Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 4
How Alienation Affects
Our Basic Psyche
It is necessary to explore what makes us tick not just from the general point of view removed from the social and economic factors behind the scenes — the way it is done by the majority of psychoanalysis and psychotherapists.[1] We need to examine what makes us tick from the point of view that explains how the economic and social factors of capitalist society distorted the human psyche and its potential. Thus, in the following chapters we examine the specific manifestations of this in the last decades.
There are, of course, contemporary humanistic psychoanalysis and therapists who diverge from the majority, and who try to find genuine humanistic solutions for the alienated person’s dilemma. Carl Rogers, for example, is one of them. But the only one that I know who clearly understood how our social economic system conditions our psyche is Eric Fromm. This is why the following chapters elaborate on Fromm’s basic humanistic approach regarding the contradictions of the alienated person in capitalist society. It explains how alienation influences our basic psyche from this humanistic perspective.
On the Anxiety Behind Being Separate
Human beings cannot be alone. We have a profound need for unity with other human beings. The basis for this can be traced to early stages of our development. As herd animals we developed later into tribes of apes, a process that took millions of years. Our main survival was associated with closeness to the herd and later the tribe. For many millions of years, no separate identity from nature, from the herd, and later from the tribe was possible. Only for thousands of years with the slow rise of human civilization (agriculture started in about 6500 BC, and the invention of writing occurred in about 3100 BC), humans started to feel the sense of separate identity — the “I” as separated from other humans and nature. But for the great majority of these thousands of years, the “I” was barely in existence; to a large degree it remained buried in the unconscious. Most humans did not sense themselves as separated from the tribe, the village, the country, the nation, and other forms of human communities.
Because the destructive effects of capitalism on the community and nature, some of us tend to romanticize the indigenous tribal societies that still exist in some remote areas of the world. Such societies dominated the human world for a long time, until we were capable to develop economic surplus values and hence class societies. These societies can differ from one another quite radically. Some have a strong hierarchical structure and some have hardly any hierarchy. In these societies the human bonding and solidarity within the tribe can go very deeply. Many of the rituals in these tribes emphasize the connection to nature with vitality that bound us all as one; these societies raise the jealousy of modern people who feel their painful isolation and emptiness. But while the sense of community, spirituality and human bounding in these tribal societies can be expressed beautifully through the rituals, the people who belong to these tribes must sacrifice one precious thing: their independence. To belong and feel as one with the community they cannot question the traditions of the tribe and develop their separate identity.
This basic sense of belonging in which the separate identity could not be experienced was maintained throughout history until capitalism came to the scene. In feudalism, for example, the peasant life were utterly miserable, and suffering was intense. But his/her place in society was fixed for “eternity”, or more accurately, being a peasant was the way he or she experienced life. The “I” was not as of yet experienced as separated from the village. The fact that his/her personality and place in the village was unchangeable gave him/her a deep sense of belonging.
Only with the rise of capitalism the sense of deep separateness has began to fully arisen. Capitalism had to “free” humans from the sense of “eternal” belonging and ties to the community. Labor, which comprised of the majority of people, had to be mobile and move from one place to another, and later even from one country to another. Money, and the exchange of commodities became the most important factors in the relationships between people. Material gains and the ability to survive either as an individual exploiter or exploited, replaced the deep sense of “eternal” belonging to the community and the “protection” of the king, the duke, or God. With the rise of capitalism human relationship has reflected the relationship between commodities. People moved around freely depending where they could get the best exchange for their values. As workers people moved where they could get the best offer to their labor. As members of the middle class they moved around when opportunities arise to climb up in the social ladder. The sense of communities has been gradually broken and humans experienced themselves more and more as a separate entities that operate within the insecure parameters of the blind market. This experience of separateness is always accompanied by deep feelings of anxiety that comes from the lost feeling of belonging and oneness with the people in the tribe or the village.
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[1] For what is wrong with mainstream psychoanalysis and psychotherapists see chapter 6, on the essence of today’s conformist psychology.