Lost Hope

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"There could be nothing more paradoxical in historical terms than this change: man, at the beginning of the industrial age, when in reality he did not posses the means for a world in which the table was set for all who wanted to eat, when he lived in a world in which there were economic reasons for slavery, war, and exploitation, in which man only sensed the possibilities of his new science and of its application to technique and to production - nevertheless man at the beginning of modern development was full of hope. Four hundred year later, when all these hopes are realizable, when man can produce enough for everybody, when war has become unnecessary because technical progress can give any country more wealth than can territorial conquest, when this globe is in the process of becoming as unified as a continent was four hundred years ago, at the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it."

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Erich Fromm (Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 23 March 1900 ~ Muralto, Ticino, Switzerland, 18 March 1980). Excerpt from the Afterword to George Orwell's 1984.
◙ Artwork: Antonio Berni

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