Destructiveness is the Outcome of an Unlived Life
By: Erich Fromm
“The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.”
— Erich Fromm
To create life is to transcend one’s status as a creature that is thrown into life as dice are thrown out of a cup. But to destroy life also means to transcend it and to escape the unbearable suffering of complete passivity.
To create life requires certain qualities which the impotent person lacks. To destroy life requires only one quality—the use of force. The impotent man, if he has a pistol, a knife, or a strong arm, can transcend life by destroying it in others or in himself. He thus takes revenge on life for negating itself to him. Compensatory violence is precisely that violence which has its roots in and which compensates for impotence.
The man who cannot create wants to destroy.
In creating and destroying he transcends his role as a mere creature. Camus expressed this idea succinctly when he had Caligula say: “I live, I kill, I exercise the rapturous power of a destroyer, compared with which the power of a creator is merest child’s play.”
This is the violence of the cripple, of those to whom life has denied the capacity for any positive expression of their specifically human powers. They need to destroy precisely because they are human, since being human means transcending thing-ness…
From these considerations follows something else. Compensatory violence is the result of unlived and crippled life, and its necessary result. It can be suppressed by fear of punishment, it can even be deflected by spectacles and amusements of all kinds. Yet it remains as a potential in its full strength, and whenever the suppressing forces weaken, it becomes manifest.
The only cure for compensatory destructiveness is the development of the creative potential in man, his capacity to make productive use of his human powers.
Only if man ceases to be crippled will he cease to be a destroyer and a sadist, and only conditions in which man can be interested in life can do away with those impulses which make the past and present history of man so shameful.
Compensatory violence is not, like reactive violence, in the service of life; it is the pathological substitute for life; it indicates the crippling and emptiness of life. But in its very negation of life, it still demonstrates man’s need to be alive and not be a cripple.
You can find this passage in chapter 2 of Erich Fromm’s profound book— The Heart of Man
Some heady thoughts here. I've often argued with people about what to do about the rise of acts of violence on a mass scale, which is probably mostly unique to one gender. Fromm makes some good observations here:
"Compensatory violence is not, like reactive violence, in the service of life; it is the pathological substitute for life; it indicates the crippling and emptiness of life."
And here:
"The only cure for compensatory destructiveness is the development of the creative potential in man, his capacity to make productive use of his human powers."
Any society that leeches the capacity of an individual to make meaning, to freely 'do' and pursue and evolve in a way that feels in the service of something deep inside, can't possibly have a *surprised pikachu face* when the individual develops maladaptive behaviour in the form of the violence Fromm's talking about.
Great post!