fromm_quote.txt

"Knowledge has one more, and a more fundamental, relation to the
problem of love.  The basic need to fuse with another person so as to
transcend the prison of one’s separateness is closely related to
another specifically human desire, that to know the “secret of man.”
While life in its merely biological aspects is a miracle and a secret,
man in his human aspects is an unfathomable secret to himself—and to
his fellow man.  We know ourselves, and yet even with all the efforts
we may make, we do not know ourselves.  We know our fellow man, and
yet we do not know him, because we are a thing, and our fellow man is
not a thing.  The further we reach into the depth of our being, or
someone else’s being, the more the goal of knowledge eludes us.  Yet
we cannot help desiring to penetrate into the secret of man’s soul,
into the innermost nucleus which is “he.”

There is one way, a desperate one, to know the secret:  it is that of
complete power over another person; the power which makes him do what
we want, feel what we want, think what we want; which transforms him
into a thing, our thing, our posession.  The ultimate degree of this
attempt to know lies in the extremes of sadism, the desire and ability
to make a human being suffer; to torture him, to force him to betray
his secret in his suffering.  In this craving for penetrating man's
secret, his and hence our own, lies an essential motivation for the
depth and intensity of cruelty and destructiveness.  In a very
succinct way this idea has been expressed by Isaac Babel.  He quotes a
fellow officer in the Russian civil war, who has just stamped his
former master to death, as saying:  "With shooting--I'll put it this
way--with shooting your only get rid of a chap...With shooting you'll
never get at the soul, to where it is in a fellow and how it shows
itself.  But I don't spare myself, and I've more than once trampled an
enemy for over an hour.  You see, I want to get to know what life
really is, what life's like down our way."

In children we often see this path to knowledge quite overtly.  The
child takes something apart, breaks it up in order to know it; or it
takes an animal apart; cruelly tears off the wings of a butterfly in
order to know it, to force its secret.  The cruelty itself is
motivated by something deeper:  the wish to know the secret of things
and of life.