"Common sense is not so common," remarked Voltaire more than two centuries ago. Much later Thornton Wilder, in his play The Matchmaker , endowed one of his characters with the belief that "ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion." Not only does man's reason seem to be stunted, but according to Erich Fromm ( The Sane Society , p. 154), "it is striking to see how his intelligence has developed and how his reason has deteriorated. ... Even from the 19th century to our day, there seems to have occurred an observable increase in stupidity." Arthur Koestler sounded even more pessimistic when he wrote ("Man�One of Evolution's Mistakes?" p. 9) that man is "certainly not a reasonable being; nor are there any indications that he is in the process of becoming one." Whom did these famous people have in mind when they said such awful things? Obviously, they were talking about the majority of us, that is, the public, the crowd, the masses.

With regard to the accumulating problems faced by contemporary society, the majority of people could be divided into three basic categories: (1) those who are ignorant and, therefore, still somewhat innocent; (2) those who are unable to understand and, therefore, somewhat hopeless; and (3) those who understand but don't give a damn about what is going to happen to our world and future generations. But today, in the age of communication and computer technology, adults can no longer excuse their attitudes and actions by pleading ignorance, and those who do are either stupid or immoral or both. To understand things clearly, one needs to think, but thinking nowadays is not generally considered a useful and productive occupation. Some people don't even have time to think because they are too busy making their living; others are unwilling or afraid to think because that would make their lives more complicated. Instead, they simply react to the contingencies of life. ©

4.2  Herd Mentality, Conformity

Having already established man's tendency towards animality, we should examine specific examples of the consequent behaviour. First, there is the urge to gather in groups. The larger the group, the safer, braver, and stronger we feel, since, as we know, animals seek safety in numbers. Conversely, when left on their own, many people feel insecure, out of their element. That is why they like to participate in all kinds of gatherings, such as parties, picnics, jamborees, and, of course, demonstrations. For them, according to Fromm ( The Sane Society , p. 64), "... the sense of identity rests on the sense of an unquestionable belonging to the crowd." In actual fact, people lose both their individuality and rationality when swept along by the crowd. They become more suggestible and are more easily manipulated by leaders (politicians, activists, militants, gurus, preachers, role models, superstars, etc.). On the other hand, the crowd is also capable of self-excitation and can explode into violence and destruction, such as riots. A very apt description of this phenomenon was given by Huxley in his book Brave New World Revisited (pp. 34-37):

"Groups are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own, and is capable of anything except intelligent actions and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They become very excitable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called `herd-poisoning.' Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extroverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness... Virtue and intelligence belong to human beings as individuals freely associating with other individuals in small groups. So do sin and stupidity. But the subhuman mindlessness to which the demagogue makes his appeal, the moral imbecility on which he relies when he goads his victims into action, are characteristics not of men and women as individuals, but of men and women in masses. Mindlessness and moral idiocy are not characteristically human attributes; they are symptoms of herd-poisoning."

4.3  Idolatry

Primitive man worshipped gods and idols most likely because he had very little understanding of how nature worked and what caused such horrifying phenomena as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, thunderstorms, fires, floods, eclipses, etc. He invented gods and idols because he was ignorant and afraid of nature. Thanks to his powers of imagination, man believed that there existed in nature strange invisible animal- and humanlike creatures that were responsible for those phenomena and had to be appeased in various ways (including animal and human sacrifice) so that they would not cause harm to man.

Although mankind has made enormous progress over the millennia, accumulating experience and knowledge, this primeval urge still lingers in man's subconscious, making him continue to look for idols to worship and identify with, often through religion and art. But today his idols and gods are not so much the sun, the moon, statues, figurines, and drawings, but movie stars, rock musicians, professional athletes, talk-show hosts, and other entertainers and celebrities. In their shadow, ordinary people, too, feel they are somebodies. It doesn't matter whether the idol is a decent person or scum, honest or crooked, intelligent or stupid. The talents and skills with which nature endowed the idols (free of charge, by the way) are considered a much more valuable commodity than human dignity. Knowing this, the idols charge their worshippers exorbitantly for sharing nature's gift with them. Even worse, the mindless public allows the new "gods of fun" to assume the image of role models for our children and brainwash them into believing that wealth, fame, power, and fun are authentic human values worth living for. Some of the secular humanists, "free-thinkers," and atheists, who view religion as the source of all our troubles while tolerating or accepting modern idolatry, are as guilty of ignorance or stupidity as the rest of the public. It was probably to them that Fromm appealed when he wrote ( The Sane Society , p. 305): "Is it not time to cease to argue about God, and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry?"

4.4  Hedonism, Consumerism, Materialism

Western society operates largely on the principle that an individual has the inalienable right to live as luxurious a life as he or she can, limited only by the amount of wealth acquired. That is, if you have enough money, you can own as much land, as many production facilities, buildings, homes, cars, boats, etc., as you can buy, regardless of how you have come into possession of your fortune as long as you have not directly broken the existing law. Thus money opens up unlimited possibilities for experiencing all kinds of pleasure, for satisfying any desire, whim, or fantasy one may have, including sex and drugs. Unlike old times when kings and nobility wallowed in luxury behind the impenetrable walls of their castles, the nouveaux riches of today practise hedonism openly, generously sharing (albeit only through movies and television) their experiences of pleasure, including dirty and intimate details of their private lives, not only with the less fortunate masses in their own relatively prosperous countries, but also in the poorest of nations all over the world. Today the whole world knows what to crave and what happiness is all about. Billions of people learn about it by watching on TV the endless sagas of Dynasty , Dallas , and other similar trash. When they don't have to think about their own survival, they think and dream about acquiring things and getting rich so that they can afford more pleasures. "As to men's notions of the good or happiness," remarked Aristotle, "it seems... that the masses, who are the least refined, hold it to be pleasure, and so accept the life of enjoyment as their ideal."

Western economy spends an enormous amount of resources on creating innumerable products and services whose only "value" is to give the sensation of pleasure (luxury cars, fashionable clothes, jewelry, expensive restaurants, endless entertainment, glossy magazines, useless gadgets, etc.). A new phenomenon has been created�consumerism. Now people live to consume. For many, buying things has become a source of pleasure, a habit, a routine, or an addiction. "Modern man," wrote Fromm ( The Sane Society , p. 123), "if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them. He would wander around open-mouthed in this heaven of gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were ever more and newer things to buy, and perhaps that his neighbours were just a little less privileged than he." Industry ensures at any cost that there are "ever more and newer things to buy," which is not only a drain on the planet's resources, but also a source of environmental pollution. It is very sad that people like Ralph Nader, a popular American consumer advocate, waste their energy and charisma on protecting the interests of the insatiable consumer�whom Fromm refers to as "... the eternal suckling with the open mouth" ( The Revolution of Hope , p. 40), thereby actually promoting consumption and waste instead of calling for reasonable moderation.

Although the Marxist-communist philosophy, whose underlying principle is materialism, has denounced the West for its capitalist-bourgeois ideology based on idealism, both capitalism and communism, according to Fromm ( The Sane Society , p. 311), "are thoroughly materialistic in their outlook, regardless of Christian ideology in the West and secular messianism in the East." Soviet communists, who claimed to be building a new society, promised the masses a materialistic paradise�an unlimited supply of goods and services, "to each according to his needs." The industrially developed countries of the West could be much closer to that goal if it were not for one stubborn factor, namely, that in the absence of reason, man's attachment to material values knows no bounds. There will never be things enough for everybody, all the more so because of the on-going population explosion. If we don't reexamine our values, eventually the entire history of human civilisation will amount to a huge collection of high-tech scrap and antiquities and piles of toxic garbage. "The materialism, prevalent in our system," said Fromm ( May Man Prevail? , p. 129), "corrodes the sense of meaning of life in the young generation and leads to cynicism. Neither religion, humanist teaching, nor Marxist ideology is a sufficiently strong antidote�unless fundamental changes occur in the whole society."

4.5  Acquisitiveness, Greed

As one saying goes, "the richer you are, the greedier you are." I am not sure if that is true for most of us, but the modern consumer does seem to be, according to Fromm ( Escape from Freedom , p. 136), "always restless, always driven by the fear of not getting enough, of missing something, of being deprived of something. He is filled with burning envy of anyone who might have more."

What is the origin of greed? I don't think that man is born greedy for things, because at the time of his birth he is not even aware of their existence, though he surely is born with instincts for food. Greed is a sickness. Just as an animal that is greedy for food would become physically sick from overeating, so a human being that is greedy for things would become mentally sick from overstocking. As Spinoza remarked over three hundred years ago, "... factually, greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although usually one does not think of them as `illness.'" We catch this disease from society. In an acquisitive, selfish society run by capital, it is in the interests of the consumer-goods industry and of the enormous parasitic advertisement business to propagate through the wanton entertainment media the notion that greed is a natural human trait not to be ashamed of and even necessary for a more rapid progress of the economy and public welfare. No wonder corruption and deception are rampant amongst politicians and government bureaucrats.