Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
How Alienation Affects
Our Basic Psyche
(page 2)
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The twentieth century completed the evolution of human separateness which was developed with with the pains of doubts and loneliness. At the end of the twentieth century capitalism decisively destroyed the organic connection of humans to the their community e.g., the tribe of indigenous people, the villages in the feudal system, etc.; the full “identity” and fix belonging in which I am one with the community has gone. The disintegration of the fundamental feelings of belonging to a community has reached its climax in the last 20 years in the advanced capitalist countries and it is spreading rapidly to the rest of the world.
To develop the productive forces and spread globally, capitalism had to develop the present ideology that we are all familiar with. When stripped of its rationalizations and sugaring it says the following: the world consists of “individuals” who fight the war for success or survival in which the “fittest” prevails. In reality, most of the time the ones who succeed are the ones with money and power — those who knows how to manipulate, exploit and use the others for their material success. When the normal conditions to exploit and manipulate fall apart, the rich uses the powerful state to protect its privileges. For the rest of us, it is the rot race to succeed at the expense of others (in case of upper middle classes) or survive (in the case of the lower classes). In such human relationships the individual as separated from the others is the key for the social order. Bourgeois society idolizes the concept of individualism in which each individual must make it alone in antagonistic relations to others.
There are many ways in which this profound social structure that produce people aloneness is mitigated with the routines of life, work and the many escapes which are available. But the underlining social relationships between people does not normally transcend the exchange relationships between alienated human commodities. Even in the relationship within the family and the relationships of “love” between people[2], most people remain alone. Such human relationships that stem from an antagonistic social economy trickled down to the deepest part of our psychology. Nobody can completely transcend it. From it developed certain type of personalities of this historical period that in the most general way can be characterized as capitalistic type personalities. The main feature of such personalities consists of deep sense separateness with the anxiety that arises from it.
In such social structure it is impossible not to feel an acute pain of separateness and aloneness. The “I” experience itself as a separate small dot standing alone in a social jungle in which the norm of survival is antagonistic relationships to other people. This feeling can be conscious or unconscious, but it exists for all the people that cannot overcome separateness in our society. Such feeling produce enormous anxiety that only exacerbates the feelings of separateness and aloneness. Eric Fromm clearly defines the main contradiction of humans in our “modern” society:
“The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. Being separate means being cut off, without any capacity to use my human powers. Hence to be separate means to be helpless, unable to grasp the world — things and people — activity; it means that the world can invade me without my ability to react. Thus, separateness the source of intense anxiety. Beyond that, it arouses shame and the feeling of guilt.”[3]
No intellectual understanding of the world can change the profound feelings of anxiety that comes from separateness. Without a positive belonging we remain emotionally little children who are torn from the comfort and warmth of the mother’s womb and protection. There is nothing more horrifying than the helplessness from the aloneness in a hostile strange world. On one hand the “I” lost the sense of the belonging from the past, while on the other hand, maintaining a separate painful identity is simply not an option for any human being. Humans cannot be isolated from their fellow humans and nature without seeking answers that can ease the pains of the weak and isolated ego. Nobody can really tolerate the painful consciousness of separateness and loneliness that our social system is forcing upon us. Humans in reaction to it, can either regress or progress. Whether people are aware of it or not, they must find a solution to the intolerable pains of separateness and the frightening terror and impotence that such feelings bring.
The great majority of people are still too weak to face the dilemma and they regress. Thus most people retreat from the challenge of becoming fully independent human to the protective mother womb or the protection of the herd. The most common form of regression is to lose the ability to develop self identity both mentally and emotionally, and to retreat to dependence relationships. There are many mechanisms that we do it and I selected only the basic types. The most common one and important one from the standpoint of reviewing alienation is to conform to our social and economic system and to adopt the main features of the marketing character — to develop the mentality of a commodity, to relate to the world as a thing. The latest developments of the alienated market personality is to identify with machines and the machine virtual realities. It comes at the expense of losing the ability to connect with people. Thus the real isolation of the marketing character is reaching new levels. It does not matter whether I am spending my time shopping for things and gadgets, or whether I spend all my free time compulsively on the internet. By doing the above I forget my pain of isolation and my doubts about my identity as a human being. It is indeed less painful to identify with machines than to identify with nothing.[4]
In reality the main features of the market personally are never pure. They are combined with many others psychological compensatory measures that keep people from going crazy or experiencing the terror of isolation. I can, for example, become inflated with narcissistic dreams of self importance and see other people as nothing but a distorted inflation of my self. This way the world ceased to exist outside my narcissistic distortions, and since I perceive the world as the extension of myself, the unbearable feelings of anxiety and separateness are lulled . Or, I can inflate my ego and seek the illusion of power by controlling and dominating other people, something that our system greatly encourage through its class and hierarchical structure. There are dozens of forms that this takes place. In the workplace, for example, the boss or manager does not get only material privileges, but he/she usually satisfies the sadistic passions of controlling and dominating people. In the family the husband plays many times the same role. The sadistic person — whether it is in the milder form in the case of the boss at work, or a drastic form in the case of the nazis who committed mass murder — escapes the pains of separateness by forming a symbiotic relationship with the people he/she controls or tortures.
Basic symbiotic relationships still extend to all spheres of social life in our system. Despite some progress, our system still encourages too many women, for example, to seek protection under the shadow of the husband and the family, and thereby to lose their human independence. In all symbiotic relationships the basic psychological factors coincide with the social economic system. The manager and the husband do not magnify an illusory ego centered on controlling other people in a social vacuum. The manager fulfills the system requirement that workers should be intimidated and minimize their demands. The abusive husband fulfills the social economic requirement that the wife stays shackled to the structure of the nuclear family — which in today reality means raising children and working at the same time! Those wives that allow themselves psychologically to be dominated and controlled seek a false security to pacify the same basic feelings of separateness and anxiety. In sum: the social economic system pressures us to develop false solutions to the anxiety of separateness; these solutions boil downs in most cases to symbiotic relationships with others that come at the expense of our emotional and mental independence.
We can only genuinely overcome the terror of the anxiety that comes from separateness by becoming full humans through reconnecting to the world from the strength of our independent reasoning and love. We can become full humans by becoming one with nature and other humans while at the same time maintaining a separate self that can relate to the world in a loving and productive way; that is, by developing a profound oneness with the world through love, solidarity and aliveness in a community that accept our separate unique identity — in a world where human antagonism that comes from competitive separateness is not an accepted social behavior.
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[2] For more detail about the commodification of love in our society, see Eric Fromm, The Art of Loving.
[3] Fromm, The Art of Loving, page 7.
[4] See the chapters on the market personality and on the market personality's identification with machines.