Alienation

“The person who centres on jealousy, instead of on narcissism, can find satisfaction in work since it is a route to social power. The desire for power keeps the normal person glued to their job. For the existentialist such attitudes are dreary beyond compare.”

by Ian Heath [extracted]

Society as an Impersonal System

A recurring feature of my adult life, and one which intensified during my self-analysis, was alienation or estrangement. Alienation results when a person cannot feel any rewarding satisfaction from his social involvements.

Alienation can produce isolation. The person's values have become different from the norm. However, since his values are more advanced than the norm, he is not willing to level downwards so as to gain social acceptance.

Hence he is often an outsider (like the early beatniks).

[ This situation is not the same as when the person's values are lower than the norm – here he can be rejected because he is an outcast, and not because he is an outsider].

He comes to view all personal contacts as links in an impersonal social system. ‘The system’ is impersonal, and so his life becomes ‘impersonalised’. There is nothing that he can take responsibility for. His work is not valued by anyone.

Alienation results from guilt that has a social origin, from guilt that is generated by the social roles that the person has to play. This guilt is generated when the person feels that he has no choice over some major aspects of his life. It is a sense of degradation produced by being forced to participate in social necessities that one hates. [¹]

For example, the economic need to take part in kinds of employment that do not fulfil a person will spawn alienation to some degree. It is the narcissistic individual who feels alienation at its greatest intensity. Unfulfilling work has no meaning for the narcissistic individual; such work just produces high levels of anxiety.

When a person's social roles are not valued by society any more, then alienation is generated as an anti-social belief, a belief that modern Western life is unnatural in many ways. It is a protest at the mechanisation of human life: such mechanisation degrades, even neutralises, a person’s sense of identity. In modern society there is no place for the natural side of reality. In an harmonious life there would be no alarm clocks and no rigidity of life style.

Alienation makes the person despise society. He vents his hatred on the barren wasteland of materialism. Materialism is needed in order to fulfil bodily and mental necessities (the need for food, shelter, relaxation, recreation, etc), and it does no harm so long as a higher reality is being aimed at. But when society sees only materialism as the goal in life, and nothing beyond it, then that society becomes a living death.

Materialism, as an end in itself, does not go beyond having a nice job, a nice house, a nice car, a nice spouse, a nice social status. Everything nice ! There is no depth, no intensity, anywhere. Alienation means that everything is bland, everything is regulated, everything is regimented. Such a life lacks vision. Such a life lacks faith, a living faith.

I hated the necessity to have a job since I had no commitment to it. The economic need to submit to clockwork routines and non-fulfilling roles meant that the continual anxiety was slowly shattering my integrity. I was in a trap. The guilt was destroying my integrity, and without my integrity I could not escape from the guilt.

The person who centres on jealousy, instead of on narcissism, can find satisfaction in work since it is a route to social power. The desire for power keeps the normal person glued to their job. For the existentialist such attitudes are dreary beyond compare.

In a caring society I can accept a caring vocation. In a caring society I can be orientated to the community. But in a world of mediocrity I am an individual. In a world of mediocrity I am an individual enwrapped in my own solitude.

When a person despises society, then alienation generates social guilt. But when the person embraces society, then alienation turns into shame.

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