Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 1
Global Capitalism and the
Intensification of Human Alienation
(page 3)

[Click here to go back to page 2.]

To understand the depth of human loneliness and isolation these days, one need only turn to the personal ads in the newspapers and on the Internet. In the 1970s, people were embarrassed to meet a soulmate through personal ads. It was quite uncommon. In the 1980s, personal ads started to increase in number, and were no longer considered an unusual practice. By the late 1990s, with the addition of personal ad web sites and Internet “chat rooms,” the number of people seeking to meet someone this way has become hopelessly large, and the process has become sufficiently socially acceptable to be depicted on TV and in the movies (e.g., You’ve Got Mail!). But the competition is intense, and only the lucky ones meet someone they’d actually want to see a second time. Busy yuppies who make six-figure incomes can afford to pay a matchmaker to screen the potential candidates and weed out the undesirables. The rest of us are on our own.

What does it say about a human society that its members are so isolated from one another that they can no longer meet potential mates through the normal process of face-to-face social interaction? When single people cannot meet each other within a large and close inner circle of friends whom they see regularly, something is fundamentally wrong with that culture. In today’s culture, spontaneous human contact in the community, which results in loving relationships and lasting friendships, is becoming increasingly hard to come by. Ultra-busy people must behave like human commodities “for sale” in most aspects of life, including the intimate ones.

Nowadays not only does a person have to sell himself when he applies for a job, he has to sell the “desirable” qualities in his personal life as well. Besides the personals pages, this is done through the medium of computers via the Internet. When people post personal ads on the Internet, they must present themselves as socially desirable packages according to the latest concept of what an “attractive” man or woman is, or they will be rejected. If you’re not wearing bleached jeans, you don’t do Yoga, and you drive a Geo, no one will want you. Dialectically speaking, the more isolated and busy people are, which prevents them from having warm and loving relationships with others through a healthy community life or a genuine network of friends, the less strength and self-confidence they possess, and the more they need to apply the facade of the salesperson or the market personality so as not to face what they really feel.[2]

Even the past, humanistic psychoanalysts such as Erich Fromm already warned that the busyness of modern people reflects their inability to love and connect to the self and others from the center of their being:

If we say love is an activity, we face a difficulty which lies in the ambiguous meaning of the word “activity.” By “activity,” in the modern usage of the word, is usually meant an action which brings about a change in an existing situation by means of an expenditure of energy. Thus a man is considered active if he does business, studies medicine, works on an endless belt, builds a table, or is engaged in sports. Common to all these activities is that they are directed toward an outside goal to be achieved. What is not taken into account is the motivation of activity. Take for instance a man driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and loneliness; or another one is driven by ambition, or greed for money. In all these cases the person is the slave of a passion, and his activity is in reality a “passivity” because he is driven; he is the sufferer, not the “actor.”[3]

The alienated person, who is not in touch with the deeper parts of the self and the deeper parts of others, becomes a slave of the alienated social persona and its “activities,” through which he/she escapes the pains of disconnection from the deeper part of the self. Deep down inside, the alienated person experiences loneliness and painful anxieties. People’s inability to free themselves from these feelings and develop their full human potential is the source of many of our modern social sicknesses—including widespread depression, suicide, and the frequent break-up of relationships and marriages, which reflects the inability of the alienated person to truly love others.

The Break-Up of the Family and the Rise of Aggressive Competitive Individualism

Stress from long working hours under global capitalism is a particularly potent force in destroying the traditional two-parent family. A survey by researchers at the University of Chicago found that the percentage of American households made up of married couples with children has dropped dramatically: from 45 percent in the early 1970s to only 26 percent in 1998.[4] Earlier, the U.S. Census found similar statistics: the number of all households comprised of married couples with children younger than 18 fell from 50 percent in 1970 to only 36 percent in 1997.[5]

The University of Chicago survey found that in 1998, 56 percent of adults were married, compared with almost 75 percent in 1972; that in 1998, 51 percent of children lived in a household with their two parents, while in 1972 it was 73 percent; that the percentage of households made up of unmarried people with no children was 32 percent in 1998, more than double the rate in 1972; and that the percentage of children living with single parents rose by 13.5 percent from 1972.[6]

These statistics clearly show that the traditional family is falling apart; that today’s overworked couples postpone or abjure having children, divorce readily, and then live alone without re-marrying. They live in a reality in which each person must compete aggressively, alone in the global capitalist jungle where survival is a solo task that requires an increasing amount of energy. In such a reality there is little time left over for tender and caring human relationships. The individual tends to view life as the survival of the fittest in a hostile jungle. Such individualism means that one does not advance in life through cooperation and love, but primarily at the expense of others.

Greater individualism with an aggressive approach to life exists because all important social and personal problems and conflicts reflect—directly or indirectly—the social pressure of capitalist society. It is very difficult for isolated individuals without a strong social consciousness and active solidarity with others to transcend the pressure put on us by the corporate elite. Thus we end up dealing with social pressures, problems and antagonisms as isolated individuals, in ways that benefit the continuing domination of that elite.

For example, workers are not allowed to express their anger and frustration directly to their bosses or managers. This is not new. What is new is the worker’s rising level of stress from overwork, from job insecurity, and from the constant busyness that has become necessary just to survive and maintain a half-decent standard of living. As this stress and the resulting anger become bottled up inside dissatisfied workers, they personalize and internalize these feelings, and may consequently abuse their co-workers, family members, or closest friends. This tendency to individualize social/economic pressure and to express it as subjective antagonism against the people close to one exacerbates many problems in the personal spheres of life. This is clearly reflected in the rising rate of family break-ups and relationships, to cite just one example.

[Click here to continue to page 4; click to here to go back to page 1.]


[2]For more details, see Chapter 8, “The Market-Personality,” and Chapter 9, “The Market-Personality’s Enslavement to Machines.”

[3]Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, pages 17-18, emphasis in original.

[4]Associated Press, 11/24/99.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.