Fromm was a psychoanalysis professor who wrote many books on what life is all about. You do not necessarily have to agree with him.
For instance, people with to have personalities have a main focus: to have, to own, money, power, control of people and things. Even parents may have a to have personality. The children are the object of their power.
A to be personality is creative, projecting what is known. You act without thinking about possessing. If you are, the world is yours. You own something no one will have. It is something only you can understand. It transcends time. It sounds crazy, but it is not.
Asian thinkers go beyond to have and to be. They say that if you focus on achieving the to be personality, you will also achieve wealth as a by-product.
Fromm made an interesting comment in this regard. Spinoza (Dutch philosopher 1632-1677) was the first modern Western thinker to say that health and mental energy are the outcome of how we live. In other words, mental sanity, he says, is a manifestation of living well.
What is the right way to live? He believed that a to have personality, concerned mostly in accumulating wealth and achieving power, develops symptoms similar to sickness. This state eventually affects his/her health. These thinkers do not condemn wealth. What they are saying is that wealth (however you define it) is the outcome, not the objective of living.
George Dagnino,PhD
Editor, The Peter Dag Portfolio
Since 1977
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