The innate ability to identify and classify patterns is trained through education and social experience, teaching us to categorize and prioritize what really matters in life: health, career, wealth, and social status. The values, principles, and ethics (honesty, integrity, dignity,...) are highly praised in therory but end up in the bottom drawer.
Wealth guarantees tangible security, such as access to quality goods and services, while ideals and values can land us in hot water.
Most people still think about starting a family, but many young adults who are heavily in debt (student debt) and without good prospects for the future cannot do so or have to postpone having children. In other words, debt cripples people and forces them to put personal interests, meaning the need to survive, ahead of the projects, values, and ideals they hold dear.
Crucial aspects for a functional society, such as social justice, political agency, economic democracy, effective equality before the law, respect for the dignity of life (human and animal), social and labor rights, freedom of expression and movement, environmental protection, etc, are replaced by personal, family and corporate interests.
At the base of the social pyramid, the driving force behind this distortion is the need to survive, but in the upper layers of the social ladder, the driving force is greed, megalomania, and the struggle for power and control, which explains why society is so dehumanized. Not all people in positions of power are sociopaths or psychopaths, but the truth is that power attracts people with those psychological and personality traits. These people resort to any means (no matter how vicious) to achieve their goals.
It is imperative to include the principle of power and class struggle in any attempt to analyze and understand the root causes of society's systemic problems. Those who omit them are intellectually dishonest, or naive and delusional.
The most crucial aspects of a functioning society are ignored because people's priority, whether motivated by need, careerism, or greed, is to focus on what really matters. So, in a society where what really matters is wealth, we can't expect people to attach equal value to aspects that are nothing more than adornments of a fictitious democracy.
Human beings live in a hybrid reality created and perceived through fictional narratives. Science cannot completely circumvent this innate characteristic of the human condition. Communicating is narrating, that is, telling stories. Anyone who believes that science is impartial has not yet realized that the vile metal corrupts everything in this world. Not even mathematics is free of sin; the mathematical models used by orthodox economists prove that the principle garbage in, garbage out also applies to mathematics.
The current historical period is dominated by technoscientism, the theology of the supremacy of science and technology. Cui bono?
"Whoever tells a story adds a dot." This Portuguese saying suggests that creative imagination is implicit in human communication.
Human beings are, first and foremost, logical thinkers; flaws in reasoning are unearthed and clarified over time, not through any magical process.
We rarely have explicit or implicit knowledge of all variables that could allow us to conduct a comprehensive critical analysis. We reach conclusions by approximation despite often believing that we understand the whole. Factors such as worries and distractions interfere with the reasoning process, making it more likely to be incomplete, distorted, or wrong than free of flaws. This is the actual human being, not the one portrayed as a rational being out of free choice.
It is not news to anyone that fear, reward, and punishment are powerful conditioners of human behavior, along with feelings of shame, guilt, social stigma, and ostracization.
The hybrid (biosociocultural) nature of the human condition combines the need to keep the organism alive daily with the ability to predict and project the future, that is, to manage the present with the expectation of accumulating sufficient wealth to guarantee future economic and financial security.
Learned dissociation is a psycho-affective adaptation strategy to a dysfunctional system. Learned dissociation and cognitive dissonance are ways of dealing with a reality that pushes us towards alienation as a way of protecting our mental health.
Most of the time, those looking for work out of necessity have no choice; they have to accept the opportunities that come their way. Even though they will be unhappy, they convince themselves they will be able to adapt.
What are the main factors that contribute to alienation at work?
Workplace conditions such as excessive noise, lack of natural light, environmental pollution, wearing uncomfortable protective equipment for long periods, isolation or partnership with incompatible co-workers, productivity goals beyond what is humanly acceptable, repetitive movements, awareness of participating in the production of unnecessary and/or harmful products, the absence of agency (a mere cog in the machine).
The impact that the working environment has on each worker differs in degree, intensity, and depth, meaning that the majority (apparently) adapt quite easily, while the minority risk developing symptoms of mental disorders due to being aware of how their lives are being wasted to satisfy the basic needs.
When we arrive at the job door, we are supposed to leave our worldview at the door. Of course, it is an impossibility. Analyzing and making sense of what happens around us through our ideological-cultural lenses is beyond the control of the conscious will.
We can try to control ourselves to prevent our professional performance from being affected but at a cost to our mental health. Devotees of cold and impartial rationality believe (or want to make others believe) in the possibility of suspending the psycho-affective system to fully embody the role assigned to employees in the workplace.
I will use fast fashion as an example of an economic sector where the principle of degrowth applies like a glove. We could cut fast fashion production by a third, and society wouldn't collapse. Some may ask: what about the loss of income for people who depend directly or indirectly on this sector to survive? Where would the raw materials such as cotton, wool, or fur consumed by this industry be channeled?
Many people may not know, but tens of thousands of Indian farmers have committed suicide because they couldn't pay their debts. When they "chose" to cultivate transgenic cotton instead of traditional varieties based on promises of better production and reduced use of phytopharmaceuticals, farmers entered a debt spiral that led many of them to commit suicide. Farmers can produce other crops and be paid adequately because the problem is political. Most economic and social problems are political problems. A guaranteed employment policy can easily accommodate unemployment in an intervened sector, as would be the case with fast fashion.
When politics is held hostage by big business and the FIRE sector, politics fails society. Unemployment doesn't bother anyone when it serves the interests of the elites, but if it is to restructure society and implement a social and ecological economy for the common good, then we have a problem.
In a socioeconomic system that exalts private job “creators” for the (crucial) role they play in society, it seems absurd to talk about reducing the production of a sector, as the case I used as an example, because of the fallacious unemployment argument. Demonizing the fossil fuel sector has become cool because the transition to “clean” options is controlled by the same actors.
However, job destruction is a constant in the corporate world; every time two companies merge and announce the layoff of thousands of workers, it is always justified. Job loss is a problem because there is no guaranteed employment policy. Replacing useless work with useful work should be a priority for any functional society, so why doesn't it become a reality? Cui bono?
Why is collective well-being, reducing resource and energy consumption, increasing free time to live, access to universal public services, and other policies for a social and ecological economy are not part of the political agenda to compensate for the unemployment generated by production cuts in economic sectors that produce unnecessary and harmful goods and products?
The solution to any problem is political; for example, a government can support food sovereignty instead of producing cash crops for international markets while the commodity markets set the prices despite the consequences for the producers.
Secondly (the most important for many), limiting consumers' freedom of choice and, in the case of the fast fashion industry, restricting the freedom of creators is like an attack on fundamental rights. Creative freedom (any form of freedom) must end before causing social and ecological damage motivated by economic-financial gains.
Like everything in life, freedom is relational; there is no freedom in absolute terms, and bio-sociocultural and ecological constraints must define its limits. We live under the illusion that science and technology will solve our problems instead of thinking about reducing the consumption of superfluous and luxurious products and services.
The marketing techniques used to spread chronic dissatisfaction that leads people always to want more and more (another false assumption about the human condition) should be prohibited because this has nothing to do with freedom of expression but with psycho-affective manipulation, using freedom of choice to legitimize hedonistic and narcissistic individualism.
As social beings that we are, the consumption pattern of the middle class works as a template that the lower class aspires to have access to, and the same happens between developed and developing countries. This paradigm will lead to the planet's ruin and civilization's collapse. The difference between the current civilization and those of the past is the available technological resources, but this relative advantage may delay but will not avoid collapse.
I worked for around two decades in the tanning industry. This industrial sector produces raw materials for footwear, clothing, and accessories. With each new season, the fast fashion industry launches new creations that may require changes in production processes to meet fashion's "needs." The creative freedom of the fashion industry poses challenges to manufacturers that, in some cases, can harm the health of workers and the environment.
These problems are discarded because the reason for the existence of companies is to meet the demands of the market. The tanning industry produces abundant physical waste laden with chemicals, which ends up deposited in landfills, in addition to consuming a large volume of water and chemicals.
As we are conditioned to see the world from a particular perspective, we do not attribute due value to ideas that point us in different paths.
The sources we trust tell us that there is no alternative (TINA) and thus limit the interest and curiosity of looking for solutions outside the box. This impasse is favorable to the forces that intend to control the transition to so-called green capitalism, thus managing to neutralize the possibility of a radical change in the political economy.
It is not only those who benefit from the encouragement of superfluous consumption, as happens with the creation of new fashion collections each season, but the expectation created, a way of living separated from the origin and eventually destructive processes to produce unnecessary stuff "People buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like." Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish
Everything we consume requires natural resources and energy from the extraction process to store shelves.
How should those who, out of necessity, work in companies that produce, distribute, and sell unnecessary and harmful consumer goods feel?
The answer should be obvious, but the question is not asked because we learn to ignore the problems that we believe we cannot solve, and we learn to avoid inconvenience at all costs.
Undifferentiated work is generally poorly paid, but it needs to be done by someone, and society expects citizens at the bottom of the social pyramid to be not only available to do it but also grateful for having the opportunity to earn a living.
Regardless of the financial compensation that workers receive and the added value that their work generates, economic activities with a negative social and ecological impact must undergo a degrowth process.
How should we describe a system in which the survival of many of its citizens requires them to accept jobs that could be eliminated or significantly reduced without any change in the quality of life of society as a whole?
What about the inability to imagine other ways for people to occupy their time and be productive without depending on sectors of activity that encourage unnecessary consumption of goods and services while continuing to kick the can down the road?
In a society where paid work is the only source of income for the majority of citizens, meaningless work can easily turn from sacrifice into psycho-affective torture.
Cynics will say that people in these situations can look for another job or start their own business because we live in societies with freedom of choice and movement.
Ideological linguistic framing is quite effective in justifying the unjustifiable but ineffective in explaining reality. Blaming victims, based on the myth that everything that happens to people is the result of bad choices, is extremely convenient for a system that grows at the expense of manipulating behavior and habits. If our choices were merely individual, marketing would not have the effect it has; it is the social factor that makes behavioral manipulation effective.
Most citizens have no choice; the range of options they can exercise is politically, economically, and socially limited because the system was designed to protect the ruling elites. The modus operandi of a class society involves improving the legal, fiscal, monetary, financial, banking, police, and military systems to protect the ruling class's interests.
How does work end up turning into torture?
Anyone looking for work out of necessity has to accept what comes their way. Even though they know that type of work will not make them happy, they try to convince themselves they will be able to adapt.
Most people adapt without thinking twice because it is the normal way to go, and even many of those who believe in a different system end up accommodating.
However, a minority never manages to adapt, period. Moral, ideological-cultural, or political rejection can be followed by physical rejection when the living organism as a bio-sociocultural whole refuses to cooperate.
What are the main demotivating factors that trigger the inadaptation to the workplace?
If we follow the trail of justifications based on the principle of structural and functional benignity of the existing system, it is evident that the problem lies with the citizens.
Firstly, all citizens must contribute to the collective well-being of society; the most common way to do it is through work.
The basic rule of society must be reciprocity practiced through the mechanisms of the real economy.
The worker cannot be seen as a disposable pawn; class consciousness continues to be as relevant as ever because exploitation continues to be an unresolved issue in addition to all the problems affecting the working class.
Citizens have a wide range of world views, and the generational clash is aggravated by dizzying technological evolution with the so-called fourth industrial revolution.
Life's circumstances bring together in a common space a group of people who share the need to work to survive, at least when we talk about low-paying jobs. Previously, lower-class citizens had a low literacy level or were completely illiterate. There was social and cultural-ideological uniformity, and education was a preparation for voluntary submission. The current educational paradigm is not much different, except that voluntary submission is based on convenience.
Cynical critics will say that people with work adjustment problems are hypersensitive or think they are better than others, etc.
The opinions of those who have never been through similar situations and believe they never will generally display class superiority prejudice. Of course, we can put ourselves in other people's shoes, but this only makes sense when we intend to be honest, or it would be better to remain silent.
Psycho-affective suffering does not arise out of nowhere; it is circumstantial and relational. Principles and values, ideological-political affiliations, sociocultural identity, personality type, and temperament combine in variable proportions and determine the individual's psycho-affective and behavioral responses to the circumstances they are exposed to.
The degree of individual satisfaction or dissatisfaction in a given environment is triggered by the interpretation of objective circumstances through the subjective lenses of individual bio-sociocultural identity.
Many of the "misfits" should be seen as canaries in a coal mine because, in fact, they may be "ahead of their time," or, more precisely, they perceive the present with greater acuity than most of us. There is a normal delay between our ability to understand reality and reality itself due to its complexity, multilayered nature, and the speed at which it changes.
The escalation of psycho-affective suffering can reach the point of turning into physical (psychosomatic) torture. Suppose the person does not have anyone to talk to openly about what they feel and why they feel what they feel, without feeling guilty, being criticized, or their complaints being devalued or ridiculed. In that case, social alienation emerges as a defense mechanism.
When people don't see the light at the end of the tunnel (learned helplessness), they can engage in self-destructive behaviors and develop severe mental disorders. Today's society treats the problem of maladjustment as a person's problem and resorts to psychotropic drugs to treat problems whose true origin is socioeconomic.
A dysfunctional system will cause enormous psycho-affective suffering and give rise to many mental disorders, which is what we are witnessing; not even children escape this scourge.
Many citizens experience the dilemma of being unable to do without their salary and the need to escape the suffering caused by work.
This dilemma is easy to resolve when the worker has the opportunity to change his situation. However, switching to something similar that brings temporary relief is not enough. It has to be a change to something with meaning and purpose that the worker identifies with and feels motivated.
Most citizens have the capacity to be useful to society. A functional society respects individual idiosyncrasies, which does not mean that citizens only do what they want but are listened to instead of being treated as disposable peons, dehumanized, and objectified.
A social and ecological political economy system is the solution; the biosphere's limits must be respected, and work must focus on satisfying basic needs and collective well-being.
If we continue to be driven by greed, the pursuit of profit, the accumulation of wealth, and placing private property at the top of everything, we will end up being devoured by the beast we feed.
We fallaciously assume that most citizens are well-adapted, but most workers feel deep down that there is something intrinsically wrong with the system in place. Many people may have difficulty conceptualizing, correlating (connecting dots), or verbalizing what they feel inside, but they inhale the rotten smell in the air.
The consumer society continues to distract us from reality; we are attracted by the promise of happiness in each item purchased, and thus, we keep the fuse of hope lit on the promise of a tomorrow of milk and honey.
Bank loans for purchasing houses, furniture, cars, holidays, education, health, and even food, in other words, debt from the tip of the toes to the roots of the hair for individuals, families, companies, and governments. Debt makes us more complacent for obvious reasons. The fear of losing essential possessions like our home, car, or health insurance keeps us up at night. More and more people are aware of the growing risk of becoming destitute.
Of course, cynics attribute the problem to the inability of those in debt to manage personal, family, business, or state finances, but this argument is beginning to be worn out. It would be good if more and more people realized that there is nothing wrong with them; what is happening is that they are being deprived of the means to live with the implementation of austerity measures, politically motivated to weaken the working class.
Alienation allows people to continue in a job that has become too painful.
Alienation from nature derives from the obsession with commodity fetishism and cosmopolitanism.
Alienation, in the Marxist theory of class conflict, corresponds to the experience of loss of freedom experienced by workers trapped in the vicious cycle of salaried work as the only way to guarantee survival.
Marx defined work and production as the metabolism of nature and society by capital.
Capital plunders and commodifies nature, seen as resources to be transformed into profit-generating products and goods.
From a Marxist perspective, commodity and nature fetishism includes work as part of the development of the capitalist economy.
Societies stratified into classes or castes are legally and politically designed to prioritize private property rights and safeguard wealth accumulation at the top of the hierarchy of the social pyramid.
The pursuit of profit, the accumulation of capital, and the commodification of literally everything mediate most established and normalized social relations, rendered invisible.
The predation of natural resources is motivated, firstly, by the search for profit, accumulation of capital, and private control of them, not by the concern to satisfy the basic needs of society and collective well-being.
If economic activity is driven by the search for profit, the products, goods, and services placed on the market do not have the priority to satisfy the needs of society, much less the common good. An enormous quantity and diversity of superfluous and harmful products, goods, and services are artificially made necessary through the magic of marketing. Marketing, as we know, is ubiquitous; it lives within us and is associated with everything we should aspire to in order to be happy.
The consumer is the one who, in theory, has the power and duty to make rational choices, as if the psycho-affective and ideological-cultural components could be suppressed from the process by which our organism makes choices and decisions. The brain does not exist to control the body; the nervous system is one of the systems that make up a multisystemic organism whose role is to keep the homostatic state at levels compatible with life.
Comparison is a constant in our lives; we are attracted, seduced, or repelled by a multitude of external influences. Even if we live in the middle of nowhere and only interact with a small number of people, our choices are still not completely free from influence; the narratives we carry in the form of implicit memories of our past experiences continue to take an active role in the process of making choices and taking decisions.
Implicitly and explicitly, we are part of a complex sociocultural relationship in which people we know personally or virtually are part of who we are; other people's ideas and experiences live within us, are part of us, and influence our choices.
When the objective of the economy is the pursuit of profit and private enrichment, collective well-being has to be guaranteed by the State. The State's powers and institutions have the responsibility and obligation to maintain a level of social equity compatible with the dignity of life, but for this to happen, the State cannot be hijacked by the private interests of the oligarchy, which continues to be the dominant paradigm in most countries. Political democracy without economic democracy is a political and moral fraud.
The commodification of nature is the process by which natural resources are extracted and exploited to be transformed into marketable goods.
The growth of industrial capitalism accelerated the process of plundering nature as if natural and mineral resources were inexhaustible.
Industrial capitalism's development normalized the alienation from nature on the one hand and, on the other hand, naturalized the fetishization of nature, which often corresponds to having a romanticized view of nature that might mislead us into developing a proper understanding of nature.
The dehumanization intrinsic to the capitalist socioeconomic system leads to the fetishization of nature. However, the fetishization (to a certain extent, it is a form of objectification) of nature does not replace the awareness of being part of nature. The feeling of belonging decreases as the feeling of ownership and entitlement increases. The feelings of belonging and interdependence become irrelevant when nature is objectified, commodified, and financialized.
We gave up the sense of intimacy, replaced by philosophical-ideological abstractions and scientific specializations in which nature is the object of study and speculation. Nature continues to be colonized by capital, proprietary rights, gene patenting, bioengineering manipulation, you name it. All of this happens in the absence of intimacy and connection, the essence of compassion and empathy.
Marx realized that natural resources were often treated as a free gift from nature to capital.
The Marxist concepts of the universal metabolism of nature, social metabolism, and metabolic disturbance help us to understand capital as the cause of dissociation between man and nature.
Marx defined socialism as a process of sustainable human development based on the imperative to preserve the environment for future generations and improve human development and individual freedom. I believe ecosocialism is the political solution to design a social and ecological economy.
The extraction of natural resources to produce superfluous and luxurious products and goods must be reduced. The hyper-commodification and hyperconsumerism of the present cannot continue, but as the architecture of the international economic, financial, and monetary systems depend on growth to avoid collapse, it forces politicians to talk about transition rather than a paradigm shift.
The so-called decarbonization of the economy and the fourth industrial revolution (digitization of society) do not solve the structural problems but convey the feeling of something being done.
Meanwhile, national and global elites are pulling the strings so that the great transition or the great reset is tailored to keep their interests, power, and control untouchable.
The much-needed radical change does not involve demonizing and continuing to dehumanize humanity but breaking with the paradigm of class subordination and class supremacy through the supremacy of capital and private property rights.
The solution requires inverting the enclosure of the commons, starting with implementing universal public services and revitalizing the notion of the collective good.
The materialist-dialectical approach used by Marx allowed him to understand that environmental degradation, economic impoverishment, and the exploitation of the working class are part of an organic process induced by the reproduction of capital.
A complex system analysis is crucial for a coherent understanding of the negative externalities caused by the extraction, transformation, production, and distribution of goods and services in the context of the capitalist economy.
The concepts of alienation and commodification in Marxist political ecology are essential tools for understanding the capitalist impact on nature (Capitalism in the Web of Life https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/74-capitalism-in-the - web of life).
The notion of class is crucial in the process of analyzing the socioeconomic and ideological-cultural reality to deconstruct dominant narratives.
Social alienation is the human being's way of dealing with psycho-affective suffering caused by unsatisfactory or traumatic socialization.
The lack of meaning and purpose and an inverted value system generate confusion, perplexity, hopelessness, and uncertainty, pushing human beings into alienation to protect themselves from an environment perceived as alien.
The process of alienation can be caused by the rejection of a hyper-technological and cosmopolitan industrialized society that generates a split between man and nature.
The lack of responsiveness of the so-called liberal representative democracy is one of the leading causes of socio-political alienation, and the rise of the neo-fascist ideology is feeding on it.
Alienation is simultaneously a sociocultural and psycho-affective phenomenon. The economic, sociocultural, and political-ideological environment in which we live can cause psycho-emotional trauma with psychosomatic repercussions, and alienation helps to deal with situations that become intolerable.
I do not deny the existence of pathological cases of alienation that require a medical solution, but in most cases, alienation is the process by which the citizen alleviates the suffering of having to deal with a disturbing situation (specific or systemic) social, work, family, cultural, political, etc.
Recognizing that we have a systemic problem would do more to solve most issues than any psychotropic drug available on the market.
Instead of assuming that citizens have the duty to adapt to dysfunctional societal contexts and conditions to make a living, we should focus on replacing an anachronistic civilizational paradigm. The basis of what we call civilization remains the same: growth of cities, class-based system, centralization of power, concentration of wealth, plunder of natural resources, and imperialist expansionism. Adding more layers of technological complexity through the fusion of nanotech, biotech, bioengineering, infotech, and cybernetics will not change the paradigm; it will lead us to a transhumanist dystopia.
Technology changes the way humans interact with each other and with nature. Human adaptive plasticity has allowed us to survive in all habitats except Antarctica. However, this fundamental feature of the human condition is equally "responsible" for our adaptation to dehumanized sociocultural, political-ideological, and economic contexts and environments. A dehumanized society pressures humans to hold antagonistic value systems and perspectives coexisting through cognitive dissonance.
In addition to making the world go round, capital is the driving force behind participatory annihilation. Participatory annihilation results from a socioeconomic paradigm based on manufactured scarcity and the enclosure of the commons, coercing people to be "inventive" to survive, with conspicuous consumerism as its template.
Participatory annihilation is systemically induced; it has nothing to do with individual rational or irrational choices. People, just as animals and even plants, are conditioned by the environment in which they live. It turns out that the environments created and modified by humans are subordinated to laws, rules, and values, as is the case with the search for profit, accumulation of wealth, legal protection of private property, etc.
As time passes, the destructive spiral becomes increasingly destructive and can only be ended by changing the system; reforming it always ends up acting as yet another opportunity for an even more dystopian upgrade.
The solution to the "problem" of alienation involves debunking the myth that the solution to all problems is technoscientific. I have already mentioned earlier in this text that many of the citizens labeled as maladjusted are, after all, canaries in a coal mine. "The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them." Albert Einstein. Conventional thinking will not help us find our way out of the maze it has placed us in; we need to think outside the box of technocratic dehumanization if we want to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
