@jadagul asked whether their lack of feeling alienation led to a qualia gap that made it hard for them to appreciate a lot of social analysis and social preferences. This seemed like a good chance to discuss “What is alienation?”
First off, someone asking me what about if they don’t experience alienation makes me feel like when Maslow would get letters from people saying they are self-actualized so what should they do next. https://twitter.com/existentialcoms/status/812394889295974400
Most of my writing is based on this premise: If you are happy, and you think your life and role in society is going along well - great! I have no desire to convince you that you are wrong. I want more people to feel like you, and I want to figure how we can help get more people there.
But I believe that most people writing thousands of words about politics on tumblr dot com are actually deeply unhappy, and their attempt to change the political Discourse is reflective of a belief that things are not working and a compulsion to try to fix them. I certainly feel things are not working, and so hopefully my thoughts can help me and others be in a place where we do not feel this unhappy anymore. Maybe this requires worldwide revolution, or maybe just a change of our state of mind, a lot will depend.
(I should possibly note at this point that I do not believe in the Discourse, and think that it is a modern day God-replacement for most of its participants.)
But anyway, alienation. It probably gets overused in the social context, because I think it’s most useful in the economic sense first (after which we can see how the social is the economic.)
The cliche criticism of communists is that they are lazy and do not want to work. This could not be farther from the truth. Work is great. People want to work. They want to spend hours upon hours producing something they care about. Maybe they cook for their friends. Maybe they manage spreadsheets for an intergalactic empire. Maybe they dig up a bed for their garden. Maybe they write brilliant social analysis for tumblr dot com every other night. But regardless, often the things people love the most, are things they love working for.
In all of these cases though, there is a connection to the product of the work, that the worker takes pride in and that leads to them to care about the details of the work. You care that the meal tastes interesting when it’s for your date. You lovingly water each flower knowing you can look out on it when you get up in the morning.
Capitalism is a system of economy where instead of working to make your food for the day and building your own house, you receive wages you can buy those things with. You get wages by doing a particular job you are good at, over and over and over again for an faceless entity. That entity chooses what work it wants you to do based on what maximizes arcane and distant capital for the ownership class. (Capitalism is also the ideology that defends this economic relation.)
When you don’t do this work for yourself or something you care about - but instead just on the orders of some distant not-you, it gets a lot less fun. @jadagul is a math teacher, so I’d say it’s like going from making a lesson plan for your students, who you know the strengths and weaknesses of and whom you are so happy to see grow, to deciding you’re really good at lesson plans, so you just crank out lesson plans 10 hours a day, for other teachers to use in a one-size-fits-all solution for their students. You are now alienated from the product of your work.
Because fulfilling work is fundamental to human happiness, this separation from enjoying your work is of immense moral importance. (Of course, capitalism might be using people to create things much more efficiently than they would be as individual units doing a little bit of everything, but the economic analysis of those benefits has to wait for another post.)
Instead of doing the work on your schedule, or improving it based on your own observations, or switching between what projects you feel like, you’re answering to a boss who tells you when exactly to work on what and in what way and monitors you for any unauthorized deviation. It is miserable.
So alienation comes up a lot in analyses that notice “we’re doing the things we’re supposed to be doing… but this just really doesn’t seem enough. We in fact hate doing these things.”
And then this relates a lot to all social interactions. It’s not a misnomer that some social maintenance is called “emotional labor.” But that’s because labor is supposed to be joyous just like social interaction can be joyous (aka friendship.) If you are doing the tasks of friendship without actually connecting with the friend and valuing the work, then it’s just as soul-killing as flipping burgers 9-5.
And we really really want to get away from our work - material and social - being a fucking job we do for distant forces and unchosen obligations.
One of the many reasons we don’t want this is because all that we are producing is for some one-size-fits-all factory line instead of crafted specifically to what we need. So what you buy sorta looks good in your home, but not as much as if you made it. And the social rules you are handed down to follow sorta work, but aren’t a replacement for having a genuine connection with the people you are trying to help. (Hence, as Ozy points out https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/12/27/secondary-is-a-really-broad-word/ , so many advice columnists have this very generic romantic advice that is probably useful to many people but doesn’t actually say anything for your specific situation and partners.)
So discussion of alienation, both at our job and socially, is discussion of “how is this rote repetition of certain tasks killing us inside, making us very unsatisfied with the way society works, and producing more and more stuff (material goods, and social rules) with less and less benefit for people.”
If some people are actually happy with this state of affairs, that really is great. I can’t really tell them what to do, or how they should analyze society (I do not worry about truly happy people being oppressive, so really, they can do whatever they want.) But I’m pretty unhappy with alienation from my labor, and I think a lot of the bloggers I read evince problems that flow from that as well.
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