Thursday, March 28, 2024
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ALIENATION & TOTALITARIANISM

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To be sure, alienation is not an altogether new phenomenon. We can track its inchoate beginning all the way back to the rise of industrialization. The seed of alienation was already baked-in within the fabric of collective existence the day craft manufacturing gave way to industrial commodity production. Since then alienation was set on a one-way trajectory, ultimately reaching its pinnacle of mass affliction in late modernity. Helplessness, loneliness, depression, etc., are all induced by the systemically embedded alienation of the global order. These afflictions in turn fostered docility and impotence in the individual human beings, thereby facilitating the ascendance of a global totalitarian regime. Today totalitarianism fledges everywhere on earth, thanks to the increased homogenization of the world system under the diktat of the techno-sphere!
For instance, in a city like New York where millions of individuals intermingle on a daily basis, loneliness/isolation and depression have become serious health issues. One out of every four patient suffers from some kind of mental ailment in the US. Many of these problems are, to a large extent, manifestations of alienation. The deeper reason why modernity cannot realistically tackle alienation is because societies are not organized to satisfy the natural needs and cravings of humanity, rather they are geared to satisfying, first and foremost, the desire of capital. In late modernity, the technosphere is one of the most important pillars supporting planetary totalitarianism! Totalitarianism is mostly effective in societies where alienation has taken deep root! In this regard, it is worth mentioning that the more organic existence of traditional societies doesn’t readily facilitate the entrenchment of totalitarianism, as is the case in the advanced industrial civilization of the North! In the non-core countries, where technical sophistication remains rudimentary, i.e., where the technosphere doesn’t have the privilege of preponderance, totalitarianism is sustained mostly by relying on terroristic measures. Unfortunately, the peripheral states have become quite adept in utilizing state terrorism to implement totalitarianism in their jurisdictions!
Totalitarianism is a system of overarching control that seeks total dominance. Obviously, the human operators of totalitarianism are bona fide psychopaths. These individuals are control freaks, hence, any attempt to steer collective existence away from the anti-life objective of capital, towards a more humane orientation, is bound to meet forceful opposition! The ultimate objective of the prevailing totalitarianism is to deliver, to its human surrogates, a regime of; ‘some animals are more equal than others’. Alienation as a symptom of fragmented communal spirit is used as an effective weapon to impose totalitarian rule. For example, in our current totalitarian state, critical comments against the narratives of the status quo, is not tolerated. The reigning parasitic psychopaths, who continuously work to undermine inquisitive spirit, while propping up mediocrity and opportunism, are now in charge of even the hard sciences! Today it is politics that is dictating the big sciences! Just look at the recent muzzling of scientists, not in the pay of the establishment, in regards to the declared pandemic/plandemic. Unless the global sheeple (human mass) revolts against the on-going indoctrination/brainwashing and the muzzling of scientific findings, mental and physical slavery will be the fate of humanity in the days to come! See the article next column, on pages 28 & 30.
Since alienation is what feeds totalitarianism, addressing the problems associated with it will go a long way to tempering/rectifying the beastly totalitarianism of our time. If one is serious about finding potential solution to alienation, then one has to start by interrogating the existing anti-life global socio-economic order, including the technosphere. Structural systemic alienation is an impossibility without the support of the technosphere. We admit; individual freedom or individualism started to die a slow death when the rationally designed repetitive industrial processes of the machines started to replace craft manufacturing. Crafted products, to some extent, embodied aspects of the craftsman’s creative spirit, expressed materially. While critiquing capitalism, alienation is one of the deeper problematic the young radical economist managed to illuminate, about a century and half ago. ‘The object which labor produces, its product, is encountered as an alien entity, a force that has become independent of its producer. The realization of labor is its objectification. Under the prevailing economic conditions, this realization of labor appears as its opposite, the negation [Entwirklichung] of the laborer. Objectification appears as loss of and enslavement by the object, and appropriation as alienation and expropriation. .… the more the worker toils, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects he produces to oppose him, and the poorer lie himself becomes ..” Karl Marx. Good Day!

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