CONCEPT
Rational Faith
Fromm's term for the conviction — grounded in observation rather than wish — that human beings retain the capacity for genuine freedom even when conditions for its realization are unfavorable. Fromm's response to the AI age is not optimism or despair but the effort rational faith justifies.
Rational faith is Fromm's alternative to both passive hope and despair. It is not the wish that things will turn out well, which is not hope but the disguised wish to be relieved of the burden of responsibility. It is the conviction, grounded in experience and observation, that human beings have the capacity for genuine freedom even when the conditions for its realization are unfavorable. Rational faith does not guarantee the outcome. It justifies the effort. And the effort — the daily, unglamorous work of cultivating the capacity for genuine freedom in a world organized around its evasion — is the only response to the AI moment that Fromm's framework can endorse.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Fromm distinguished rational faith from two failures he considered characteristic of contemporary thought. The first is passive hope — the expectation that things will work out, that the technology