To Have or To Be?: Summary & Key Insights

In the history of Western thought, few ideas have been as seductive as the belief that humanity could achieve unlimited progress through science, production, and consumption. The renaissance and the Enlightenment taught us that reason could master nature; the industrial revolution convinced us that this mastery could produce endless wealth and comfort. Thus was born what I call the Great Promise — the modern faith that happiness and freedom derive from material abundance and the constant expansion of technological control.

This faith was once revolutionary. It liberated mankind from the fatalism of medieval life, offering hope through human effort and intellect. For centuries, people lived under the assumption that their fate was divine, that poverty and suffering were ordained. The idea that man could improve his own condition through knowledge was exhilarating. Yet by the twentieth century, the promise had shifted from freedom through knowledge to happiness through possession. The spiritual liberation became economic ambition. We began to measure human progress not by wisdom or compassion but by productivity, growth, and consumption.

The paradox, however, soon became clear. The very tools that expanded our power also narrowed our being. We became experts in doing and acquiring but strangers to the experience of living. The sense of self turned outward — grounded in things rather than in one’s inner vitality. Instead of mastering nature in order to live more fully, we became slaves to production and efficiency. The dream of progress transformed into the nightmare of endless pursuit.

In this first step of the book, I seek to understand how a noble promise became an illusion. The expansion of material wealth was supposed to bring happiness, but it has produced anxiety. The conquest of nature was supposed to bring freedom, but it has resulted in ecological and existential threat. Our civilization thrives materially, yet starves spiritually. The Great Promise, I argue, does not fail because it promised too much, but because it mistook the path — substituting the having mode for the being mode. What began as an assertion of human potential ended as its confinement.

By the time I wrote this book, it was impossible to ignore the moral exhaustion of Western society. The promise of happiness through material success had led not to fulfillment but to estrangement. People felt increasingly disconnected from their work, their communities, and even themselves. Anxiety had become the natural condition of life, despite abundance. This failure is not accidental; it derives from the inner contradiction between human needs and the structure of the having mode.

In the having mode, the sense of self depends on possession — what one owns, controls, or consumes. Therefore, the more one has, the more one must continue to acquire. Ownership requires constant defense: against loss, competition, and the fear that others have more. Even love becomes possessive — the desire not to experience union but to secure another person as property. Knowledge too becomes an object: students learn facts to possess them, not to transform themselves. The having mode’s defining mindset is static, not dynamic; it depends on the illusion that selfhood is permanent and can be fortified by accumulation.

Yet human existence is inherently process, fluctuation, and growth. We are defined not by what we have but by our capacity to be — to think, love, create, and relate. When we imprison ourselves within the having mentality, we suffocate that capacity. Thus the crisis of modernity is a crisis of being. The more we produce and consume, the less alive we feel. The world becomes a warehouse of objects and achievements, and we lose the sense of life as participation.

The failure of the Great Promise reveals the necessity of a radical shift in values. Wealth alone cannot sustain human joy; security cannot replace meaning. Unless we rediscover the mode of being, the civilization built on possession will decay from within. This recognition sets the stage for defining the two fundamental modes themselves.