Both Material and Spiritual Costs of Alienation

Vitality, alienation, spiritual wellbeing as ripe for non-material improvement, utility and progress: Equally transformative, societal progress will address the wasted human vitality lost to alienation and depression that arise from the mere structure of our capitalist and political institutions, how most work as wage slaves without individual meaning beyond survival, how our hierarchical economic and governance institutions depersonalize and disempower so many.  Were these to be restructured in such ways as to release that lost human vitality, we would collectively develop to a higher stage of living, and such structural development of our institutions may be well within our reach economically, insofar as they may require relatively little material cost.  US has seen big decline in labor-force participation since 2008-09 financial crisis.  Mental health lowers economic potential by lowering lifetime incomes and their spending abilities, etc.  Diminishes prospects for forming partnership, having children, forming household.  Why?  Labor market deteriorated after 2008-9.  Social media might play a role.  Same problem in UK, but not as bad.  Fix is probably outside the labor markets, because market is tight but mental illness is rampant.

Loneliness is a crisis.  How does it relate to alienation: .  What is friendship in work?

Lakshmi Ramarajan, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Erin Reid, McMaster University: Is it still possible to build a career that is both morally satisfying and materially rewarding? To do well by doing good?  Professionals and executives in a range of fields grapple with this question as rapid technological change and intense bottom line pressure upends one field after another, transforming how work is done and how people are paid for it. “In any organization, you want to make the moral and material coexist,” Ramarajan says.

Ron Getz, Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins, studies productivity costs of mental health.  There are also direct costs in medical and therapy costs.

David Blanchflower & Alex Byson: 12% of 23-year-old women report that every day of their lives is a bad mental health day.  (Barron’s, 10/20/23, p.30).  42 state attorneys general sued Meta Platforms alleging that Facebook and Instagram ensnared children to the detriment of their long-term physical and mental health.  Despair, distress and well-being peak in midlife.  But young used to be happy, and now they are not.  In 2011 5% of women under age 25  reported mental distress (“every day of the last 30 was a bad mental health day”)., but in 2023 10% said so.  Same with young men.  Problem started around 2011, and is not attribuab

“Bowling Alone”

The hermit consumer.  Covid taught people to stay home and they don’t want to come out.  Percent spent on services declined with Covid and has not recovered.  Share prices of companies that benefit from stay at home have done better than those that benefit from going out, certainly during Covid, but that has not reversed.  (Econoist, 10/28/23 p.70: “Apart, together”

Lauren Cohen, Harvard Business School, extreme competitiveness makes even highly successful strivers unhappy.  Is this social structure or consumerism that needs change?

“Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World”, April 21, 2020, Vivek H. Murthy M.D.

https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf: “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community”. Overview: What is Social Connection? 10
Current Trends: Is Social Connection Declining? 12
Trends in Social Networks and Social Participation 13
Demographic Trends 15
Trends in Community Involvement 16
What Leads Us to Be More or Less Socially Connected? 16
Groups at Highest Risk for Social Disconnection 19
Impacts of Technology on Social Connection 19
Risk and Resilience Can Be Reinforcing 21
Call Out Box: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Hana Arendt: The Human Condition.  Science is the source of alienation, reducing the public sphere in which individuals can participate in the plurality.  (Labor, Work and Action; life, the world, plurality.)  Tools are implements of man’s work, but machines turn humans into implements of labor.  They rob them of a chance to act and speak and be heard.  Science and machines are crowding out man’s arena to work upon nature in furtherance of the World.  They are robbing man of the arena in which they can express themselves as fully human.

To-day most of those who seek to overcome alienation are unwilling to follow the approaches proposed by Marx or T6nnies. They consider alienation as a state of mind and believe that an inner change, a spiritual rebirth, will enable man to return from this condition. Many of them emphasize the need for a revived and deepened religious commitment, although not necessarily for a return to institutionalized religion. Others concentrate on efforts to reinterpret human knowledge. Inspired by men like Bergson, Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger, they try to break away from the cult of natural science, which is focused almost exclusively on detached knowledge, and they grope for ways toward an encounter with reality which is based on participation. There are also those who believe that the minds of the young, at least, can be protected from the influence of alienating forces, and that therefore we should be concerned with the improvement of teaching methods. Some groups emphasize the need for the strengthening of neighborhood feeling and grass roots responsibility, or for a larger participation in the tasks of local government. Furthermore, many people influenced by the ideas of the do-it-yourself” movement expect that practical hobbies will induce man to familiarize himself with tools and materials, and thus help him to grow into a new closeness to the objects of his environment.

Efforts of the kind we have described are important, because they reveal that many people today no longer accept man’s estrangement as an inevitable fate but are reaching for ways of conquering it. Are the moves which they suggest steps in the right direction? To answer this question, let us look briefly at some of these attempts to counteract the trend toward alienation and see what they have accomplished so far.

Pappenheim:

Tonnies — Geselshaft (exchange relationships and exchange thinking will) are replacing Geseinshaft (social relationships and spontaneous will).  This can not be reversed, only ameliroated:

“To-day most of those who seek to overcome alienation are unwilling to follow the approaches proposed by Marx or T6nnies. They consider alienation as a state of mind and believe that an inner change, a spiritual rebirth, will enable man to return from this condition. Many of them emphasize the need for a revived and deepened religious commitment, although not necessarily for a return to institutionalized religion. Others concentrate on efforts to reinterpret human knowledge. Inspired by men like Bergson, Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger, they try to break away from the cult of natural science, which is focused almost exclusively on detached knowledge, and they grope for ways toward an encounter with reality which is based on participation. There are also those who believe that the minds of the young, at least, can be protected from the influence of alienating forces, and that therefore we should be concerned with the improvement of teaching methods. Some groups emphasize the need for the strengthening of neighborhood feeling and grass roots responsibility, or for a larger participation in the tasks of local government. Furthermore, many people influenced by the ideas of the do-it-yourself” movement expect that practical hobbies will induce man to familiarize himself with tools and materials, and thus help him to grow into a new closeness to the objects of his environment.

Efforts of the kind we have described are important, because they reveal that many people today no longer accept man’s estrangement as an inevitable fate but are reaching for ways of conquering it. Are the moves which they suggest steps in the right direction? To answer this question, let us look briefly at some of these attempts to counteract the trend toward alienation and see what they have accomplished so far.”

 

 

Harvard Public Health Study:  Offer intentional spaces to connect:

So-called “talking benches” have become popular in the U.K. These public seats have signs on them that say, ‘”Sit here if you don’t mind someone stopping to say hello.” Nobel suggests we do something similar in American cities. “Create connection cafes,” he says—designated areas that invite people to strike up conversations with strangers or acquaintances.

Fritz Pappenheim, “The Alienation of Modern Man”, 1959, (built up the ideas of Ferdinant Tonnies (1855-1936), “Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft”

“There is something uncanny in the condition of man when he has become a stranger to himself; but it is a fate which shapes the lives of many of us. We seem to be caught in a frightening contradiction. In order to assert ourselves as individuals, we relate only to those phases of reality which seem to promote the attainment of our objectives and we remain divorced from the rest of it. But the further we drive this separation, the deeper grows the rift within ourselves.

The “company wife” who, concerned about her husband’s career, chooses her friends more among the “right people” than among those to whom she feels drawn; the individuals who, for reasons of social prestige or in consideration of professional or business interests, join the church which gives a relatively high degree of respectability rather than the one which represents their religious backgrounds and beliefs; the political leader who, realizing that his struggle for an unpopular cause might doom his chances for re-election, abandons his convictions to secure his political future; the painter who, committed to creative but not generally accepted ideas, gives up the struggle of the lonely artist and accepts the attractive fees and the security of a job in an advertising agency – all these persons show how those who are estranged from what is real can no longer be themselves.

The individual’s alienation from everything which has no bearing on the pursuit of his interests does not necessarily enter into his consciousness; nor does he always become aware of the estrangement from his own self or feel it as a disquieting experience. As a result of his detachment, the alienated man is often able to achieve great successes. These, as long as they continue, engender a certain numbness, which makes it hard for him to realize is own estrangement. Only in times of crisis does he start to sense it.

Societies too are often unperturbed by trends toward alienation, a fact which is illustrated by the history of the word “alienation.” In its philosophical sense the term was first used by Fichte and Hegel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, though at that time its influence was confined to small groups of their disciples. It was incorporated into sociological theory in the forties of that century, when Marx centered his interpretation of the capitalist era upon the concept of self-alienation. But the concept did not exercise this influence for any length of time, and it became almost forgotten in the period which followed. Now, approximately one hundred years later, it has come again to the foreground and has become almost a catchword, even in circles which have little sympathy with Marxian thought. This may well be due to the years of continuing crisis which have forced on our awareness the problem of human estrangement.

Today, concern about man’s alienation is expressed by many: by theologians and philosophers who warn that advances in scientific knowledge do not enable us to penetrate the mystery of Being, and do not bridge but often widen the gulf between the knower and the reality he tries to understand; by psychiatrists who try to help their patients return from the world of illusion to reality; by critics of the increasing mechanization of life who challenge the optimistic expectation that technological progress will automatically lead to the enrichment of human lives; by political scientists who note that even democratic institutions have failed to bring about genuine participation by the masses in the great issues of our period.”

…

“But do we not oversimplify the problem when we relate alienation to a specific period of history instead of seeing it as rooted in the human condition? Many readers will raise this question here and will reiterate it as they go on to other parts of the book. … The thesis that the forces of alienation predominate in our era does not imply that they did not exist in previous ages. It does assert that they have gained greatly in intensity and significance in the modern world. To relate this development to the social structure of our period is the aim of this book.”

…

“a society dominated by the forces of alienation stifles the fulfilment of human potentialities, that in such a society respect for the individual and for the dignity of man cannot be implemented but will remain in the realm of ideas and philosophic pronouncements.”  (Pappenheim, op.cit. Introduction)

Similarly in microeconomic price theory, while Adam Smith’s model of an invisible hand lauds selfish opportunism and individual competition as producing the most efficient allocation of scarce material resources across society in the aggregate, at the same time he noted that the model comes with limitations and provisos.  It disregards distributional effects and so called “externalities”, those effects which cumulatively impact the whole of society but do not enter into an individual’s self-interested calculations.  And microeconomic price theory disregards other aspects of economic life that involve largely non-material aspects, for example attributes of societal structure that lead to isolation, loneliness and alienation, undermining individual abilities to find meaning, purpose and psychological well being.  Such structural aspects of economic life impose hard to measure costs, both material and non-material, on societal well being in its broadest sense.  Society’s organic maturation through its adolescence is incentivized to address these obvious handicaps to aggregate social welfare, to the extent that maturation aligns with progress in seeking improvement through transformation.  Much of human adolescence might be seen as a transformative period in which we search out and choose where to devote life’s energies in our individual searches for meaning.

 

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