Amputated Wonder

A Dialogue on Erich Fromm, Humanism Without God, and the Thread That Holds the World Together

I. The Diagnosis That Still Cuts

I just read Erich Fromm’s 1976 masterpiece To Have or To Be? and its eerily prescient warning of “technocratic fascism”: a society that keeps the shell of democracy and markets while turning human beings into well-managed consumers inside a corporate-bureaucratic machine. Fromm saw it coming in the 1950s and 60s: the merger of big government and big business, the reduction of citizens to data points and purchasing power, the replacement of aliveness with accumulation.

He was right about the disease. The pandemic lockdowns of 2020–22 functioned as a global stress test that proved his point beyond any reasonable doubt: small businesses crushed, independent lives destroyed, billions funneled upward to the already colossal, all justified by “science” and enforced by algorithms. We do not live in the free-market capitalism of textbooks; we live in corporatocracy dressed up as public health or progress.

Fromm’s critique is surgical. His prescription, however, is where the blade slips.

II. The Humanist Cure That Cannot Heal

Fromm proposed a radical humanism: decentralize power, limit consumption to sane and humane levels, foster cooperatives, shorten the work week, teach people to live in the “being” mode instead of the “having” mode. Beautiful on paper. Naïve in flesh.

Once any society grows beyond the size of a village, human corruption, envy, and the will to power reassert themselves with predictable ferocity. Every utopian attempt to re-engineer mankind through better structures (from Soviet planning to Californian communes) collapses for the same reason: it believes the problem is external arrangement rather than internal deformity.

More fatally, Fromm’s entire vision is built on a deliberate amputation of wonder. He speaks movingly of love, aliveness, and the mystery of existence, but he refuses to allow that mystery a name, a face, or a voice. God is locked out of the laboratory. In His place Fromm installs the human psyche, therapeutic technique, and enlightened social planning. It is Dr. Frankenstein in a different coat: convinced that if we tweak the formulas and turn the right societal knobs we can manufacture full humanity without the Author of humanity.

A world engineered to maximize psychological health while excluding the living Source of all health will always birth a monster. You cannot generate reverence by committee. You cannot schedule awe.

III. The God-Shaped Hole at the Center

Fromm’s humanism is only the latest in a long line of attempts to keep the moral passion of Judaism and Christianity while discarding the metaphysical scaffolding that makes the passion coherent. Remove the vertical beam (the Creator who sees, judges, redeems, and finally recreates) and the horizontal beams (love your neighbor, forgive, hope against hope) eventually sag into sentimentality or collapse into coercion.

If this life is all there is, then none of our striving ultimately matters. It's just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic of humanity. Every secular salvation story ends the same way: first enthusiasm, then bureaucracy, then terror or despair, because nothing within the system is strong enough to hold the system together once self-interest reasserts itself.

IV. The Sermon on the Mount as the True Reference Point

Jesus did not come offering another social program. He came announcing that the Kingdom is already breaking in, like yeast in dough or seed in soil, and that the only way to live sanely inside a collapsing age is to order every part of life around the Father who sees what is hidden and rewards what is done in secret.

Consider the passage that so perfectly answers both Fromm’s consumer anxiety and our modern ecological panic:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear… Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them… See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.” (Matthew 6:25–29)

This is not a call to irresponsibility. It is a call to re-anchoring. Lilies and sparrows are not idle; they are simply not anxious, because they participate every second in the care of a Creator who is intimately present to each one. The thread of divine attention runs through every mitochondria, every blade of grass, every child’s laugh, every beloved’s eyes. You can literally see it if you refuse the willful blindness that modern sophistication so often mistakes for maturity.

Jesus offers no five-year plan to fix Rome. He offers a way to live indestructibly inside a world that is already passing away: seek first the Kingdom, love God with all your being, love your neighbor as yourself, forgive as you have been forgiven, store up treasure where neither moth nor rust nor central bank can touch it.

That is scalable to one person or one billion, because its power source is outside the system.

V. Beholding Instead of Engineering

The great temptation of every age (and ours most acutely) is to believe we can secure life by control. Fromm fell for it in a gentle, psychological way. Today’s transhumanists fall for it in algorithms and gene editing. Same laboratory, same refusal to kneel.

The alternative is the path of beholding. Look long enough at a child’s eyes and you will meet the “Thou” that looks back. Watch a single blade of grass push through concrete and you will hear a sermon on resurrection. Sit quietly enough and you can feel the thread of divine artistry running through every living thing, including the mysterious organism reading these words right now.

That thread is not a theory. It is the realest fact there is. Everything else (politics, technology, economics, even religion when it becomes another possession) is commentary.

VI. Pockets of Sanity in a Dying Age

We will not fix the megamachine. It is too late for that, and maybe it was always too late once Babylon got its start. But we can refuse to give it our hearts. We can cultivate small, fierce places where wonder is still legal: faithful marriages, honest work, gardens, dinner tables with the phones banished, churches that still pray instead of perform, friendships that outlast trends, children raised to notice the sparrows.

These are not “solutions” in the modern sense. They are embodied testimonies that the Kingdom is not a future project but a present reality breaking in wherever two or three refuse the amputation and choose to see.

Fromm saw the sickness with devastating clarity. He simply refused the Medicine that was standing in the room the whole time.

We don’t have to make the same mistake.

Keep looking until you see the thread. Once you see it, you can never unsee it. And that is the one thing the machine can neither sell you nor take away.

Faramarz Hidaji, MD