Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 15
Objectivity as a
Requirement for Love
(page 4)
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Let's take the typical example of Paul and Amy again. If they are realistic people in our society at the present time, then it is likely that Paul has a job where he has to work long hours with little lime for breaks. This is likely to be compounded with looming deadlines which produce constant stress and anxiety. If Paul is not in particular a socially aware person, he tries to accommodate to the increasing pressure with workaholism. He may believe that he likes his job while deeper underneath he hates it and he represses his feelings toward his job by becoming a workaholic. He does not like his demanding boss, but he tries to suppress his strong resentment toward the boss by putting on a conscious level the facade of the market personality. Thus, he acts very pleasantly while underneath he feels on edge and tired too often. Being in constant competition with his peers over favoritism and climbing up the corporate ladder, he tries to deal with that by being extra friendly, that is, pushing the limits of the market personality as far as he can. But underneath he feels deeply insecure, since he is not sure whether his co-workers really like him, or when someone is going to stub him in the back to get ahead of him in the corporation. All and all, in the deepest unconscious level, he feels that his creative and productive abilities are wasted, and that he does not have a deep relationship with himself and others. He feel anxious as he senses that his whole life may be wasted. But whenever the anxiety surfaces to consciousness, he cannot deal with it and thus he digs himself deeper into the routines of work. When he comes home, he cannot deal with Amy’s angers and anxieties, since he cannot deal with own anger and anxiety — so he resort to petty fights with patterns of aggressiveness that he was conditioned to express when he was under stressful situations in his childhood. He tried to escape from the tension with Amy by staying late at work; he hangs out with his peers as late as he can.
Amy is unhappy about her social isolation. Even though she makes good money by working at home, doing marketing via her computer and the Internet, she is not really satisfied from her job. Being by herself most of the day, she feels lonely and she has a hard time to concentrate on her job. She is easily lurked into the chat rooms and the Internet’s Web Sites, and she feels guilty about it. She is beset by typical insecurities such as lack of self-love and self-esteem that accompanied loneliness and isolation in our society. When she fails to have Paul pay more attention to her and spend more time with her, she feels angrier and she resorts to petty fights with him over household matters. As the tension between them mounts, she utilizes her angry bust of temper tantrum that she resorted to in her childhood to get attention, whenever she felt unloved and abandoned.
“Mirroring” for this couple and millions of other couples, will provide at best a temporary relief. Individual therapy can help a person in dealing with old material and thus be in a better position to deal with the difficulties in relationships in the stressed-out alienated daily life. But the present methods of therapy do not and cannot deal with the social sources that drive people into states of constant anxiety, depression, and break up of relationships. This will remain the case as long as the constant anxiety and depression are primarily the reflection of our culture that prevents people to fulfill their human potential. In Paul’s and hundreds of millions of other people’s cases in this world, it is the long hours of work that force them to be a marketable machine and not a human being. In Amy’s and similar growing cases of isolated people who work at home, it is the feelings of loneliness and depression that develop as their real loving contacts with others decreases.
This couple, and many other couples, cannot heal their relationship unless they see the real reality behind their social/economic existence that stifles their ability to be loving and non-alienated humans. They need to see the alienating social reality, and how it drives up their level of anxieties and fears; how the social reality stifles their ability to experience their humanity. They need to learn to be objective about the social reality and themselves and gain the courage to break away from the vicious slavery to negative feelings as expressed in couple fights. Their slavery to negative feelings that is expressed in petty fights is in the last analysis nothing but a defense mechanism against the deeper social alienation that they are afraid to face.
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