Fromm - Loss of Individual Identity

..., the role of the consumer is essentially a passive one. Nothing has value itself, but only as "a good buy" or "a sound investment". We think with increasing abstraction, so that nuclear war becomes representable by graphs and charts (see the "decontextualized discourse" of military planner analyzed by Wersche). The most central ailment of modern society is, alienation - or idolatry, as Fromm prefers to call it: "the fact that man does not experience himself as the active bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished 'thing', dependent on powers outside himself, unto whom he has projected his living substance" (p.124)
   As a result, we have lost a sense of self, of individual identity.

- Preface by David Ingleby
Source: The Sane Society, Fromm 1991:xxxii