What the world needs now: Marsha Sinetar books

Healthy mentoring flows from productive types because, as we have seen, loving life they encourage life in others. This is key, so I repeat it. When our relationships are mutually liberating, we connect to people without artificiality. By contrast, unhealthy mentors try to fool or exploit us. Their words seem to deprive us of dignity or safety, and somehow that robs us of vitality. They may be ultra-aggressive or manipulative. They may not hear or respect our disclosures, could thwart our wishes, and generally don’t – perhaps can’t – guide us to true liberty. Erich Fromm’s description of “productiveness” influenced my ideas about healthy mentoring, and I share Fromm’s and Maslow’s view that when self-actualizing growth is blocked, life-denying impulses increase. Fromm’s term for the opposite of the productive type is necrophilous. The word means “lover of death and decay,” a cancerous life orientation, the “quintessence of evil.” Epitomized by ultra-authoritarian repression, necrophilous types ran rampant under Nazi rule where control of others, detached annihilation (or torture) of life, and militaristic rituals were celebrated. While most of us have mixtures of productive and unproductive responses, we observe in extreme unproductive types an absorption with dead systems and an unsettling “concern with mechanical, nonhuman gadgetry.” As Fromm explains: “The necrophile who is interested in photography takes pictures of people, but his interest is directed to the quality and sophistication of his camera; he listens to music, but his love is for experimentation with his complicated stereophonic receiver; he loves time-saving appliances, but even the simplest addition is done on a calculator; even the shortest walk to the grocery store is reason to drive there by car. In effect, the necrophilous character substitutes an affinity for technique and for technology in place of the [productive] person’s affinity for life, for people, for beauty.”

-- The Mentor's Spirit, Marsha Sinetar

Shall we count the ways this resonates with today's situation in the U.S.? How many fingers do you have?

The word means “lover of death and decay,” a cancerous life orientation, the “quintessence of evil.” Epitomized by ultra-authoritarian repression, necrophilous types ran rampant under Nazi rule where control of others, detached annihilation (or torture) of life, and militaristic rituals were celebrated.

I can think of no better characterizations of the behavior of the sickos in power than "cancerous life orientation," "ultra-authoritarian repression," and "detached annihilation (or torture) of life."

Yet, it occurs to me that the following from the piece describes blogging at its best:

Healthy mentoring flows from productive types because, as we have seen, loving life they encourage life in others. This is key, so I repeat it. When our relationships are mutually liberating, we connect to people without artificiality.

So...two obsessions interests of this writer, in a book picked at random for lunchtime reading and opened to an arbitrary page in the middle. I guess the tagline at the top right of the page here doesn't lie: truthseeking between the usual necessary duties.

Yours in productivity, my friends. (What other choice do we have?)