Not sure he has expressed it quite so clearly before, it's v. well laid out. Ages ago I read RD Laing's book about psychosis, 'The Divided Self', and it had a passage in it explaining how psychotic individuals have a split in them between their internal, authentic selves, and a false, social avatar that negotiated with the outside world as a kind of alienated middle man. It reminded me of colonial systems where a local elite is propped up to supervise the transfer of wealth & resources. But it also occurred to me that everyone engages this kind of false, deadened personality in order to survive in modern institutions like schools, workplaces, the political culture, even the nuclear family. The institutional self, or 'company man' per Fromm's description. In a very real sense, when you're dealing with people in their institutional role, it's fundamentally not actually a human interaction, but a negotiation with a disembodied power structure that is pulling the strings of this apparently sentient automaton. Pretending that 'it's all just people' is actually the most insane thing to do in that circumstance...

cheers,
I