What is Alienation and What Does It Have to Do With Me? #062

Hello, welcome back to Every Dawn. Today, I very briefly want to tell you something about the concept of alienation. It's a thing that comes from Marx, and I know that Marx is not the most popular philosopher, especially not in the United States. But I think as a philosopher, he had insights that were valuable, and we should not confuse perhaps Marx the philosopher with Marxist Communist States as they existed in the Soviet Union or perhaps today in other countries like, I don't know, North Korea.

These countries are not really Marxist. They misuse the name in the same way as perhaps the Catholic Church has over many centuries misused the name of Jesus and of Christianity in order to torture people, imprison people, kill people, make Crusades, organize Crusades, and all these things are not what the Christian message is about. And in the same way, the Soviet Union or today's Russia or North Korea are not what Marxism is about.

The idea of Marxism is essentially very easy. It is the idea that people should own the means of production when they produce something. And why should they own the means of production, and what does this even mean? And the idea here, I think, is that if you think, you know, of a man who is making shoes by hand, a shoe maker in some country that is not yet industrialized, and he's making the shoes, he's selling the shoes, and he has a good life doing this in his little workshop.

Now a factory opens close to his little shoe shop, and now suddenly it's not only him producing shoes, but he has to compete with his factory. But the factory does not produce the shoes one by one; it produces them in the thousands, and therefore, it can sell them much cheaper because there is much less work involved for every single shoe. Now the factory produces the shoes cheaper, and this man cannot compete. So this man has only two choices: he can either try to start his own factory, but this is normally impossible because he won't have the capital. Factory needs a lot of money to be built before you can start producing these shoes, or the shoe maker can go and become a worker in the factory. But this has its own problems because working in a factory is not as fulfilling as having your own shoe shop.

The difference is that when he works for his own shop, he's producing the whole shoe. He's making this whole product out of some raw materials, and so in the end, when he sees the shoe, he can be proud of what he made. He has created this shoe, and this is something that he made. It gives meaning to his life. And the work in the factory is always doing the same movement on the assembly belt, or who is putting some raw materials into a machine at regular intervals. He is not actually producing anything creatively, right? He's not making anything, he's not making a shoe. He is just serving a machine, and so at the end of this process, when the shoe comes out, this factory worker is not proud of the shoe he produced because he did not actually produce a shoe. And this makes a huge difference to them at the end of the day.

The individual shoe maker, the independent shoe maker, can say, "I made, you know, five pairs of good shoes. I know what I did today. I'm proud of it." The factory worker can say, "I pressed the button 500 times, and everybody else could have done the same. There's no reason to be proud of that." So this is called alienation. It's the idea that I become an alien to my work. I become alienated from my work. I become distant from my work. I lose the contact I have with it.

And the problem with our societies, our capitalist societies, is that we more and more are supposed to become alienated from our work. And why? Because society wants us to be interchangeable. A factory owner doesn't want the workers to be irreplaceable individuals because then they could demand more and more salary. They could, you know, go away, and the factory would be destroyed, and so on. They need workers to be interchangeable. They need to be able to fire one, hire another who can press the same button.

The same is true of universities. When I'm sitting here, you know, as part of a university, my university doesn't want me to be an individual that is separate from everybody else and perhaps better than others or unique in some way. Universities operate on the basis that they offer a service to students that everybody should be able to offer the same kind of service so that if I, for some reason, you know, don't work well, they can replace me with somebody who will do my work better. But the work needs to be standardized for this to be possible. Every prospective professor or lecturer who goes to university must be the same kind. They must have the same education. They must be interchangeable. So if we, you know, fire one of them, we can hire another, and they will do the same job. But in the end, this means that we lose all sorts of personality that somebody could inject into his work. We lose new ideas. We lose original solutions. We standardize everything so that in the end, we get only the lowest standard of work as a result of that. We don't encourage anybody to do better work than the lowest standard.

And for the workers, which is also us, you know, for you, for me, this means that we lose this happiness that we had, the satisfaction that we had from our work. When I'm teaching, you know, a course in an interesting way, this gave me satisfaction. This gives me a bond with my students. When I'm teaching like a robot the same thing that everybody else is teaching, then I don't have this satisfaction, like the shoemaker who is just pressing a button now being a factory worker.

And so we should think about it, perhaps as members of this society, you know, how much we want to let society do this to us and when is the point to resist that. And we can resist it in a way. We don't need to make a revolution. We can just say at work, we try to go beyond what is required as a minimum specification for our job, and we try to inject our job with some personality. I can give a lecture that is better or different from the others who give the same lecture. I can perhaps even as a worker in a factory find some way of doing my work in a more original way, or perhaps if the factory does not allow me to do this, then I try to find something outside of the factory where I can do something. For example, making YouTube videos, or I can write a book, or I can, you know, read some books, or I can go for a walk, or I can raise my children in an original way, in some way to preserve what is specifically me, right, what is specifically human. And in this way to oppose this trend that wants us to just act like machines.

Thank you, and see you next time.