On Alienation

Is the deep, gnawing disconnect that many of us feel a result of contemporary societal pressures, from our economic and political structures, or is it an innate feature of human experience?

It seems specious to rely on either to fully account for experience.

Buddhists claim that dukkha, which translates to suffering or dissatisfactoriness, best indicates the human condition. I would not hesitate to disagree with that analysis, but we should, for the moment, put aside metaphysics for, shall we say, an examination of our political reality. And it really is a reality of which I speak, because our structures of consciousness absorb political and economic ideologies, often subconsciously.

What is capitalism's effect on consciousness? What does consumerism do to the human animal? These are all questions that have been dealt with before, most notably by Marx, whose legitimate critiques of capitalism have been discredited by the failure of the Communist experiment. For one, it seems clear that we have truly reached an age of rabid commodification, where the value of an object is completely unrelated to it's intrinsic value, but where value and, more importantly, need is completely constructed by ubiquitous and insidious forces. Adam Smith's major axiom--find a need and fill it--has been replaced with create a need, a multiplicity of needs, and view human beings only in terms of what we can buy, and not who we are.

We are in such a state in the United States of 2007. The frightening paradox of our situation is this: while our options as consumers seems to multiply endlessly, our political options dwindle. The commodification of the economic has led, inversely, to the devaluation of the political. Our consumer choices are many, while our political options are few?

Why is that? If steadfast defenders of capitalism are so enamored with economic choice, why do so many seek to restrict political choice? They deny us fundamental choice while handing us what Rousseau called 'flower covered chains'. Contemporary America commodifies only superfluities, and not substance. It is an unthinkable inversion: human needs become wants, while wants become needs.

Which leads us back to our alienation. I cheer the recapturing of Congress by the Democratic Party, but only with a deep sense of context. It is with heaviness that I imagine a perpetual two party system with a political either/or, and, in contrast, an economics that gives nothing to life, and imagines us only in terms of our buying capacity.

This is, in the last analysis, the first step: consciousness of the ideas and ideologies that seep into our minds, and from here creativity may begin.