Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 8
The Market Personality Today:
The Further Transformation of Human Beings Into Things
(page 8)
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Today’s alienated people have a harder time experiencing the feelings of joy and spontaneity associated with beautiful views, music and natural sounds. In the slower world of yesterday, people were able to enjoy these things because they had the time to experience their life without constantly worrying about the next thing in their busy schedule. The relaxed pace of humans in the slow-moving village is gone from almost every part of the world. But the rat race is beginning to come at a dearer and dearer price. Everything is geared for instant satisfaction and consumption — to satisfy the living abstraction who experiences life as an unsatisfied commodity. Yet no amount of consumption can quiet the anxiety. The adult-babies of today need to have their pacifiers look slicker and respond faster, because the plain old pacifier can no longer stop the inner cry of the frightened child.
Today’s social and economic pressures transform the busyness of “active” people into an infectious disease.[8] The social pressure to feel that there is no time to relax and refrain from any external activity has been further ingrained into our psyches in the last two decades, and this is beginning to spread into less developed countries via global capitalism. The spreading busyness reduces people’s internal awareness. Most people are driven into busy activities by feelings and desires that they are only partly aware of, or not aware of at all. Modern people are too “busy,” too unaware, and too numb to deal with their intensifying feelings of loneliness and insecurity. But the less capable they are of dealing with those fundamental feelings, the more tense they become and the less capable they are of connecting to the self and to other people. In fact, stress and tension are the chief defense mechanisms of modern Western people to avoid conflict with the positive feelings of the real self, such as tenderness, love, or even a healing sadness, which are usually buried in the unconsciousness.
Underneath their busyness, people experience deep feelings of boredom, emptiness and doubts about their life — which are manifestations of the pain that arises from their inability to experience profound human feelings. Unconsciously, the busy market personality experiences fear and even terror about being a nobody — a person without a growing self and without a deep connection to others and to nature. Thus the drive for continuous busyness is only a meager defense for lonely and anxious humans. When we come into contact with our terrifying anxiety and loneliness, we do our best to avoid the pain that accompanies it by hiding behind the façades of busy-type activities. We must constantly consume goods, as well as shallow and short-lived personal experiences, to cover up the underlying feelings of insecurity.
The busyness of humans in today’s Western society protects them from aloneness and other such explosive underlying insecurities, so that paradoxically, busyness itself is now one of the most common ways to be part of the herd. “I feel that I belong when I run around like a chicken with its head cut off,” this attitude says, in essence. “Sometimes, when I feel exhausted and tense like everyone around me, I want to slow down and take it easy, but I am okay, because my life is full.” This is indeed a very inhuman way for a human being to achieve a sense of “belonging” and “security.” But the unaware “normal” person has reached extreme levels of social sickness. Insofar as he/she has very “busy” schedules with little time for deep human interactions, and insofar as everybody else is behaving the same way, no one fully experiences the terrifying feelings of insecurities. Anxious, shallow interactions between busy people have become the norm for the majority. As long as one is part of the “normal” majority, one is secure, no matter what the human price is that one has to pay for such “belonging.”
Work as an escape from the self becomes more acceptable in the culture of busyness. “If I exist to belong to a busy crowd, then clearly I must accept the norm of working long hours. When I do have a micro-second of free time, I feel compelled to operate some gadget or surf the Internet, so as to avoid realizing that my thoughts, feelings, and experiences are not authentic. But then, who am I?” Most people do not consciously think about this, but nevertheless feel the conflict between their persona and the potential self that sits deep in the psyche. They must escape this conflict or go insane.
As was mentioned before, without psychological compensatory mechanisms, most of us would fall to pieces. Because the true feelings of the market personality are unbearable, many people must constantly smoke, eat, listen to music, watch TV, or talk, in order to ensure that these feelings remain unconscious or semi-conscious. They cannot concentrate on simply one activity, or on their own feelings. People with the market personality are incapable of being contentedly alone, so as to focus inwards and to experience their true feelings and their whole self.
In our culture, most individuals cannot interact without some external distraction, which diverts one from deep human interaction. It is very difficult for most people just to spend time together, concentrating on interacting with another person in a loving way. To see friends, we usually need to have dinner or lunch together, or to see movies, go dancing, etc. I am not saying that such activities cannot be a fulfilling experience from time to time. On the contrary, if done with the whole self, some external activities can enrich us with joy. But the fact remains that most people cannot bear to be alone with themselves or even with others without the constant need to put food in their mouths or be distracted by the sights and sounds of the artificial escape stimuli that are so readily available.
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[8] According to Fox TV, Nov. 27, 2000, 33% of Americans are afraid that they will have a nervous breakdown because of their unrelentingly busy lives.