American Impotence & Domination 9-10-2012

[8/16/2025: I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.sch] 

Thinking about the portion of Erich Fromm's Man for Himself that I wrote about under the title of "Productivity, Domination, Impotence" [8/16/2025: that note remains somewhere in my boxes I brought back from prison. sch], led me to thinking of Fromm's ideas applied to American penal policy. Especially as I observe that policy at Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution.

American criminal law policy has done nothing but increase the power of drug lords and gangs. This prison serves as a recruiting ground and to solidify gang membership. This seems like impotence to me, how about you?

The B.O.P. certainly treats us as if we were things instead of human beings. This policy comes down from the American people via Congress. Congress has given the BOP no means of dealing with inmates other than force and coercion. The BOP has consistently moved back night recall till it is now 8 pm. The reason for this change was bad behavior on the part of some inmates. The bad behavior ended, but the BOP has no procedure for rewarding good behavior. What better describes a state of domination.

The federal prison does nothing about teaching inmates how to live productively. The prison does leave them with a knowledge of the power to dominate, and such power determines what is right.

The BOP creates a class understanding power resides in the color of one's shirt. The blue guard's blue shirt gives power to its wearer. Is this the putative lesson to be taught in a putative democracy?

sch

[8/16/2025: rereading this, in this day as Trump tries harder and harder to make himself into our first dictator, I wonder if we have not translated the prison mentality into our national culture. Alligator Alley is cheered on by many. Trump cheers many by his efforts at dominating the members of other groups - other "gangs".

For a different view of Fromm and his book: Man for Himself, by Erich Fromm (Commentary Magazine).

Unlike much of contemporary psychiatric writing, which reveals, in spite of itself, an underlying contempt for man, Dr. Fromm’s argument rides on a passionate conviction of man’s inherent goodness. But, unfortunately, this passion leads him into a primitive logical error—the failure to distinguish between what is already proven and what is still to be proven. The inherent goodness of man has most distinctly not been proven.

Dr. Fromm regards ethics as ultimately an applied science founded upon certain theoretical assertions about man. Like every applied science, it is based, he states, on the assumption that the end, the purpose of an act of choice, is desirable—as medicine is based on the premise that to cure disease and prolong life is desirable. But how can ethics be an applied science if it attempts to establish its own values and aims as well as the means of obtaining them?

Dr. Fromm’s attempt to bring ethics within the framework of psychoanalysis is not convincing primarily because he fails to face the problems he himself raises. After all, the amoral role assumed by the analyst in the therapeutic situation—a role that evades the question of whether the patient’s behavior is morally correct or not—is not arbitrary but involves many considerations which are held important to the process of cure. Dr. Fromm, who asserts that psychoanalysis “made the mistake of divorcing psychology from problems of philosophy and ethics,” tells us neither at what points or specifically how the reconciliation with philosophy and ethics is to be effected nor what the consequences to psychoanalytic theory would be if it were effected.

Even if Fromm did not reach the goal he sought, it does not mean that the search for an ethics that embraces humanity and points us to a better way of living.

sch.]

[8/17/2025: Sheila Kennedy is her usual thoughtful self with her post The Choice Really is Simple. I add the link and quote because of its discussion of ethics.

MAGA’s hatred of “others” recently manifested itself in an executive order barring transgender people from the military. As a soldier who is a self-described Evangelical described that order in an op-ed for the New York Times,“The order may be legally sound, but it is neither moral nor ethical. I believe that it is my duty as an officer to dissent when faced with such an order.”

***

 This soldier understands–as so many do not–a foundational principle of American democratic governance: individuals have the liberty to believe as we choose, but no right to impose those beliefs on our fellow citizens. 

If they can shoot and want to serve in the military, who cares about anything else? 

You think it is just fine for the government to impose on others the idea x because you agree with x. What about when the same government imposes idea y on you, even though you do not agree with y?

You think there should be prayer in schools, you see no reason why the government should not mandate prayer in school, because it will a prayer that fits within your Evangelical/White Christian Nationalist/Pentecostal/Protestant religious views. But then the government imposes a Rastafarian prayer?

sch.