In 'The Revolution of Hope' (1968), Erich Fromm predicted what the human being of the year 2000 would be like: a mere consumer, a passive being subjected to a mechanized reality that will separate us from each other. Society would be increasingly individualized, dehumanized and subordinated to technology. The world will progressively move towards a scenario with less social interaction and greater isolation. In the 'mega-machine', as he defined industrialized society, man will be a slave to technology. This prognosis is, in many respects, a portrait of our world today.

For Fromm, the 'mega-machine' is a totally organized and homogenized social system in which machines and people are the same thing. The only difference is that the human being loses freedom, health and happiness to make these gears work.

We take it for granted that our computers and other technologies are at our service, when in fact, it is the other way around. On the other hand, there is another interesting aspect that Fromm pointed out in his book 'The Revolution of Hope'. Men and women will lose faith and trust in human values and, in their place, only technical and material values will be given validity. The dehumanized society, according to Fromm, will be an unhappy society.

Ortega y Gasset said that "while the tiger cannot stop being a tiger, cannot bleed, man lives in permanent risk of becoming dehumanized". This would mean being stripped of his human characteristics, including freedom and his own identity, which would subject him to new forms of slavery.

The dehumanized society has been made possible, in part, by what Yosvani Momtano explains in 'The exile of the Humanities': that in the acting schools there is no margin for thought and creativity. The vacuum of the Humanities is being filled by pseudocultures. Rob Riemen highlights the four that I mention in summary below.

1. Pseudoculture, which opts for a pleasant, fun and easy life;

2. The pragmatic pseudoculture, that of science and technology, which prioritizes the useful;

3. The pseudoculture of money and wealth;

4. The pseudo-culture of aesthetic snobbery, the nostalgic veneration of the 'beautiful works' of the past, which allows us to flee from our world with its uncomfortable truths.

For Rob Riemen, these subcultures generate a spiritual void and a loss of identity, which can lead to despair and manifest in drug use and violence. In his essay 'The Art of Being Human' (2023) he argues that to be authentically human and to remain so in a dehumanized society is a challenge and an art that lies in the nobility of spirit, which frees us from our ignorance and our prejudices. It is equivalent to what Socrates called 'paideia' and the Germans called 'bildung'. It involves forming character and becoming real people, rather than just individuals in the crowd.

In this status it is necessary to resort to human values: cooperation, active listening, empathy, solidarity, altruism, humility, simplicity... humanity, in final, is the only antidote against dehumanization.

In a society dehumanized in part by the excess of life on social networks, it is essential to take measures to counteract their negative effects. It is important to set limits on the time we spend on social networks. Cultivate offline relationships: arranging face-to-face meetings, participating in community activities, and establishing real, meaningful connections with others can counteract feelings of loneliness and isolation.

Riemen affirms that the art of being human is favored by the permanent reading of the classics. In this regard quotation the first stanza of a sonnet by Quevedo:

"Withdrawn in the peace of these deserts.

with few but learned books together,

alive in conversation with the deceased

and I listen with my eyes to the dead".

He adds that in order to build a healthy society and culture, care must be taken to foster an independent human spirit, constant respect for freedom, openness, courage, responsibility, a critical spirit and, above all, a love of truth. A culture cannot be founded on an equivocal relationship with the truth.