One day, while I was on the train back to university after spending some time with my family, I was seated next to an American girl. She was particularly loquacious and immediately made contact with me. We talked throughout the whole train ride and she told me she was a Mormon currently in Sweden to complete her missionary. She was exceedingly kind and friendly. She radiated warmth and benevolence. I truly enjoyed her company, and we had many interesting discussions during the journey about our different cultures and lifestyles. We decided to stay in contact after our arrival. We met several times during the year to fika and we had many interesting discussions about everything between heaven and earth. But there was one thing, in particular, during our meetings that made me ponder: I was never allowed to buy her anything. Each time we met, she insisted on paying for me, and I was never allowed to reciprocate, although I expressly told her that I would love to pay for her as well. But it didn’t matter, she refused to let me pay for her—and for myself. I felt as though she had an important need to do good deeds and to be a good person, which involved giving but not receiving. The problem was that, she made me feel as though my discomfort at not being allowed to reciprocate was secondary to her need to do good deeds. A sort of moral imbalance had emerged. She didn’t seem to notice that her generosity was making me uncomfortable. I do believe she had good intentions with her actions. I am not claiming that she lacked virtue. But perhaps one virtue—generosity—wasn’t balanced with another—attentiveness to the other person’s feelings and perspective. She denied me one very important component of friendship: reciprocity. Eventually, I was troubled by the feeling that she simply needed someone for whom she could do good deeds, and I was a recipient, but receiving wasn’t consistent with her own moral project. I felt like a participant in her moral narrative rather than an equal friend. It made me feel that I was merely a means to her end.
I think it’s about time that I introduce my favorite philosopher to this blog:
Immanuel Kant.
The first time I came across Kant was when I studied public international law. In the chapter about human rights, I read the following:
“Kant drew, among other things, on the philosophy of antiquity and on Cicero, who had maintained that all human beings are equal and that every individual has a right to a certain degree of human dignity. Kant expressed the idea that a human being should not be regarded as a means (for others), but as an end (in themselves). The human personality is uniquely valuable, and every person has the right to self-fulfillment, a form of moral self-determination. Kant emphasized society was created for the human being, and not the human being for society.“
It was particularly the last part that made me stop breathing for a second. There was something arresting about the passage. It resonated with me because, at that time, I had started to think that society was undergoing a moral decline; that people had confused individuality with individualism and forgotten that the main purpose for which we created society in the first place was to help each other and be there for one another. It was my experience that, day by day, we were slowly drifting further away from that purpose. Kant helped me formulate a feeling that had been growing inside of me, and he also stimulated my intellectual curiosity. I needed to delve deeper into this subject and into Kant’s extraordinary mind. I went home and bought as many books by Kant as my study grant allowed me.
Kant gave philosophical expression to the revolutionary idea that human beings possess an intrinsic worth simply by virtue of being human. He contributed something exceptionally powerful to the philosophical justification of universal human dignity. He helped bring the individual to the front.
“Treat humanity, whether in yourself or another, always as an end and never merely as a means.”
The humanity formulation of the categorial imperative:
Certain things cannot legitimately be done to a human being merely because doing so would benefit somebody else—or even society as a whole.
Imagine if sacrificing one person would greatly benefit the collective. Kant’s categorical imperative states that you cannot simply turn one individual into an instrument for everybody else’s purposes because that individual possesses dignity. This answers the question of why Kant’s philosophy appeared in a book about human rights; human rights put boundaries around what the collective can do to the individual. This was one of the greatest intellectual developments of the Enlightenment. The individual isn’t merely a subject belonging to a sovereign. The individual possesses a moral status that political authority must respect.
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulates:
”All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
The Enlightenment project sought to establish that the individual matters; the individual has rights; the individual possesses dignity; the individual should not merely serve society. However, Kant’s philosophy also leads us to another conclusion:
If I am a free rational individual, I am morally bound to recognize every other rational individual as possessing the same dignity that I claim for myself.
If I have a right to be treated with respect and dignity, that also entails that others have a duty to treat me with respect and dignity. When someone has a right, others have a duty to respect that right.
Kant’s emphasis on the individual didn’t mean “Now that I am free, I can do whatever I want.” Autonomy entails responsibility. I am free because I am capable of moral self-government; however, my moral principles cannot simply be constructed around my own interests—they must survive the demand of universality.
While I was reading about the categorical imperative, I realized something remarkable: From a young age, I had already been implementing a mindset similar to the one the categorical imperative suggests. In seventh grade, I had a friend tell me that I was too kind to another girl and that she didn’t deserve my kindness. I told her that I am kind to everyone; my kindness is not something you earn. My love is not earned. How I treat other people is not contingent upon how they treat me. How I treat other people is a reflection of my character, not theirs. She then told me something that has stuck with me for the rest of my life. She told me that she is only kind to people that are kind to her. I remember thinking, “Imagine if everyone had that mindset”—then no one would be kind, since kindness would require someone to decide to be kind first, irrespective of whether the other person had been kind to them.
What happens when everyone adopts that principle?
That is the sort of question the universal-law formulation of the categorical imperative asks us to consider.
Kant’s categorical imperative is essentially his attempt to answer the following question:
“How can I determine whether the principle behind an action is morally permissible?”
Kant believed that morality shouldn’t depend on what is beneficial to you, what you desire, or whether an action produces good consequences. A genuinely moral principle must apply universally to all rational human beings.
His most famous formulation is roughly:
Act only according to a principle that you could rationally will everyone to follow as a universal law.
So before acting, one should consider:
“What if everyone acted according to the same principle I’m about to act upon?”
Now look at the principle “I am only kind to people that are kind to me.” What would happen if this principle were universalized? I asked myself, “What if everyone waited for somebody else to be kind first?” If everyone made kindness conditional upon receiving it first, where would kindness begin? Could I rationally will such a principle as a universal rule? What kind of world would that create?
I was not consciously doing Kantian philosophy because I had no idea who Kant was at the time. But the structure of my response was remarkably Kantian.
I tend to observe modern society through a Kantian lens. Perhaps that is why, lately, I have been pondering whether there is a moral decline taking place in society. First, I saw a video of a guy who was filming himself on a bus doing some kind of dance. The main purpose of the video was not to show off his dancing to the public; it was to show the other passengers on the bus, who couldn’t care less about his attempt to attract attention. They were just minding their own business, presumably on their way home after a long day at work. He seemed rather disappointed not to be getting any attention. I opened the comments section on the video and was surprised to see how many commenters were calling the other passengers “NPCs” for not giving him attention when he so clearly was seeking it. It is not exactly a compliment to call another person an “NPC.” It struck me as dehumanizing. The word originally refers to a “non-player character” in a video game: a character controlled by the game rather than another human. But from the late 2010s onward, it has increasingly become an internet metaphor for a real human who at least ostensibly does not think independently, follows the crowd, behaves predictably, or lacks individuality. The way it was used in the comments gave me an uncanny feeling. To call someone boring, conformist, or unoriginal still recognizes them as a human being, albeit one possessing characteristics that you dislike. However, metaphorically calling someone an NPC removes their fundamental subjectivity; it reduces them to something less than fully human. They become scenery in somebody else’s world, background players, rather than another consciousness experiencing the world from their own perspective. Think about the people on the bus, who were presumably filmed without their consent. One could be busy thinking about whether their mistake at work is going to lead to disciplinary consequences and what could happen if they lose their job. Another might be concerned about a lump they just felt and contemplating getting it checked but not wanting to become a burden on healthcare. A third might be worried about whether her husband will be home when she gets home or if he must “work late” for the third time this week. My point is: you can never know what goes on inside a stranger’s head. After watching this video, I was more attentive to how many people were referring to strangers as NPCs and how frequently it occurred on my social media platforms. I couldn’t help but think that the NPC phenomenon expresses a rather interesting form of contemporary individualism: where people see themselves as the fully realized protagonist—“the main character”—while people who seem conventional or insufficiently distinctive are perceived as background characters. Through a Kantian lens, the NPC phenomenon becomes rather eerie; Kant’s idea of humanity requires treating every rational human being as an end in themselves, never merely as a means. Referring to another human as an NPC moves us in precisely the opposite conceptual direction:
“I possess an interior world and agency, and you are merely an object within my world.”
The NPC phenomenon raises an important philosophical question:
What happens when our language stops recognizing other people as fully human?
While immersing myself in classical philosophy and Enlightenment literature, I’ve made an interesting observation: When many of these thinkers considered human improvement, they were concerned with how to become a better person—more virtuous, just, courageous, honest, compassionate, wise, generous, reliable, for example. But observing modern culture, self-help literature, social media, advertising, public discourse, the emphasis seems increasingly to be placed on wealth, physical appearance, social status, influence, productivity, visibility; and these have increasingly become our measures of a successful person. We are constantly encouraged to ask ourselves, “How can I become richer, better-looking, more influential, more successful?” rather than “How can I become a better person?” There is an interesting distinction between asking yourself, “How can I have a good life?” and “How can I become a good person?”
I have also observed that public discourse often places much more emphasis on what society owns you than on what you owe society and your fellow citizens. We seem to think primarily about our claims on others, and less about our obligations toward others. Modern societies have rightly devoted enormous attention to protecting individual rights. Yet rights alone cannot sustain a flourishing society. Every individual right exists within a community of other people, and that community depends not only on citizens who know their rights but also on citizens who recognize their responsibilities. A culture that asks only, “What am I entitled to?” risks overlooking an equally important question: “What kind of person should I strive to become?” and “What can I do to create better circumstances for my fellow citizens?” A healthy society requires not only rights, but also responsibilities. Rights protect us against mistreatment. Responsibilities remind us that we also have obligations toward other people. Emphasizing one without the other risk creating an imbalance.
Rights ask:
What am I owed?
Responsibiilites ask:
What do I owe other people?
If a culture becomes overwhelmingly focused on the first question, there is a risk that every interaction starts from the perspective of the self.
What do I want?
What do I deserve?
What makes me happy?
What benefits me?
Kant asks us to widen the perspective. Instead of asking only:
“How can other people satisfy my goals?”
He asks:
“Am I respecting this person’s humanity?”
Maybe we’ve become excellent at defending our own dignity, while becoming less attentive to the dignity of others. A morally mature society is not one in which people merely know their rights. It is one in which people habitually recognize the humanity of others. To treat another person as fully human is to acknowledge that they are not a tool for our ambitions, our self-image, our moral satisfaction, our entertainment, or our desires. They are, as Kant argued, an end in themselves. Perhaps the problem is not individual rights themselves, perhaps it is an individualistic interpretation of individual rights. This leads us to the questions:
Has our increasing emphasis on individual rights unintentionally encouraged a culture that emphasizes entitlements over responsibilities?
Have we become so preoccupied with what we are owed that we have forgotten what we owe to one another?
Has public discourse become so disproportionately focused on rights while giving comparatively little attention to duties?
It was my impression that modern society had become remarkably skilled (and prone to) teaching us how to build a successful life, yet surprisingly quiet about how to build a virtuous one. What happens when the liberation of the individual becomes individualism? And has that liberation made us increasingly skilled at thinking of ourselves as individuals while increasingly poor at recognizing the individuality of everyone else? We have countless books filling up the shelves in the self-help section of bookstores, teaching us how to become more successful, more productive, more attractive, and more influential:
Stop taking things so personally—stop caring about what other people think about you—start living—create your dream life—dare to be unlikeable—master self-control—handle your anxiety—how to not let people get to you—stop comparing yourself to others—stop blaming others—protect yourself from bad energy—how to get more friends and influence people—how to become more effective—how to get more motivation and willpower—how to get back on track when you fall off course—how to reach your goal—how to stop doubting your greatness and live an awesome life—how to think and grow rich.
But among all these self-help books, there is one that truly stands out.
The Art of Loving.
Why?
Because its focus is on giving and not receiving.
Erich Fromm begins his book by asking: Is love an art? He identifies three major misconceptions underlying our understanding of love. I share an excerpt from his first page:
“Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence, the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable. In pursuit of this aim they follow several paths. (…) Many of the ways to make oneself loveable are the same as those used to make oneself successful, “to win friends and influence people”. As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal. A second premise behind the attitude that there is nothing to be learned about love is the problem of an object, not the problem of a faculty. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love—or to be loved by—is difficult.”
The first major misconception is that we are more concerned with being loved than with loving. Most people approach love by asking:
“How can I make myself lovable?”
Rather than:
“How can I develop my capacity to love?”
Fromm observes that men may try to make themselves lovable by becoming successful, powerful, wealthy, or prestigious, while women may cultivate physical attractiveness. Both sexes cultivate pleasant manners, interesting conversation, modesty, and other socially desirable qualities. Hence, being “lovable” becomes roughly:
“How can I turn myself into someone other people will desire?”
Fromm then observes that what most people mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture of becoming popular and having high sex appeal.
The second misconception is that we think love is a problem of finding the right object, rather than developing a faculty. Fromm believed that modern people assume that loving is easy, the difficult part is finding someone worthy of my love. Someone beautiful enough, intelligent enough, funny enough, successful enough—to love. It is Fromm’s idea that we’ve got it all backwards. Love is a faculty—a human capacity. Just because you find a human who possesses many desirable attributes doesn’t mean that you possess the capacity to love them.
Then he introduces the third major misconception. But let’s save that one for later.
Fromm asks an important question: if love matters so much to us, why do we devote so little effort to learning how to master the art of loving? His answer is essentially that modern society teaches us to devote our energy to other things: success, wealth, appearance, power, influence. We spend enormous amount of our time learning how to become successful. We build careers, improve our appearance, acquire skills, cultivate social status and influence. But very little of that energy is devoted to developing:
The capacity to love.
Some weeks ago, I watched a video on YouTube by one of Sweden’s biggest YouTubers. The concept of the video is that the YouTuber moves in with a celebrity and spends a full day with them, offering a unique insight into their life and home. In this video, the YouTuber moved into one of Sweden’s biggest beauty influencers. I watched it because a newspaper had reported that the influencer stated in the video that she could not date someone who was ugly. I thought that surely she must have been misquoted. And if she had actually said it, I wanted to understand what could lie philosophically behind a statement like that. So, I watched the video. Most of the video consisted of the influencer explaining her daily routine for maximizing her looks. She tells the YouTuber that she wakes up around 6 am to start doing her morning routine, and no one is allowed to see her before 10 am. The YouTuber follows her around as she introduces him to all the things she does and uses every day to become better looking—vibration plates, red light therapy, celery juice, facial ice treatment, etc. She tells the YouTuber that she prioritizes looking good and that she would never leave the house without having made herself presentable. Then came the part that I had been waiting for. The YouTuber asked her ”how she is thinking when it comes to love.”
I quote her:
“I am thinking that he must have humor. If the guys don’t have timing—then I’m out. (…) but I would like them to have humor, timing, and not take themselves too seriously. That is like the only thing I am thinking. And then of course, they must be very good looking. I have to be completely honest and say that I cannot date someone who is ugly.”
I am not going to argue that having physical preferences is inherently immoral. After all, most people experience some degree of physical attraction in romantic relationships. The philosophical issue isn’t whether attraction matters at all; it’s what happens when appearance becomes the overriding criterion, eclipsing every other human quality. And what is the underlying conception of love behind a statement like this?
What does it mean if our willingness to love another person depends primarily on their appearance?
The first thought that came to mind after listening to the statement was what message it sends to all the young people who perceive the influencer as a role model. Because it is not the statement itself that concerns me the most—It’s who’s listening. It’s about what values risk being normalized when influential people communicate them to millions of followers. A large proportion of the influencer’s followers are young people in their early teens, most of them with very little experience of romantic relationships. If influential public figures such as influencers consistently communicate that physical attractiveness is one of the most valuable qualities in a partner, how might that shape the priorities of young people when selecting a partner? Is there a risk that a young person decides to stay in a toxic or abusive relationship because they’ve heard an influential public figure present physical attractiveness as the most valuable quality in a relationship? They might consider their partner a catch simply because they are conventionally beautiful in the eyes of society and decide to stay and overlook other qualities. When choosing a life partner, which qualities ought to carry the greatest moral weight? It does concern me that one of Sweden’s biggest influencers makes a statement like this so openly and seemingly without considering the message it might convey to young people. It worries me what kind of society that mindset will encourage, and it worries me that young people might overlook violent and toxic behavior and think that as long as the eyes are pleased, it doesn’t matter that the soul is bleeding and the heart is held together with plasters. I wonder if there is a risk that young people become more willing to excuse, rationalize, or minimize serious character flaws because another quality, physical attractiveness, has been assigned disproportionate importance.
Let’s universalize the principle underlying the statement: I may exclude someone as a possible object of romantic love solely because I consider them physically unattractive.
Imagine a society in which people who are considered physically unattractive are effectively excluded from love and intimate relationships simply because of their appearance. Most people would probably find that troubling. Why? Because appearance is something people only partly control, whereas qualities like kindness, honesty, loyalty, courage, and compassion are much more closely tied to character. If everyone determines another person’s eligibility for romantic consideration primarily by appearance, several questions arise:
What happens when beauty fades with age?
What happens after illness or disability?
What happens to people who never meet conventional beauty standards?
Does the principle respect people as fully humans, or primarily as objects of visual evaluation?
Evaluating the principle through a Kantian lens leads to the question:
Am I recognizing this person as a rational human being with intrinsic dignity, or am I reducing their value as a potential partner primarily to whether their appearance satisfies my preferences?
If our appreciation of a person as a romantic partner depends primarily on qualities that can disappear through aging, illness, or accident, are we appreciating the person themselves—or merely their appearance?
From a Kantian perspective, one might ask whether making physical appearance the decisive criterion for love risks treating people according to their external qualities rather than recognizing their intrinsic dignity as humans. If you cannot see beyond appearance—if someone’s perceived ugliness is enough to make every other quality they possess irrelevant—are you still encountering them as fully human?
The more a person’s appearance becomes the decisive measure by which they are evaluated as a romantic partner, the greater the risk that their deeper humanity–their character, reason, virtues, and dignity—receives less moral weight.
There is something deeply troubling about a world in which a person’s possibility of being loved is contingent upon their physical attractiveness. But is it truly love? The YouTuber asks her about love—but is it truly love she is searching for?
When somebody says, “I can’t date someone who’s ugly,” there are actually two Frommian questions hiding inside that sentence. First:
“Am I approaching another human being as a person to know and love, or as a “personality package” that must satisfy my requirements?”
Second:
“When I call somebody “ugly,” whose standard of desirability am I actually applying?—and how certain am I that it is truly mine?
On page 14 of The Art of Loving, Fromm writes the following:
“Equality had meant, in a religious context, that we are all God’s children, that we all share in the same human-divine substance, that we are all one. It meant also that the very differences between individuals must be respected, that while it is true that we are all one, it is also true that each one of us is a unique entity (…) Equality as a condition for the development of individuality was also the meaning of the concept in the philosophy of the Western Enlightenment. It meant (most clearly formulated by Kant) that no man must be the means for the ends of another man. That all men are equal inasmuch as they are ends, and only ends, and never means to each other. (…) In contemporary capitalistic society the meaning of equality has been transformed. By equality one refers to the equality of automatons; of men who have lost their individuality. Equality today means “sameness” rather than “oneness.”
So, equality does not mean that you and I are interchangeable. Quite the opposite. What Fromm argues is that genuine equality requires recognition of individuality: you are irreducibly you, I am irreducibly me, but neither of us may be reduced to an instrument for the other. But he then writes that modern capitalist society has subtly transformed equality from:
“Different individuals possessing equal dignity.”
Into something closer to:
“Interchangeable individuals who increasingly resemble one another.”
That’s what he means when he says modern equality has become “sameness” rather than “oneness.” Oneness here doesn’t mean uniformity. It means something paradoxical:
“We are one, although we are different in many aspects.”
I can recognize another human being as myself—someone who loves, suffers, fears, hopes—without requiring them to reason, dress, behave, desire, or live exactly as I do. Fromm believes the modern capitalist society poses a threat to that individuality.
On page 15 he continues by writing the following:
“Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without friction; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called “equality.”
He compares modern human beings to standardized commodities. Because industrial mass production functions efficiently when products are standardized, Fromm provocatively argues that modern society begins treating human beings according to the same logic. We consume the same entertainment, read the same things, work according to similar schedules, desire the same products, and increasingly internalize the same ideas about what constitutes a “good” and ”successful” life.
And yet—and this is the most intriguing part—we remain convinced that we are choosing all of it independently.
We conform while being under the impression that we are individualists.
Think about the modern self-help culture I mentioned earlier. People are constantly told: ”Be yourself, follow your own path, do what makes you happy, don’t care what anyone thinks.”
It might sound intensely individualistic—and yet millions of unique individuals end up pursuing similar ideals: Beauty, wealth, productivity, status, followers, travel, fitness, fashionable homes, successful careers, desirable partners. I can’t help but wonder: Did millions of individuals independently decide that these things constitute a good life—or did society teach them to desire the same things while allowing each person to experience those desires as uniquely their own?
How is it that enormous numbers of people are trying to achieve similar faces, bodies, lifestyles, and markers of success while simultaneously living in a culture obsessed with individuality?
Fromm was writing this book in 1956 when social media and influencers didn’t exist. And yet he’s describing a mechanism that arguably becomes even easier to observe in an algorithmic culture. Fromm argues that conformity serves a psychological purpose. Human beings experience what he calls a sense of separateness. We experience ourselves as individual consciousnesses, fundamentally separated from everyone else. That causes anxiety within us, and one way of escaping that anxiety is conformity. If I dress like everyone else, believe what everyone else believes, desire what everyone else desires, consume what everyone else consumes, and structure my life like everyone else, I feel that I belong; I am no longer on my own. But Fromm considers that a poor substitute for genuine human connection because, in that case, you’ve solved the problem of separateness largely by surrendering your individuality. Fromm has another solution to the problem of separateness—a way for human beings to overcome the unbearable experience of separateness without sacrificing themselves as individuals:
Mature love.
Two people becoming profoundly connected while remaining two distinct individuals.
Neither absorbs the other.
Neither turns the other into an object.
Neither exists merely to satisfy the other’s needs.
That requires us to stop approaching human beings as commodities possessing desirable attributes. Genuine love requires recognizing another person’s individuality. Through conformity, you lose some of your individuality by becoming like everyone else. But through mature love, you unite with the other person without ceasing to be yourself. Genuine love does not require two individuals to dissolve into one another. You remain you; the other remains them, yet you overcome isolation through genuine connection.
Union without erasure of individuality.
On page 26, Fromm writes the following:
“Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me. If I love the other person, I feel one with him or her, but with him as he is, not as I need him to be as an object for my use.”
Fromm is distinguishing between two orientations toward another person.
The first orientation says:
I love you as you are—as a person who exists independently of my needs.
The other says:
I need you to possess certain qualities because of what those qualities provide for me.
And this is exactly where the statement “he can’t be ugly” becomes interesting through Fromm:
If I need the person I love to conform to my specifications in order to satisfy my needs, am I really encountering them “as they are”? If I love you, I must respect you as the independent person you actually are—not as something constructed for my use. Fromm says genuine love requires knowledge. He does not refer to knowing someone’s favorite movie, birthday, daily habits, or if they like their coffee with milk or sugar. He means penetrating beyond superficial appearances and trying to understand the person’s inner reality. And treating physical beauty as the most valuable quality is perhaps one of the clearest examples of remaining at the periphery of another person. You look at someone and immediately evaluate whether they are good-looking, whether they are dateable. But to master the art of loving, we must move in the opposite direction and ask:
Who is this person?
What frightens them? What have they suffered? What do they dream about? What kind of person are they striving to become?
That is almost the exact opposite of treating someone like a commodity. A commodity can be described by its characteristics—as a checklist where you fill in boxes:
Beautiful.
Funny.
Successful.
Wealthy.
Popular.
But a person cannot be exhausted by a list of attributes.
A person is so much more than a checklist.
In the chapter “Love and Its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society,” Fromm develops an argument that could help explain why certain people, the influencer, for example—think that they cannot date an “ugly” person.
What if the society we have built actively makes us worse at loving?
Now he asks: What kind of personality does modern capitalist society cultivate?
And his answer, put simply, is:
A market personality.
Fromm argues that modern romantic relationships have increasingly come to resemble market exchanges. People experience themselves—and evaluate potential partners—as packages of desirable qualities. Beauty, social status, personality, wealth, intelligence, charm, education, popularity, and so forth become forms of what we might call romantic market value. The underlying mentality becomes something like:
What is the most desirable person I can obtain, given my own desirability?
If someone says “He can’t be ugly” while looking for a romantic partner, then what is the conception of love underlying that statement? Is love understood as an encounter between two human beings? Or is the prospective partner being evaluated as an object possessing desirable attributes? Devoting enormous energy to maximizing one’s own appearance and demanding attractiveness from a potential partner could be two manifestations of the same phenomenon.
“I must make myself desirable, and I must obtain someone sufficiently desirable in return.” We have now turned ourselves into commodities—the antithesis of Fromm’s conception of mature love.
Physical attractiveness isn’t what constitutes the capacity to love. Attraction may draw us toward another person, but attraction alone tells us very little about our capacity to love them. Fromm’s conception of mature love involves care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. We spend our lives in systems governed by exchange. Things have market value. Labor has market value. Skills have market value. Products compete with other products. We optimize things to make them more desirable. Fromm’s concern is that eventually, we begin applying the same logic to ourselves and other human beings.
On page 81, Fromm writes:
“Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their “personality packages” and expect a fair bargain.”
If I spend enormous resources maximizing my attractiveness and then demand a sufficiently attractive partner, then have I learned the art of loving—or have I learned the art of becoming desirable and selecting desirable people?
On page 79, Fromm describes the kind of person modern capitalism requires: someone who wants to consume increasingly more, whose tastes can be standardized and influenced, who experiences himself as free and independent while fitting smoothly into the social machinery.
Then, on page 80:
“People consume entertainment, sights, food, drinks, people, books, movies.”
“The world is one great object for our appetite.”
When the other person does not tick enough boxes on the shopping list, the market mentality encourages us to move on to the next product. Contrast this with what Fromm writes about mature love, where he describes respect as seeing another person in their unique individuality and wanting them to develop for their own sake. On page 81, Fromm also describes the supposedly ideal marriage in which both people function smoothly together, yet can remain strangers their entire lives.
Why?
Because successfully satisfying each other’s needs isn’t necessarily intimacy.
A relationship could function perfectly as an exchange: You make me laugh and I raise your social status. You provide financial security and I satisfy your sexual needs. You provide emotional support and I take care of the home. Everyone fulfills their contractual function. But that isn’t necessarily love. Two people can become an extremely efficient mutual-satisfaction system without deeply encountering one another. Once people internalize the market logic, beauty becomes capital. Wealth becomes capital. Social status becomes capital. Youth becomes capital. Followers become capital. Thus, romantic relationships risk becoming negotiations between two people assessing whether the other’s market value approximately matches their own.
On page 121, Fromm writes:
“The principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible.”
Fromm argues that the fundamental logic by which capitalism operates points in the opposite direction from the fundamental logic of love. He’s distinguishing between the logic of a system and the behavior possible for individuals living within that system. The market is concerned with exchange value. Mature love is concerned with the intrinsic value, uniqueness, and dignity of the person. That is why they are incompatible. When “What can you give me?” starts replacing “Who are you?” romantic relationships begin to resemble exchanges between commodities. And a commodity can become obsolete. The problem is that a human being cannot become obsolete. A human being cannot lose their intrinsic value. A human being cannot be reduced to a defective product simply because they no longer satisfy our preferences.
Kant argues that human beings possess dignity, rather than merely a price. Things with a price can be replaced by equivalents; persons must not be reduced to exchangeable objects. Fromm, writing in a completely different philosophical tradition, worries that modern capitalism psychologically trains us to do almost exactly that: experience ourselves and one another in terms of exchange value.
Perhaps this is one of the biggest challenges in modern society—we must learn to master the art of loving while living inside social structures whose underlying logic may constantly pull us in the opposite direction. That is why The Art of Loving is more than just a self-help book about understanding the concept of love. Fromm highlights an important question: how do you remain capable of treating human beings as human beings in a civilization that constantly teaches you to think in terms of value, utility, consumption and exchange?
This leaves us with a fundamental question:
Can a person remain genuinely human and genuinely individual in a society that constantly encourages us to turn ourselves and others into standardized objects?
People may believe that they are searching for love while unknowingly approaching it through the logic of market exchange. Fromm asks an important question: What if we are free to choose, while the culture has already taught us what to want and indirectly what to choose? How much of what you truly want have you been taught to want?
This is where Fromm’s distinction between individualism and individiuality becomes incredibly important.
A society can be intensely individualistic while producing remarkably standardized individuals. It encourages us to be unique… by acquiring the body, clothes, lifestyle, career, home, and partner currently recognized as desirable by everybody else.
Modern society gives us unprecedented individual freedom and simultaneously standardizes us.
The market tells us to make ourselves desirable—culture standardizes what “desirable” means—we internalize those standards as personal preferences—and then search for partners who embody the very characteristics culture has taught us to desire.
I think Fromm would have found the influencer economy an almost astonishingly pure realization of the tendencies he was already describing in 1956. The role of the influencer embodies several features of what he called the market orientation. The influencer does not merely sell commodities; the influencer turns the self into a commodity. The influencer’s market value becomes connected to how desirable they are to others. Their appearance, personality, home, relationships, holidays, opinions, humor—even what they eat for breakfast—can become components of a marketable personal brand. It would hardly be surprising if this market mentality eventually extended into the way romantic partners are evaluated. Furthermore, influencer culture constantly celebrates individuality: Be yourself, find your aesthetics, express yourself, build your personal brand. But why is it that all these supposedly unique individuals so often converge upon remarkably similar ideals of beauty, homes, clothes, bodies, holidays, lifestyles, and definitions of success?
How do you know which of your desires are genuinely yours? If millions of people independently “choose” approximately the same beauty ideal after being exposed to approximately the same cultural messages, Fromm would want us to examine what we mean by choice. Perhaps the influencer economy is one of the clearest modern examples of standardization disguised as individuality.
When someone says:
“I can’t date someone who’s ugly”
Ugly according to whom? To society? Or to your own preferences? And how certain are you that the two can be neatly separated? Is she evaluating him through a standardized ideal that existed before she even met him?
If she encounters another person with the equation:
Physically unattractive—not a possible romantic partner. Then something interesting happens before love even gets an opportunity to develop. She has already categorized him. If physical attractiveness is a prerequisite, a man can possess extraordinary character and still fail the initial market evaluation. If someone genuinely does not find another human attractive, the question becomes: How uniquely their own is that preference? If her conception of the beautiful man resembles the ideal promoted by millions of advertisements, influencers, films, celebrities, and other people around her, then what she experiences as an entirely individual aesthetic judgement may partly reflect standardized social judgement.
So, when she says, “He must not be ugly.”
Could she be expressing that he must possess the characteristics her culture has taught her to find desirable?
And does she actually see him?
If she sees an ugly or beautiful man before she sees this unique human being, then she has not yet reached the kind of capacity Fromm associates with mature love. And with this mentality, will she ever be capable of seeing beyond the category of physical desirability sufficiently to encounter the person underneath it? The tragedy of standardized desirability is not merely that it tells us whom to find beautiful; it may prevent us from ever discovering whom we could have loved and created deep connections with, because if we reject people at the level of the “personality package,” we never reach the deeper knowledge of another human being that Fromm believes makes mature love possible.
The question is, can you truly love another person if you primarily encounter them through the qualities they possess for you, rather than attempting to know and respect them as the unique human being they are? If I love you because you’re beautiful, then beauty becomes a condition. If I love you because you’re funny, then humor is a condition. If I love you because you make me happy, then my happiness is a condition. Is it possible to develop mature love if we begin by shopping for a partner and ticking off attributes on a shopping list? And what happens when the attributes that made someone desirable disappear? The other person becomes sick, depressed, or has an accident—are they then malfunctioning? Broken? Disposable? If Fromm is right that mature love creates a union in which we encounter and care for the person as a person, then changes in those attributes don’t necessarily destroy the underlying relationship. You are not a collection of qualities for me to consume. You are a person with whom I have become profoundly connected. And that is why I love you.
We are all unique individuals, but no matter how unique we are, we are still part of humanity. And with that comes rights—and duties. Individual rights represent one of humanity’s greatest moral achievements because they recognize that every individual matters. But rights also imply reciprocity. Individualism stripped of reciprocity risks becoming selfishness. I am an individual and my life is mine—but I am also one individual among billions of others whose lives are equally theirs. When you encounter another person, do you encounter a subject with a life of their own, or do you experience them primarily through the function they perform in your life?
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