you think the foregoing assessment has been cynical and unrealistic, let me give you a concrete example from current events: healthcare. For the first time in 8 years, we have an opportunity to finally, after nearly 20 years, get a national healthcare plan. Or do we? Our elected, Democratic Party leaders are working on our behalf, making national healthcare a reality for all people who live in the United States. Or are they?

The reality is that ours is a republic, not a democracy. Our representation can be democratically chosen, and should be—but the system is not democratic. We tend to ignore many of the details at the start of an election process, and vote at the end of it reflexively, based on our party affiliation more than any other reason, as if we don’t have any choice in the matter. And the truth is, we don’t have any real choice, for we have largely given over our personal power to someone or something beyond ourselves.

What is the solution to this dilemma? Well, there is no easy, push the button solution—that is certain. A start is to recognize that our choices are really quite few. We cannot complacently live as blind operatives within an incoherent system—and as if we asked for the system to be that way! No, we must stop acting reflexively, and look away from our technology out at the world, applying critical thought, rather than cute consensus twittering, to things we have too long taken for granted and given over to others to do, without oversight.

Where do we begin? Well, take that popular slogan, “think globally, act locally” and put it into practice when thinking about what your real choices are, and what you want them to be. Any global real choices that we want, we should want them not just for ourselves, but for everyone: clean air, clean water, healthy food, affordable housing, healthcare, meaningful work for a living wage. We need to want that, and work for it where we live; knowing that we can only closely tend our own garden. If we start by working locally, by becoming truly informed on local matters and acting toward what we believe to be in the best interests of everyone, we will be less likely to act reflexively at the ballot box.

© 2009 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen*

Barber, Benjamin R. (1984) Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Fromm, Erich. (1955-56) The American Scholar, Vol. 25, No. 1

Kacmar, K.M., & Baron, R.A. (1999). Organizational politics: The state of the field, links to related processes, and an agenda for future research. Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management, 17, 1-39.

* Elisabeth T. Eliassen is a poet, musician and arm-chair scholar living in Alameda, California.