Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate. - Erich Fromm

هذا الفقدان للذاتية لا يزال يزيد من طابع الارغام على التطابق, انه يعني ان الانسان لا يستطيع ان يتأكد من نفسه الا اذا عاش حسبما يتوقع الآخرون. واذا لم نعش حسب هذه الصورة فاننا لا نخاطر فحسب بالاستهجان والعزلة المتزايدة, بل نخاطر بفقد ذاتية شخصيتنا التي تعني تعرض سلامتنا العقلية للخطر.

Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning.

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. This division is not very different from Marx’s concept of "human nature in general", to be distinguished from "human nature as modified in each historical period". The same distinction exists in Marx when he distinguishes between "constant" or "fixed" drives and "relative" drives. The constant drives "exist under all circumstances and … can be changed by social conditions only as far as form and direction are concerned". The relative drives "owe their origin only to a certain type of social organization".