Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Modern society treats people like standardized products to achieve a superficial sense of equality. True individuality is sacrificed for uniformity.
In plain terms
We make everyone the same to call it equal, but it just like mass production.
What can you take from it?
Equality should not mean standardizing human differences.

Where it applies

  • discussing social equality
  • analyzing mass culture
  • critiquing bureaucracy

Putting it to work

  • value diverse individual traits
  • challenge uniform social norms

Questions to consider

  • Does your environment reward uniqueness or conformity?
  • How is equality defined in your community?

Another view

It simplifies the complex relationship between equity and standardization.

More from Erich Fromm

  1. In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is essentially the same as the belief in God, in God's existence, God's justice, God's love. The love…

    Permalink to quote #44
  2. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

    Permalink to quote #46
  3. The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without the other. The difference is only that th…

    Permalink to quote #43

Related quotes

  1. Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has alway…

    Martin HeideggerMartin Heidegger quote #1
  2. The wizards represent all that the true 'muggle' most fears: They are plainly outcasts and comfortable with being so. Nothing is more unnerving to the truly co…

    J.K. RowlingJ.K. Rowling quote #1
  3. Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of hi…

    Al AlvarezAl Alvarez quote #4