Home Societal / Political Freedom How to Turn Loneliness into a Multi-Trillion Dollar Business: A Perspective on China from the Writings of Erich Fromm

How to Turn Loneliness into a Multi-Trillion Dollar Business: A Perspective on China from the Writings of Erich Fromm

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In The True Believer: Eric Hoffers (1951) offers his unique perspective on the nature of mass movements: the frustrated people are those who are most likely driven by mass movements. For Chinese middle-class families, inflation had become the main pressure, the lost of land and high housing price had made the middle classes became the new poor. Additionally, for the person who is frustrated, a mass movement offers substitutes either for the whole self or for the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot evoke out of the individual resources. Their longing for quality life became the original dynamic of online shopping (Hoffers, 1951).

Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers. Alibaba knows how to propaganda their products, when customers shopping online, they turn to purchase package deals instead of single product. Besides, it convenes the customer especially the young people that they are shopping for their dream life. For instance, in 2018 the Global Shopping Festival entitled the theme as True self, which combined the products and self-realization through constantly broadcasting advertisements.

Today we come across a person who acts and feels like an automaton; who never experiences anything which is really his; who experiences himself entirely as the person he thinks he is supposed to be; whose artificial smile has replaced genuine laughter; whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech; whose dulled despair has taken the place of genuine pain.(Fromm, 1961)

What’s more? Within 15 years, over 40% of jobs can be replaced by AI technology, we are facing a revolution, a mass movement in all human kind, and it’s coming faster than ever before (Lee, 2018) ‘

The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man’s nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become ‘Golems’, they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life’ (Fromm, 1963)

 

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