Are we wolves, sheep, or merely half-awake children?

[coberst]

Are we wolves, sheep, or merely half-awake children?

“It seems that the majority of men are suggestible, half-awake children, willing to surrender their will to anyone who speaks with a voice that is threatening or sweet enough to sway them.—Fromm

If we, women and men, are merely sheep then why is our history so different from a sheep-like society? Even the half-awake child will note that our history has been written in blood. Such a situation has led people, such as Hobbes, to say “man is a wolf to his fellow man.

Is it our true nature to be wolves and only inhibitions prevent us from exposing our fangs? I do not think so, for there are countless opportunities each day to bare our vicious fangs if such was our nature. There are many possible explanations for this conundrum.

Building things only to destroy them and killing others seems to be our human purpose. But massive destruction and killing are really the result of leaders who seek to further their own interests. These leaders are no different from you or I; it is the power they hold that makes it possible for them to escalate the ordinary selfish motives we all harbor. “The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind—not the fiend or the sadist.

Of course Hitler alone did not threaten civilization; he required the herd of citizens who harbored passions of hate and fear to act as an accomplice to destruction and death. Fromm sites the three forms of human orientation as being the fault that makes such a history of destruction possible.

A ‘syndrome of decay’ that “prompts men to destroy for the sake of destruction, and to hate for the sake of hate form the basis for “the most vicious and dangerous form of human orientation; these are love of death, malignant narcissisms, and symbiotic-incestuous fixation.

Would you say that humans resemble more as wolves, sheep, or merely half-awake children?

Ideas and quotes from “The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil by Erich Fromm