When I started my journey into the world of what there is to know about us humans, I liked to go to one of the many second-hand bookstores in the town close to where I was living. For little money, you could buy a few books, and often I read the introduction and then decided if it was worth my time. One of these books was written By Erich Fromm, a German social psychologist with some provoking thoughts. The titles of some of his books speak for themselves: The Fear of Freedom, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics and The art of loving . From this last book, you can find some quotes and links to the pages of the book at archive.org

“Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his “personality package” with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.” The Art of Loving

“But actually, people want to conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies. Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.” The Art of Loving

“Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities and the connection that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable.” The Art of Loving