The Art Of Loving

Brotherly love represents the most fundamental kind of love in Fromm’s framework, underlying all other types. It encompasses responsibility, care, respect, and knowledge of another human being, focused on furthering their life. Brotherly love is characterized by its lack of exclusivity and applies universally to all humans, recognizing the essential identity and brotherhood among all people despite superficial differences. This form of love is rooted in the recognition that all humans share a common core beyond talents, intelligence, or knowledge—what Fromm calls “central relatedness” rather than “peripheral” connection. Brotherly love begins with compassion for the helpless, establishing that genuine love transcends blood relationships and extends to strangers and those who serve no purpose to the individual.

Conformity is one of the common methods humans use to escape the anxiety of separateness by becoming part of a larger group and adopting its customs, practices, and beliefs. In modern democratic societies, people conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to, often living under the illusion that they are individualists while their ideas match those of the majority. Fromm argues that conformity represents only a pseudo-unity that affects the mind but not the body, providing a continuous but insufficient solution to human isolation.