The Second Biennial Conference of the Erich Fromm Society of North America (EFSNA). The conference theme is “Erich Fromm and the Crisis of Democracy: Educational, Psychological, and Sociological Perspectives.”
This talk is hosted by the Philosophy and Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Social Symbiosis and Culture in the Symbiocene: A Post-Frommian Analysis.
Albert Schweitzer, with his veneratio vitae, or “reverence for life,” built a whole system of ethics based solely on this affirmation. He argued in his manifesto, Civilization and Ethics, first published in 1923, that:
Ethics grow out of the same root as world- and life-affirmation, for ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.[1]
In the 1960s, Erich Fromm, who was strongly influenced by Schweitzer’s idea of life as intrinsically valuable, developed a contrast between the love of life and the love of death. In The Heart of Man (1964), Fromm develops the idea of biophilia as “reverence for life” in the context of personality development:
The full unfolding of biophilia is to be found in the productive orientation. The person who fully loves life is attracted by the process of life and growth in all spheres. He (sic) prefers to construct rather than to retain … Biophilic ethics have their own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life, evil is that which serves death. Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces.[2]
Fromm’s pioneering concept of biophilia conjoins the love of humanity with love of life and nature in a way that anticipates many key themes within the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, especially in the realm of environmental ethics. In his “Humanist Credo,” published in On Being Human, he linked his understanding of biophilia to a comprehensive ethic:
I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom.[3]
Fromm’s biophilia is certainly a positive psychoterratic state (psycho- of the mind or psyche, terratic- of the Earth or terra); however, he argues for no deep, mutually beneficial, symbiotic view of the cooperation present within life. Indeed, as shall be discussed below, he uses the concept of “symbiosis”[4] in his own idiosyncratic way as a negative psychological condition. ‘Biophilia,’ as a psychoterratic term for a positive earth emotion, was also used by E.O. Wilson. He defines biophilia as “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes”.[5] However, he uses the term in a way that is genetically or biologically rooted, as distinct from Fromm’s neo-Freudian personality-development orientation.
The foundational positive psychoterratic emotion, biophilia, or the instinctual love of life, seems lost in the labyrinth of the death-affirming Anthropocene. Sumbiophilia[6], or the love of the ‘sumbios’ or living together, seems an impossible human condition in the lifeless digital spaces of AI, social media, chatbots and alienating screens of the contemporary world.
The ramping up of conflict in the Middle East from October 7, 2023, has severely shaken the fake certainty of a world dependent on its extractive economy based on fossil fuels (oil) and now rare-earth minerals. Such an economy is irrationally terraphthoran (anti-life), including for humans, in its trajectory. The oil wars guarantee nothing but self-inflicted death.
The science of symbiosis has informed our understanding of how complex life emerged, how it innovates, how generation is possible, and how harmony is maintained. I have crafted the vision of the future Symbiocene around this compelling, life-affirming, biophilic, symbiotic narrative.
The Anthropocene, by contrast, is writing its own narrative around the apocalyptic under the authoritarian leadership of those who are narcissistic, misanthropic necrophiliacs.[7] There is a dialectic of mentalities, ranging from the deeply symbiotic to the dangerously parasitic, that is at play in the psychodrama of the twenty-first century.
Erich Fromm summarized what for me are the main characteristics of a misanthropic, necrophiliac human being. In The Heart of Man, he argued the following:
While life is characterized by growth in a structured functional manner, the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things … Memory, rather than experience — having, rather than being — is what counts. The necrophilous person can relate to an object — a flower or a person — only if he possesses it; hence a threat to his possession is a threat to himself, if he loses possession he loses contact with the world … He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life.[8]
As these mentalities become integral parts of institutional structures, we end up in what Fromm could have called the ‘‘insane society’’[9] and what Christopher Lasch called the ‘‘culture of narcissism.’’[10] I hate to have to say it, but this is precisely where some contemporary societies and their socio-political structures, leaders and their followers, have ended up in 2026.
In my own insane society, Australia, the ‘‘having rather than being’’ and narcissistic possessiveness are manifested in many ways: the escalating rates of domestic violence against women (including murder), the rates of incarceration of Indigenous men (including deaths in custody), homelessness, and mental illness rates in young people aged 15–35 (including suicide). Then, there is a host of symbiocidal crimes against what remains of the symbioment ( the environment) in the form of logging old-growth forests, clear-felling native vegetation for mining and meat, and the ongoing governmental (taxpayer) support for the fossil fuel industry in all its forms.
The mindless reinforcement of the public dysbiosis and the refusal to change direction from an insane to a sane society are metaphorically illustrated for me by the slavish tribe of powerful political men, the world-over, who all wear dark suits (blue or black) as if it was a military uniform, complete with their lapel and collar margins displaying status-signaling pick-stitching (usually sewed by slavish hands), the almost invisible symbols of being at the top of the bespoke suit hierarchy. Yes, there is the mandatory bright tie, but the tie is color-coded to illustrate strict adherence to play-book ideology, not taste. The line-up of ‘same suits’ represents a failure to question the status quo, even when in a crisis, such as climate warming, that has massive international consequences. Networked homogeneity becomes pathological, as failure to adhere to what Fromm called ‘‘compulsive conformity’’ could be considered ‘‘treason’’ and a sign of embarrassing humiliation and weakness in men.
Erich Fromm would find the current choreography of the insane society to be in broad agreement with his 1960s distinction between biophilia, love of life, and necrophilia. Toxic masculinity, especially as manifested by dominant influencers in the so-called ‘manosphere,’ including those in the Christian church, are doing their best to return the status of women to being ‘owned’ by their husbands without having any independent agency.[11]
The ‘new subjugation’ of women and the role of subservient females in society also have significant impacts on the ability to conceptualize action to prevent further climate chaos, extinction cascades, and toxic pollution. Toxic men exude toxicity as an expression of their status, and the role of women then becomes one of cleaning up the mess left behind, just as it once was an unquestioned norm in the domestic sphere.[12]
Symbols of the insane society and its masculinist toxicity in the form of gas-guzzling cars, private jets, luxury motor yachts, private islands, and monster houses are all energy-intensive and based on burning dead carbon. Toxic men are dysbiotic (anti-symbiomental) because to be a conservationist is to deny their hard-won competitive status and express so-called feminine values, for example, empathy, care, and reciprocity. Toxic men also resent affirmative action to assist women because they see it as denying them justice. Sarah Johnson, in her article, ‘Sluts, simps and body shaming: the rise of Africa’s manosphere,’ highlights the link between affirmative action for women and male dominance. She summarizes:
This view – known as the red pill theory – has been amplified by the manosphere, framing men as the victims of a society distorted by feminism. The men who populate the manosphere have made it their mission to redress the balance – through domination and intimidation.[13]
I describe this type of human (mainly men) as ‘terraphthorans,’ or earth destroyers, because they exemplify that aspect of human nature that seeks separation, violation, control, and dominance over other humans and all of nature. At least one “alpha male,” Elon Musk, has publicly stated his position on empathy in an interview. As summarized by Zachary B. Wolf:
While Musk said he believes in empathy and that “you should care about other people,” he also thinks it’s destroying society. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. ‘‘There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.’’ Empathy, he said, has been ‘‘weaponized.’’[14]
According to Musk, the problem with empathy, especially in the context of the welfare state, is that it can used to manipulate the emotions of others to attract various forms of collective welfare support. Hence, the opposition to migrants as they are thought to extract empathy from citizens of goodwill and provoke political pressure from them to give to those who are seen as not deserving. It then becomes possible to label migrants as social parasites and possibly excommunicate them.
The origins, in part, of the toxic masculinist critique of second-wave feminism might be found in the development of the use of symbiosis in a strictly pathological psychological sense. In 1680, under the intriguing title of (Συμβίωσις), ‘Symbiåosis , or the intimate converse of Pope and Devil attended by a cardinal and buffoon to which is annexed the pourtrait of each, with a brief explication thereof,’ we find a text written by James Salgado, who described himself as “… a Spaniard and sometime priest in the Church of Rome.”
In this satirical text, Salgado introduces the concept of symbiosis as a form of critical discourse (deconstruction) that attempts to explicate the nuances of power structures. Salgado believed that such deconstruction was necessary because intimate relationships, often hidden from view, ambiguous, or subject to authoritarian censorship, conceal the truth. The need for such critical discourse was already in public “circulation” in the form of Janus-faced coins “… with the pope on the obverse and a cardinal on the reverse, which when turned over became, respectively, images of the devil and a madman or jester.” The essay was an attempt to explain the symbolic significance of these Janus-faced coins[15].
As a so-called ‘reformed’ (Anglican) member of the Catholic Church, Salgado offered perhaps a first warning about the negative aspects of a symbiosis or association that is too close. Such a ‘bad’ form of ‘living together’ or ‘conjunction’ is, in Salgado’s mind, the product of the power structure of the Catholic Church imposing its will (globally) over the original unity of God and the purity and unity of Jesus Christ as expressed in the Bible. It was Salgado who first connected, under the name of symbiosis, mutual overdependence (Devil and Pope) with the possibility of a form of self-annihilation.
In Salgado’s psychodrama of symbiosis there is a connection to Eric Fromm’s notion of ‘incestuous symbiosis.’ Fromm first used the term ‘symbiosis’ in a psychological context to describe a reason for sado-masochistic relationships between people. In Fear of Freedom, first published in 1942, he made the following claim:
I suggest calling the aim which is at the basis of both sadism and masochism, symbiosis. Symbiosis, in this psychological sense, means the union of one individual self (or any other power outside of the own self) in such a way as to make each lose the integrity of its own self and make them completely dependent on each other.[16]
Fromm argued that a child, because of remaining too closely ‘‘tied to the mother’’ or her equivalents as ‘‘blood, family, tribe,’’[17] arrests their own potential for further development or maturity. There is an aspect to incestuous symbiosis at the personal level, and that is when, in modern psychoanalytic terms, ‘‘two or more individuals behave as though between them they form a whole person.’’[18]
Fromm and, later, Lasch discuss symbiosis-driven authoritarianism and compulsive conformity as ways that men might respond to the pressures of industrial society. Fromm, in the ‘Humanist’s Credo’ (1965), published in On Being Human, contrasts biophilia with necrophilia and posits three ways that humans can either progress or retrogress from any kind of productive reconciliation of self, society, and nature. The retrogressive tendency is manifest in three ways: necrophilia, narcissism, and incestuous symbiosis.[19]
The necrophilous person wants destructive violence because it is the outlet for his agency or ‘force’ to impose his will on others. The narcissist only seeks satisfaction in the self and its closed orbits (clan, religion, nation, etc.) to the exclusion of all that is ‘outside.’ Incestuous symbiosis is like narcissism in that there is an excessive tie to the mother, family, tribe, etc.; however, there is a compulsion to merge in complete dependency on ‘‘the other,’’ which is achieved only by the ‘‘ceasing of his own development.’’[20]
Fromm’s solution to the problem of incestuous symbiosis was to embrace what he called “biophilia,” or the love of life. Ever the optimist about humans and their ‘‘inherent’’ good nature, he refused to see selfishness, perversion, pathology, and dysbiotic behavior as somehow instinctual or ‘‘hardwired.’’ In The Sane Society, he argued the following:
On the contrary, the striving for mental health, for happiness, harmony, love, productiveness, is inherent in every human being who was not born as a mental or moral idiot … It takes powerful constellations and circumstances to pervert and stifle this innate striving for sanity … To believe that this perversion is inherent in man is like throwing seeds in the soil of the desert and claiming they were not meant to grow.[21]
The concept of biophilia bequeathed to us by Fromm and then E.O. Wilson has continued to exist in psychoterratic domains for decades. Wilson’s version, also based on an instinctual (inherent) component of human nature, has had considerable longevity, often expressed as the ‘biophilia hypothesis.’[22]
However, if the instinct of the love of life was dominant within human beings, it would have made manifest biophilic ways of living and steered us away from the despotism and dysbiosis we are in right now. An instinct that is weakly terranascient (life-affirming) and unable to counter its instinctual and non-instinctual opposites, especially in social structure, is almost as ineffective as having no instinct at all. As Fromm hinted, a sociology of symbiosis is needed to address the social-structural foundations of all forms of pathology: biophysical and mental. Instinct, by itself, is clearly not sufficient to take humans into the Symbiocene.
In biological symbiosis, in cases of evolution by symbiosis or symbiogenesis, there is the merging of separate entities into a newly configured holobiont; however, for example, the mitochondria within complex entities do not cease their own development. Certain cells can donate or transfer mitochondria to other cells for health benefits, for example, ‘‘regulating cellular metabolism, cancer, the immune system, maintenance of tissue homeostasis, mitochondrial quality control, wound healing, and adipose tissue function.’’[23] My reading of the role of mitochondria is not one of inert dependency, but the deeper we look, the more their active presence is integral to the united health of the whole.
The more we know about our ‘real’ relationships with life, the more knowledge of that beneficial vital dependency can lead to liberation from narcissism, necrophilia, and parasitism. All non-human beings that comprise the human holobiont also share the instinct to unite. It is the culture of parasitism that destroys that unity.
Mutual parasitism
Fromm’s use of the term ‘‘incestuous symbiosis’’ is inappropriate to describe loss of identity in human holobionts and is better understood as a form of ‘‘mutual parasitism’’ where dependency on the other comes at the expense of the full potential and vitality of both parties in the relationship. Importantly, the loss of vitality goes further than closed relationships between people because the nisedoms, or nested entities, such as family, community, and state within which they occur, are also damaged or destroyed. We can now use mutual parasitism to go beyond Fromm’s account of the individual and social expressions of loss of identity.
According to Fromm in On Being Human, a combination of necrophilia and narcissism would undoubtedly produce, in men, particularly those in positions of power, destructive tendencies and ‘‘serious distortions of rational judgment.’’[24] For a whole nation to be taken over by these mentalities, the use of force is also manifest in the abuse of the legal system, the military, and the police. Being despotic and delusional is a particularly dangerous mix in leaders when the world is at a crossroads with respect to climate chaos, oil wars, toxic pollution, forced migration, and mass extinction.
A depiction of mutual parasitism might, in part, account for adoration of the great leader, slavish conformism, being ‘lost’ in cults, belief in conspiracy theories, and going down rabbit holes in social media. Society begins to self-destruct when all three forms of Frommian retrogression work in tandem.
What has changed about the manipulative force and slavish conformism in the twenty-first century is that the dominant institutions within the social structure are amorphous and are controlled by mainly male oligarchs acting on social media platforms via faceless algorithms. The old social structure of the C19 (and earlier) had a solid geographical presence (e.g., a village, the family home, and churches) and visible leaders (e.g., parents, ministers, and the pope). The merging of one’s identity with others in the attachment to a symbolic belief system was a shared real-life experience, a public ‘leap of faith.’ Participation within these structures was communal and supported by cultural activities in the form of music, art, singing, and seasonal rituals. [25]
However, the instinctual or relictual urge to merge and share can now be ‘artificially’ achieved in the digital age through the absorption and sharing of belief systems that lack public or physical presence and do not have independent verification processes. Conspiracy theories abound because they offer a new type of what Lasch called a ‘‘haven from a heartless world.’’[26] However, no longer is the home, as exemplified by the modern nuclear family and its mother monopolized child rearing,[27] the haven; it has become the personal computer (including the smartphone), the internet, and its private connection in the ‘home’ within the private spaces of the headphones, study, or bedroom. We could even call this socializing agent “social media-monopolized child rearing.”
Given the right webmaster, the web can trap many victims in its networked stickiness, and millions become addicts or, sadly, victims. Each ‘like’ on an e-page not only delivers self-reinforcement but also huge feedback information flows to advertisers and their merchandise. The closed nature of the system features attachment, dependency, and a new form of e-parasitism as an AI chatbot takes over a victim’s mind, exercises zombie-like control,[28] and imposes dependency over future choices. One such ‘choice’ is suicide.
Lasch saw “the denial of dependency” as creating the impasse of narcissism, where both men and women regress into obsessions that he sees, in the tradition of Sigmund Freud, as ultimately generated by the “infant’s symbiotic fusion with the mother.’’[29] Lasch describes the regressive dialectic of technological modernism in ways that culminate in the ‘‘feminine’’ desire for symbiosis or the ‘‘masculine’’ expression of toxic mastery. He argues:
The technological project of achieving independence from nature embodies the solipsistic side of narcissism, just as the mystical union with nature embodies its symbiotic and self-obliterating side. Since both spring from the same source—the need to deny the fact of dependence—it can only cause confusion to call the dream of technological omnipotence a masculine obsession, while extolling the hope of a more loving relation with nature as a characteristically feminine preoccupation. Both originate in the undifferentiated equilibrium of the prenatal state, and both, moreover, reject psychological maturation in favor of regression, the ‘‘feminine’’ longing for symbiosis no less than the solipsistic ‘‘masculine’’ drive for absolute mastery.[30]
Lasch tries to resolve the narcissism dilemma by urging a reconciliation of the dependency of our relations with fellow humans and nature but also to allow for what he calls ‘‘our inevitable separation from the primordial source of life.’’ [31] In that way, we humans acknowledge our dependency on others as well as our ‘unique’ separateness as culturally mediated beings to resolve an ancient source of conflict.
Given what we have learned about the bioscience of symbiosis in the past 50 years, there is nothing inevitable about our separation from the primordial source of life, particularly as it is depicted in the Freudian mother dependency-separation dialectic. Indeed, the discovery that we are vestliens and holobionts should be enough for us to understand that, for example, we are conceived with the aid of symbiosis (complete with our sex-specific microbiomes); born via symbiosis (thanks to ancient symbiotic viral DNA); are given our microbiomes for living in the post-maternal world (initially by contact with the mother’s vagina during birth); and live healthy lives (by courtesy of our gut bacteria). We have never separated from the primordial source of life, and we never will because it is diffused within nested entities or nisedoms. The ‘‘mother’’ is a superorganism within a nisedom we often call ‘mother nature.’
Lasch was obviously correct about the importance of fetal and infant symbiotic fusion (male and female) with the mother; however, we now know that symbiotic fusion with life on Earth is a complex, lifelong affair with trillions of other beings. That some men, it seems, have a propensity to express their attempted separation from primordial unity in the form of dominance and violation of life-bearing women, and all life, is something to be strongly opposed as perversely pathological. Lasch sees women expressing a ‘mystical’ longing for symbiosis as also a failure to fully separate from the mother and to mature, and in his view, this is also something to be opposed.
However, there is nothing mystical about the longing for symbiosis; it is the default condition of life as understood by the best science we have. Within the broad biological category of human ‘female’ holobiont, there are reproductive and nurturing instincts that can also be expressed as emotions and values of empathy and care. These values are closer to the truth about the instinctual, lived experience of the symbiotic reality of life than those frequently found under the biological category of ‘male’ and ‘masculine’ emotions and values.
Those men who express their identity and selfhood through dominance, denial of access to knowledge, violation, and violence directed against women and girls place themselves at the parasitic end of the life spectrum. Oppressive values, as expressed in a social setting, are ultimately contradictory since successful parasitism on a female ‘other’ leads to a painful slope of abuse, coercive control, assault, murder, war, symbiocide, and then mass extinction. Members of the toxic manosphere need to heed the logic of that “progression” very carefully.
For both men and women, expressing a longing for the continuity of symbiosis with the primordial source, sun-life, is a sign of fully human maturation, not retrogression or self-obliteration. Symbio-education, particularly for boys, then becomes crucial to prevent socially constructed alienation from life and a failure to understand their male, generative role in the perpetuation of humanity, including potentially their own offspring, especially their daughters. Once we were ignorant of micro- and macro-symbiosis as the foundation of life. Now we have that knowledge; education about it must become a cultural priority.
Perhaps, in the light of the history of symbiosis, we can get rid of the mano-sphere and the womano-sphere and work on the idea of a ‘sumbio-sphere’ where the union of the related but different characteristics and qualities of all humans finds a place to live together in the nisedoms of the Symbiocene.[32]
My own account of human love and appreciation for the symbiotic connections in life (sumbiophilia) serves as the instinctual and emotional foundation of the Symbiocene. I have elaborated on the intellectual foundation of the Symbiocene as the bioscience-based philosophy of sumbioism. Together, these foundations can put a male-dominated, alienated human species back into the grand narrative of life. My gut microbiome feeling (instinct) is that humans, alienated from life, desperately want that productive narrative to unfold[33]. A short essay I wrote, ‘Ecopsychology in the Symbiocene,’ in 2013 for the journal Ecopsychology captures this urgency:
In order to avoid further transgression into unsafe spaces and to retreat from those already entered, we need to move out of the Anthropocene as soon as possible … Such positive reintegration will only become possible if children and adults currently alienated from nature and natural processes can see the benefits of rapidly moving out of the Anthropocene and playing a constructive role in the creation of what I have called the Symbiocene. The Symbiocene will be that period in the earth’s history where humans symbiotically reintegrate themselves, psychologically and technologically, into nature and natural systems.[34]
Fromm and Lasch clearly articulate the consequences of sliding into a dysbiotic and ultimately neurotic, pathological social structure. The antidotes to mastery and mysticism have been suggested above, and they are focused on the social structural “constellations and circumstances”[35] that “pervert and stifle this innate striving for sanity” in humans.
The sociology of symbiosis, as expressed within a science-based Symbiocene, is my attempt to take dependency on an oppressive, abstract social structure to one that is full of vividus and a cause for celebration and joy. Beneficial dependency reintegrates humans with each other and other life forms. I am a child of Hildegard of Bingham, but without the assistance of God. My emergence is from a Western Australian, Noongar country called ‘Manjumup’, TB-surviving, orchid-loving mother.
The Ghedeist
To assist the process of reintegration, I believe that for many people, spirituality—defined as the search for meaning in life—serves as a vital component that is often absent from bland bioscience or outdated Freudian accounts of the sexual basis of ‘unbalanced’ minds.
I have introduced the concept of the ‘ghedeist’ as a secular manifestation and expression of the ‘spiritual’ dimension of symbiosis. The concept was created by me in 2016 to describe the spirit or life force that holds things together, a feeling of symbiotic interconnectedness in life between the self and other beings (human and non-human), and their gathering together to live within shared and nested Earth places and spaces.
The neologism is derived from the ancient Indo-European root word ‘ghehd,’ which means ‘to unite.’ It is the root word, passed on through Old English and German, in the construction of modern words such as ‘together,’ ‘to gather,’ and ‘good.’
The clearly aligned meanings of ‘symbiosis’ (to live together) and ‘ghehd’ (to be united) could easily be combined. The fact that the word ‘good’ is also etymologically connected to ‘ghehd’ provides yet another compelling reason to combine these disparate words into one. Recognizing the unusual spelling in modern English, I shortened ‘ghehd’ to ‘ghed.’ I then joined a shortened version of the German ‘geist,’ with its meanings of ghost, spirit, mind, and affinities in other languages for a vital force or ‘life force’ to ‘ghed’ to create the ‘ghedeist.’
The ghedeist is a non-mystical feeling of intense mutual empathy for other beings. It is a term with no formal religious connotations that can be used to acknowledge the life spirit that all living beings share. The point of creating this neologism was to place into the English language a term that links symbiotic science to secular spirituality. The ghedeist also offers a conduit from non-indigenous to indigenous belief systems and may well resonate with Vedic philosophy, with its emphasis on the unity of all life.[36]
Despite Erich Fromm using symbiosis in a negative psychological light, the post-Margulisian[37] world now sees symbiosis not as the smothering loss of identity as one being fuses into another, but as the emergence of a new interactive, collective identity, one that is the cumulative addition of other organisms (including vestliens) into the cumulative holobionts that constitute life.
Fromm’s assertion of an ‘‘innate striving for sanity’’ is, for me, the work of the ghedeist in human life. The ghedeist is the zeitgeist of the Symbiocene epoch; it is an idea “whose time has come” because it is urgently needed to extract us from the symbiocidal structural black holes of the so-called civilization of the Anthropocene. Once this goal is accomplished, the ghedeist, in addition to the philosophy of sumbioism, is all that is needed to perpetuate this secular but spiritual foundation for human existence.
The repurposing of old religious structures (churches) and the design of new ghedeistual structures I call neohenges[38] by sumbiotects become places where the new symbiotic animism between humans and other life can find expression. They can also be places that welcome the birth of life. Indigenous ‘ghedeistual’ practices are more than welcome within emergent hybrid places, as, hopefully, the rituals of the Symbiocene will be welcome in theirs. The role of education and its institutions becomes crucial to the knowledge of symbiosis, sumbioism, and new animism that Generation Symbiocene[39] needs to acquire. Once they have that knowledge, they will be able to regenerate anything that is symbiotically united on Earth.
The associative nature of life, which requires integration with other life to exist, adds a practical side to the idea of the ghedeist. We need to know what direction to go in at times, and the ancient ‘good’ in the ghedeist provides a measure of guidance. Fromm’s focus on ‘‘happiness, harmony, love, and productiveness’’ as the biophilic, instinctual basis for sanity is entirely consistent with symbiosis as the basis of the ghedeist. Biophilia is hugely strengthened by symbiophilia, the love of symbiosis.
As Erich Fromm argued, “Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life.” May the ghedeist take you on that journey into the Symbiocene …
Thank you.
Material based on the book, The Symbiocene: Our Only Future (in draft preparation format) to be published by Cornell University Press 2027).
[1] Schweitzer 1967, 11. World: [Old English w(e)orold, from wer man + ald age, life; related to Old Frisian warld, wrald, Old Norse verold, Old High German wealt (German Welt)]
[2] Fromm 2010 (1964), 43.
[3] Fromm 1994, 101. (from his unpublished writings).
[4] The full derivation is from the Greek sumbiosis, meaning companionship (from sumbioun, to live together, from sumbios, living together), plus Syn from Greek words such as sunthesus (synthesis), when sun, then syn, means ‘to put’ and ‘ment’, providing a process or condition.
[5] Wilson 1984, 1.
[6] Albrecht, 2016: https://glennaalbrecht.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/sumbiophilia-2/
[7] Love of death in a general sense.
[8][8] Fromm, Erich. 2010 (1964). The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil. Riverdale, NY: American Mental Health Foundation Books. 37.
[9] Fromm, Erich. 1973 (1956) The Sane Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
[10] Lasch, Christopher. 1991 (1979). The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393348350.
[11] A spokesperson for an influential church community in the USA openly said that ‘‘women are the kind of people that people come out of’’. X: https://x.com/PeteHegseth/status/1953626931234054558
[12] The historian, Miriam Dixon when writing about Australian male culture described the position of women as ‘‘The doormats of the Western world’’. See Dixson, M. 1976. The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788-1975. Australia: Penguin Books. Introduction, p.11.
[13] See: Johnson, Sarah. 2026. Sluts, simps and body shaming: the rise of Africa’s manosphere. The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/apr/07/african-manosphere-misogyny-social-media Note: The phrase, red pill theory, originated as a metaphor from the 1999 science-fiction film The Matrix, where the protagonist is offered a choice: take the blue pill to remain in a comfortable, simulated illusion, or take the red pill to experience the harsh, unfiltered truth of reality.
[14] Wolf, Zackary. 2025. Elon Musk wants to save Western civilization from empathy. CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empathy-doge#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20fundamental%20weakness%20of%20Western,which%20is%20the%20empathy%20response.
[15] The new Trump $1 coin celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Unites States and continues the money-power tradition by having his face on one side of the coin and the American Bald Eagle on the other.
[16] Fromm Erich, 1942 (1960) The Fear of Freedom, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. p.136.
[17] Fromm Erich, 1994 (2005) On Being Human, New York: Continuum. p.101
[18] See: Koch, K., & Jarvis, C. (1987). Symbiotic Mother–Daughter Relationships in Incest Families. Social Casework, 68(2), 94-101. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/104438948706800205
[19] Fromm, Erich. 1994. On Being Human. New York: Continuum.101.
[20] Fromm, 1994. On Being Human. 101.
[21] Fromm, 1973. The Sane Society. 275.
[22] Kellert, Stephen R. and Edward O. Wilson, eds. 1993. The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington: Island Press.
[23] Borcherding, N., Brestoff, J.R. The power and potential of mitochondria transfer. Nature 623, 283–291 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06537-z, Nature | Vol 623 | 9 November 2023 | 283.
[24] Fromm, 1994. On Being Human. 101.
[25] Of course, such ‘public’ systems could become despotic and volatile, as was highlighted by Salgardo. I am trying, for example, to highlight the difference between a public death by the Inquisition and death by suicide in the private space of a chat bot, a bedroom and a screen.
[26] Lasch, Christoper. 1977. Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged. New York: Basic Books.
[27] See: Balbus, Isaac. 1982. Marxism and Domination: A Neo-Hegelian, Feminist, Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexual, Political, and Technological Liberation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Balbus makes it clear that his use of the term ‘‘mother monopolized’’ with respect to child rearing, ‘‘should not convey the impression that women have freely chosen disproportionately to assume the responsibilities of nurturing and disciplining infants and young children. To the contrary, they have throughout history been obliged to assume these responsibilities.’’ Page.7.
[28] I am reminded of the infamous fungus parasite, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, that invades an ant, turns it into a Zombie by controlling its behavior, consumes it, and then escapes as a fruiting body via breaking out from the ant’s head where its life cycle begins again on the unsuspecting body of a new ant host. Protecting one’s computer from easily spread viruses has never been more important.
[29] Lasch, Christopher. 1984. The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times. London: Pan Books. p.245.
[30] Lasch, 1984. 246.
[31] Lasch, 1984. 259
[32] I thought of this domain while watching the safe landing of the Artemis II mission on the 11th of April 2026. As the astronauts emerged from their capsule, exemplified in the four humans, was the sumbios or living together, for the whole Earth. They personified an emergent hybrid human intelligence that knows no abstract categories such as gender or race.
[33] See: Solnit Rececca. 2026. The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. Chicago: Haymarket Books. ISBN 979-8888904510.
[34] Albrecht, Glenn. 2014. Ecopsychology in the Symbiocene. Ecopsychology. Vol. 6 N0. 1 March 2014, 58.
[35] Fromm 1973. P. 275.
[36] See, for example, the Vedic concept of ‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam’ (the world is one family) which acknowledges the unity in all life and sees all borders as abstractions.
[37] After the biologist, Lynn Margulis.
[38] Albrecht, Glenn. 2020. Neohenges. Psychoterratica (Blog): https://glennaalbrecht.wordpress.com/2020/12/23/neohenges/
[39] Albrecht, Glenn. 2019. Generation Symbiocene. The Ecologist: https://theecologist.org/2019/mar/08/generation-symbiocene
