Alienation

We talked in class about alienation and I was a little confused about its meaning. It seemed to me that the examples that were brought almost sounded like examples of escapism, when people try to get away from reality using different kinds of methods. I guess the kind of alienation that is relevant to our course topic is the one that is imposed on people or in other words when whatever is the reason for alienation is not the creation of the affected individual. But at the same time I keep thinking about video games for example. Being products of the consumer culture they help people get away from the real world and into an imaginary one with different rule, problems and concerns. Wouldn’t this be called alienation too? If yes then this means that consumerism does not really cause much extra alienation, it just provides means to do it. We could argue that the need for alienation is created in consumer culture but then we find ourselves in a dead end because what seems to be Marx’s point is that alienation is caused by capitalism against the will of the effected people.

I might be pushing the meaning of alienation into something more general here but when I think about it it seems to be a very important part of human life. I would even say that the ways in which people alienate themselves from things creates their individuality. In this way alienation is not causing much trouble and probably should not be regarded as one of the main problems of capitalism. My main point for proving this idea is part of the definition for alienation. The way I see alienation happen is when someone gets moved from something that is real to something that is not at all or less real. The biggest example would be alienation from the self. I can not imagine how one can get alienated from the self when the concept of the self is so unreal, unstable, unexplainable and immeasurable in itself. This means that in order to put value judgments on alienation one has to some sort of standards differentiating reality and non-reality, which I think is hard if not impossible.

Another idea I thought we touched in class was alienation making people do a certain thing and depriving them from the possibility of doing something else. I think this is funny because of the simple constrains humans have in terms of just how many things they can do in life. Otherwise it would mean that people would have to converge on a small range of conventional, most worthwhile things to spend their lives on which would make the world awfully boring.

I remembered Freud’s idea that individuals in civilization complain about the problems they have created from living in a civilized world but at the same time in order to get over their concern and negative mood use the very products created by the civilization. I see the attitude towards alienation the same way: people complain about being alienated from the reality by the increasingly consumerist culture not thinking about the actual role of alienation and need for it that gets satisfied at the same time.

Also just to comment on people getting tattoos of brands they like: I think it is very much an opposite of alienation but if someone managed to prove it the other way then I would say that it is the kind of alienation that best illustrates the use of it to build a human identity and individuality.