Children of the Flame

The world of tomorrow will likely have in it persons who no longer live with the central orientation of fear, like savages, that place the material world as the be all and end all of existence.

That is to say, it will be a population centered heavily around the capacity to reason - as Fromm defines it below. In Man's slow and painful, yet continued evolution, this is the stock of human that will (or should) be selected for.

Why? The prerequisite to a peaceful Earth is an enlightened population. And there can be no enlightenment without the life-flame of reason. Reason taking precedence is what raises the savage human to a higher standard of being.

"Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man."

― Erich Fromm

“Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.”

― Ibid

"By intelligence I mean the ability to manipulate concepts for the purpose of achieving some practical end. The chimpanzee -- who puts the two sticks together in order to get at the banana because no one of the two is long enough to do the job--uses intelligence. So do we all when we go about our business, "figuring out" how to do things.

Intelligence, in this sense, is taking things for granted as they are, making combinations which have the purpose of facilitating their manipulation; intelligence is thought in the service of biological survival.

Reason, on the other hand aims at understanding; it tries to find out what is behind the surface, to recognize the kernel, the essence of the reality that surrounds us. Reason is not without a function, but its function is not to further physical as much as mental and spiritual existence.

However, often in individual and social life, reason is required in order to predict, and prediction sometimes is necessary for survival."

― Ibid, The Sane Society

Originally published on my Facebook page March 15th, 2017.