The fatigue and pain of youth: How are we "alienated"?
Old waster
in 2023- 11- 16
in 2023- 11- 16
This article, in-depth, xplores
the following questions:
1. What is alienation? Why are people alienated? How does alienation feel painful?
What is the nature of man?
2. What is the key to getting rid of alienation?
Alienation is an increasingly popular concept. Do you notice that young people are becoming less motivated to work?
Although they do go to work according to the rules, doubt and depression seem to be in their blood. They can't motivate themselves to do anything. Have you ever wondered why?
Some people say because of tired, 996, 007, and pressure people can not breathe.
Others say that it is because there is no hope, after all, the increase in wages can never catch up with the increase in house prices!
Some people say that we should actively adjust our mentality, change our thinking, and regard 996 and 007 as a necessary exercise in life.
Such explanations may be able to explain some problems, but they can't poke the substance, so it sounds either like complaints or toxic chicken soup, which can't guide us to find a way to cope after all.
The most accurate way to summarize the disadvantages of labor relations in modern society is the word "alienation", which includes both the alienation of work people and the alienation of society from people.
What is alienation? Why are people alienated? How does alienation feel painful?
To figure them out, it helps to first figure out: What is a person? What is the essence of man?
Essence is what makes a thing become that thing! The essence of man -- that which makes man man!
What is this thing?
Schopenhauer said, it is desire, people have desire, but can not satisfy the pain.
Bentham said that it is free will, that man can transcend biological instincts and make trade-offs and choices.
Reason, said Aristotle, Descartes, and Plato, because man can evaluate, judge, and make predictions beyond the information available to his senses Smith certainly shared this view.
Marx believed that the essence of man is work, is labor!
Do not simply understand the work as moving bricks, what is specific, we will talk about later, now let us stand on the shoulders of the sages, and take a look, what is the essence of man?
In my opinion, this issue should be expanded from three levels:
1. The difference between humans and animals
The starting point for the difference between humans and animals, as described in A Brief History of Man, was a cognitive revolution about 70,000 years ago.
Since then, Homo sapiens have updated their systems of thought and communication, creating fictions such as religion and class that
allow people to organize more effectively and eventually dominate the planet.
This conscious, creative imagination, communication, and connection is what separates humans from animals.
What Marx calls labor is another feedback of the cognitive revolution, because, in addition to eating, drinking, and defecating, man creatively transforms the natural and social environment to suit his needs.
This process of transformation, which is Labour, is what distinguishes man from animals.
2. The relationship between man and man
Living in groups is a survival strategy for many animals to avoid harm and maintain population reproduction. Human beings are typically social animals. Whether they eat, move, or reproduce, they take the group as the action unit.
The development process of human society is the process from small to large, from simple to complex.
For example, from the initial related families to clans and tribes, to regional nationalities, and then into states and international organizations......
It is human nature to live in groups, communicate, and cooperate, and over the long course of evolution, this has gradually internalized into the human consciousness's desire for social recognition and public order.
Now understand why some people, even if they are used to doing things their way, still need to be recognized by others and accepted by the group.
Because social relationships are just what people need.
3. The difference between man and machine
In the movie Finch, when the robot "Jeff" develops an independent consciousness and begins to produce a series of emotions such as curiosity, disappointment, happiness, pain, and perseverance, can you still say that he is a "machine"?
Man is beyond the biological meaning of existence.
In the US TV series Westworld, how should a robot feel when she realizes that she is a machine created to be played with?
Let's say you're in the Matrix universe of The Matrix, and you're on top of a Matrix society, living a luxurious life with almost unlimited freedom. How would you feel when you know that it's all controlled by a matrix algorithm?
Would you feel happy, even though the pleasure generated by the algorithm is no different from the pleasure you would feel in the real world?
Sure, someone who experiences pain in the real world chooses to re-enter the virtual world, but in addition to designing a happy life, he also wants to erase his memory, doesn't he?
Why can't he enjoy his life in the virtual world with an awakened memory?
How is this different from us, who are in the game world?
Why is it that people can experience happiness in the game world, while awakened people (who know that everything is fake) in the virtual world, even with the best benefits, feel pain?
The reason is that the game world serves people, and we who travel in the game world can freely choose to enter and exit, while the matrix world controls people, and the awakened people feel that they are controlled, not free, and meaningless.
Limited by the development of science and technology, ancient philosophers may not have thought that machines would become people, and people may also become machines (consciousness upload), but our generation, has been able to clearly distinguish between human and machine boundaries -- complex emotions (doubt, pain, happiness, etc.) and free will.
So, how do we define humans now?
A kind of natural biological evolution, but beyond the biological meaning of the pursuit of creativity, the pursuit of social relations, the pursuit of freedom Consciousness.
In other words, the essence of human beings is creative, social, and free!
When humanity is suppressed -- creativity is suppressed, not accepted by the group society, or controlled, freedom is not felt............ Human
beings suffer!
Modern society tends to form a system, in which you and I must take the initiative to become tools (give up creativity), and accept control (give up freedom), to be accepted by the group society, otherwise they will not be understood, and then isolated.
How can you not feel the pain of a system that forces you to give up some part of your humanity?
However, according to Marx, work is supposed to be happy, and the essence of work is to meet the needs of the self through the process of perceiving, experiencing, analyzing, thinking of solutions, and implementing changes to the surrounding environment.
For example, if you write a little poem and share it with your friends and receive praise, are you happy?
Have you ever felt the urge to share the excitement of repairing an appliance in pristine condition?
Therefore, to work and create value should be the extension of human nature and a basic human need. But in reality, workers often feel like animals or machines -- as evidenced by the growing popularity of self-deprecating memes such as mule men and tool men.
When do you feel like a human? When not working!
Why are some workers so tired that they don't want to sleep? 2. They swipe their mobile phones and lie in a daze................. Even if such
behavior is meaningless, it's enough to make him sentimentalize, why?
Because it's only when he's not working that he can take back control of his body and feel like an individual.
Alienation, we say, is the condition in which man's nature is suppressed and thus distorted into something inhuman, something else.
In feudal systems, for example, tenant farmers were often alienated into "obedient animals."
在电影《古田军号》中，短暂失去领导权的毛泽东跑到福建当起了教员，他指着黑板上大大的“人”字，对孩子们说：“什么是人呐？”
A little boy who was so poor that his whole family had only one cotton-padded jacket stood up and said: "People are landlords, landlords say we are oxen and horses, grandma says we are not as good as oxen and horses!"
This dialogue vividly describes the alienation of labor relations to human beings, which is very impressive.
However, in modern society, people can often feel the pain of alienation without knowing how it happens, because people participate in it voluntarily and can't see the subject who puts pressure on them.
But Marx did, and he described the four ways capitalism alienates people:
1) The alienation of commodities from man
2) The alienation of the process of work from man
3) Alienation of human nature;
4) the alienation of human relations.
First, in capitalist relations of production, to whom do the products produced belong?
The boss!
You may be happy that you write beautiful poetry, but what difference does it make to the workers on the assembly line at a Foxconn factory whether they are assembling a great Apple or some other electronic knockoff?
It doesn't matter! Because in such an employment relationship, the worker is not working to stretch his or her creativity but to earn a wage.
The purpose of earning wages is to buy commodities. Under the offensive of consumerism, people are becoming more and more accustomed to filling their lives with various commodities and defining their social relationships with conspicuous consumer goods Commodities are supposed to be used by people, but now
they define people in turn. Isn't that alienation?
Second, work is supposed to be how people affirm their self-worth and build social relationships.
For example, when people introduce themselves in strange places, they generally use the sentence pattern "My name is xxx and my job is xx". People will identify his position in the social network according to his work as a dentist, scientist, or cleaner.
But now people work not to show their function and create value, but to earn salary -- people rack their brains to chase, is more pay jobs, rather than more reflect their value of work.
Under these circumstances, do you feel that your work still defines your worth?
Third, capitalism is based on capital, based on the efficiency of profit growth, so we have to find ways to reduce costs, including human costs.
The standardization and process pursued by industrialization are all reducing the cost of "people".
A typical example is the factory assembly line, which significantly improves the efficiency of capital multiplication, but also dissimilates people into machine parts.
To put it simply, you and your boss have conflicting interests. If you want income growth and job stability, you need to pursue irreplaceability, while he wants to reduce the complexity of workers' work and reduce the cost of employing people.
Your work SOP, which means that many people are capable, then your feeling is only likely to be bad because your boss can always find more tools than you work.
You say you are very capable, you are an amazing talent, then he must find someone cheaper than you.
Tool people pk workload and who cost less, is not the inner volume?
Two years ago, there was a very popular article, called "Trapped in the Algorithm Takeaway Rider" -- the ultimate goal of the algorithm is to squeeze the rider's physical strength to the limit and reduce the cost to the limit.
This is also the logic of social algorithms, which will eventually drive down the wages of workers to the point where they can only maintain the reproduction of labor.
In other words, the money you earn at work only allows you to recover and go back to work the next day.
Like a battery, it is charged to discharge until it ages and then discarded and replaced.
If you work today so that you can continue to work tomorrow, then what is the point of your work?
The reason why people are human, lies in the needs of people, in addition to survival instinct, there are emotional needs and value realization, but capital proliferation regardless of this, just tries to keep the cost down, the people's battery.
Finally, the relationship between people and people is also alienated into the relationship between things, money and money.
For the multiplication of capital requires not an increase in the total utility of society, but an increase in exchangeable value.
A little hard to understand, isn't it? An example will give you the idea.
Does your mom create utility when she cooks you a table? Of course, it does, but it's not exchangeable value. The process of capital multiplication is when a nanny cooks you a meal and you pay her wages.
So what does capitalism encourage?
It encourages your mother to cook for someone else and get paid, and it encourages you to pay someone else's mother to cook for you.
It is right to feel distorted, because in this process, the relationship between people is distorted for the relationship between money and money, so the bigger the city, the less warmth there will be.
Above, alienation can be summed up in one sentence -- this should be the goal of production, but it has become a means of production.
Alienation work, which has no creative realization and makes people feel unfree, is a negation of human nature and the principle of happiness.
The alienated society separates people's need for creativity and freedom from their need for sociality -- if you want to be accepted and recognized by society, you must give up creativity and freedom; If you want to be creative and free, you cannot be recognized by the general values of society.
This is the root cause of many people's frustration in the workplace. To enter the work, they must suffer the pain of alienation; If you don't work, you will suffer the pain of being
excluded from social relationships. No matter how we act, a part of us is stripped of our basic human needs
Do you think that's all that causes people to suffer? Not enough!
German sociologist Rosa also put forward the concept of "new alienation".
The reason for the new alienation is "social acceleration" -- Mu Xin said "slow in the past", which means "fast now", and faster and faster!
Why faster and faster? Of course, it is brought about by the progress of science and technology. In the past, the mail of cars and horses was slow, and now how fast is the plane WeChat?
The question is, isn't science and technology advancing to save time? Why is it making leisure less and less?
First of all, because the total amount of people's tasks has become more before there was no WeChat, the communication efficiency is low, but there are not so many things brought by WeChat -- Old tour is a model worker I admire very much, he ate lunch, he will save more than 50 messages have not been returned.
Secondly, contemporary society is a high division of labor, interdependence, interlocking, chain of infinite collaboration network, your work time is not determined by you, even by your boss, but by customers, colleagues, upstream and downstream of all links to decide.
For example, if a star explodes a big melon late at night, does the new media editor have to work overtime immediately?
Everyone is tied to the same conveyor belt, others speed up, and you have to speed up, otherwise, it will be out of touch, and squeezed out.
Some people say, well, why don't everyone just slow down? No!
Because competition is always there.
The logic of competition, from the top down, from the perspective of discipline, is struggle, Wolf nature, and happiness...
But from the perspective of the bottom worker, education, income from work, children's achievements, conspicuous consumption, even marriage -- everything -- is used to engage in an "arms race."
Only if you win the game, can you get more social distribution, including both resources and psychological, such as superiority.
Competition, requires you to do more things, and can not stop, commonly known as the internal volume.
The logic of collaboration and the logic of competition interlock with each other to form a meat grinder called society, which rolls faster and faster:
1. It is driven not only by desire and greed but also by fear and anxiety.
For example, today's young people from the high school entrance examination, college entrance examination, to work, to buy a house ...
Along the way, the chance of tolerance is very low, as long as you don't keep up with one step, others will tell you that your life is over.
2, the faster the social machine is turning, the higher the energy requirements to maintain rotation, so we feed it more and more time and energy.
3. Society is accelerating faster and faster, but there are always parts that cannot be accelerated, such as the ecological environment, the way decisions are made (democracy takes time), and the psychological load of human beings.
The problem of psychological overload brought about by the acceleration of society has become more and more serious, and the first thing is a strong sense of oppression and powerlessness.
In modern society because of the high degree of cooperation and division of labor, the formation of an "everyone on the assembly line" situation, your work pace, personal time, by the "social conveyor belt" operation determined, you can only passive participation, resulting in what you do, even if you voluntarily, is not what you want to do.
Voluntary but not free, there will be a sense of oppression that you can't resist.
To keep up with the speed of society and avoid disconnection, you also need to engage in more and more topics, add a lot of information, read this, and know that... The pile-up keeps you in a constant state of anxiety about having too many tasks to do and never getting them done.
Even more paradoxically, algorithms can constantly tempt you to deviate from your to-do list, and in the new media age, it's easy to find "quick highs" alternatives, like short videos and video games.
Compared to these "high-speed pleasure products" that can generate instant feedback, reading books, systematic long articles, etc., can take a long time to complete the happiness mechanism.
And human willpower is consumable when you stand on the "line called work", your willpower is in a state of consumption, you must repeatedly control your words and deeds, not offend the boss, not offend customers, not make colleagues unhappy, do not resign...
When you get a chance to pull out of this system for a short time, you will be physically and mentally exhausted, and you will have a serious compensation psychology -- you need to be happy, and you do have not enough willpower to resist the impact of instant pleasure.
It's only after you swipe your phone that you're faced with a longer, more unreachable list of tasks, and you're left with an increasing sense of emptiness and anxiety.
Above all, social alienation not only suppresses people's creativity, imprisons freedom, and distorts social relations, but also intensifies people's psychological load, making people feel more and more oppressed and anxious.
You can't be happy in such a system!
And there's nowhere to hide, because the capitalist system of issuing debt for hundreds of years has permeated every aspect of
people's lives, and we're all welded to the conveyor belt of socialized production.
It's also hard to rebel against. Unlike slave societies and imperial societies, there is a direct and specific object of criticism. Who do you rebel against in an alienated society? Commodity fetishism? The logic of social competition? Don't forget that you are actively participating in it yourself!
The key to escape alienation is to escape the algorithmic rules of capitalism.
And the key to escape from capitalism is to return to humanism From capital to people!
1. What is alienation? Why are people alienated? How does alienation feel painful?
What is the nature of man?
2. What is the key to getting rid of alienation?
Alienation is an increasingly popular concept. Do you notice that young people are becoming less motivated to work?
Although they do go to work according to the rules, doubt and depression seem to be in their blood. They can't motivate themselves to do anything. Have you ever wondered why?
Some people say because of tired, 996, 007, and pressure people can not breathe.
Others say that it is because there is no hope, after all, the increase in wages can never catch up with the increase in house prices!
Some people say that we should actively adjust our mentality, change our thinking, and regard 996 and 007 as a necessary exercise in life.
Such explanations may be able to explain some problems, but they can't poke the substance, so it sounds either like complaints or toxic chicken soup, which can't guide us to find a way to cope after all.
The most accurate way to summarize the disadvantages of labor relations in modern society is the word "alienation", which includes both the alienation of work people and the alienation of society from people.
What is alienation? Why are people alienated? How does alienation feel painful?
To figure them out, it helps to first figure out: What is a person? What is the essence of man?
Essence is what makes a thing become that thing! The essence of man -- that which makes man man!
What is this thing?
Schopenhauer said, it is desire, people have desire, but can not satisfy the pain.
Bentham said that it is free will, that man can transcend biological instincts and make trade-offs and choices.
Reason, said Aristotle, Descartes, and Plato, because man can evaluate, judge, and make predictions beyond the information available to his senses Smith certainly shared this view.
Marx believed that the essence of man is work, is labor!
Do not simply understand the work as moving bricks, what is specific, we will talk about later, now let us stand on the shoulders of the sages, and take a look, what is the essence of man?
In my opinion, this issue should be expanded from three levels:
1. The difference between humans and animals
The starting point for the difference between humans and animals, as described in A Brief History of Man, was a cognitive revolution about 70,000 years ago.
Since then, Homo sapiens have updated their systems of thought and communication, creating fictions such as religion and class that
allow people to organize more effectively and eventually dominate the planet.
This conscious, creative imagination, communication, and connection is what separates humans from animals.
What Marx calls labor is another feedback of the cognitive revolution, because, in addition to eating, drinking, and defecating, man creatively transforms the natural and social environment to suit his needs.
This process of transformation, which is Labour, is what distinguishes man from animals.
2. The relationship between man and man
Living in groups is a survival strategy for many animals to avoid harm and maintain population reproduction. Human beings are typically social animals. Whether they eat, move, or reproduce, they take the group as the action unit.
The development process of human society is the process from small to large, from simple to complex.
For example, from the initial related families to clans and tribes, to regional nationalities, and then into states and international organizations......
It is human nature to live in groups, communicate, and cooperate, and over the long course of evolution, this has gradually internalized into the human consciousness's desire for social recognition and public order.
Now understand why some people, even if they are used to doing things their way, still need to be recognized by others and accepted by the group.
Because social relationships are just what people need.
3. The difference between man and machine
In the movie Finch, when the robot "Jeff" develops an independent consciousness and begins to produce a series of emotions such as curiosity, disappointment, happiness, pain, and perseverance, can you still say that he is a "machine"?
Man is beyond the biological meaning of existence.
In the US TV series Westworld, how should a robot feel when she realizes that she is a machine created to be played with?
Let's say you're in the Matrix universe of The Matrix, and you're on top of a Matrix society, living a luxurious life with almost unlimited freedom. How would you feel when you know that it's all controlled by a matrix algorithm?
Would you feel happy, even though the pleasure generated by the algorithm is no different from the pleasure you would feel in the real world?
Sure, someone who experiences pain in the real world chooses to re-enter the virtual world, but in addition to designing a happy life, he also wants to erase his memory, doesn't he?
Why can't he enjoy his life in the virtual world with an awakened memory?
How is this different from us, who are in the game world?
Why is it that people can experience happiness in the game world, while awakened people (who know that everything is fake) in the virtual world, even with the best benefits, feel pain?
The reason is that the game world serves people, and we who travel in the game world can freely choose to enter and exit, while the matrix world controls people, and the awakened people feel that they are controlled, not free, and meaningless.
Limited by the development of science and technology, ancient philosophers may not have thought that machines would become people, and people may also become machines (consciousness upload), but our generation, has been able to clearly distinguish between human and machine boundaries -- complex emotions (doubt, pain, happiness, etc.) and free will.
So, how do we define humans now?
A kind of natural biological evolution, but beyond the biological meaning of the pursuit of creativity, the pursuit of social relations, the pursuit of freedom Consciousness.
In other words, the essence of human beings is creative, social, and free!
When humanity is suppressed -- creativity is suppressed, not accepted by the group society, or controlled, freedom is not felt............ Human
beings suffer!
Modern society tends to form a system, in which you and I must take the initiative to become tools (give up creativity), and accept control (give up freedom), to be accepted by the group society, otherwise they will not be understood, and then isolated.
How can you not feel the pain of a system that forces you to give up some part of your humanity?
However, according to Marx, work is supposed to be happy, and the essence of work is to meet the needs of the self through the process of perceiving, experiencing, analyzing, thinking of solutions, and implementing changes to the surrounding environment.
For example, if you write a little poem and share it with your friends and receive praise, are you happy?
Have you ever felt the urge to share the excitement of repairing an appliance in pristine condition?
Therefore, to work and create value should be the extension of human nature and a basic human need. But in reality, workers often feel like animals or machines -- as evidenced by the growing popularity of self-deprecating memes such as mule men and tool men.
When do you feel like a human? When not working!
Why are some workers so tired that they don't want to sleep? 2. They swipe their mobile phones and lie in a daze................. Even if such
behavior is meaningless, it's enough to make him sentimentalize, why?
Because it's only when he's not working that he can take back control of his body and feel like an individual.
Alienation, we say, is the condition in which man's nature is suppressed and thus distorted into something inhuman, something else.
In feudal systems, for example, tenant farmers were often alienated into "obedient animals."
在电影《古田军号》中，短暂失去领导权的毛泽东跑到福建当起了教员，他指着黑板上大大的“人”字，对孩子们说：“什么是人呐？”
A little boy who was so poor that his whole family had only one cotton-padded jacket stood up and said: "People are landlords, landlords say we are oxen and horses, grandma says we are not as good as oxen and horses!"
This dialogue vividly describes the alienation of labor relations to human beings, which is very impressive.
However, in modern society, people can often feel the pain of alienation without knowing how it happens, because people participate in it voluntarily and can't see the subject who puts pressure on them.
But Marx did, and he described the four ways capitalism alienates people:
1) The alienation of commodities from man
2) The alienation of the process of work from man
3) Alienation of human nature;
4) the alienation of human relations.
First, in capitalist relations of production, to whom do the products produced belong?
The boss!
You may be happy that you write beautiful poetry, but what difference does it make to the workers on the assembly line at a Foxconn factory whether they are assembling a great Apple or some other electronic knockoff?
It doesn't matter! Because in such an employment relationship, the worker is not working to stretch his or her creativity but to earn a wage.
The purpose of earning wages is to buy commodities. Under the offensive of consumerism, people are becoming more and more accustomed to filling their lives with various commodities and defining their social relationships with conspicuous consumer goods Commodities are supposed to be used by people, but now
they define people in turn. Isn't that alienation?
Second, work is supposed to be how people affirm their self-worth and build social relationships.
For example, when people introduce themselves in strange places, they generally use the sentence pattern "My name is xxx and my job is xx". People will identify his position in the social network according to his work as a dentist, scientist, or cleaner.
But now people work not to show their function and create value, but to earn salary -- people rack their brains to chase, is more pay jobs, rather than more reflect their value of work.
Under these circumstances, do you feel that your work still defines your worth?
Third, capitalism is based on capital, based on the efficiency of profit growth, so we have to find ways to reduce costs, including human costs.
The standardization and process pursued by industrialization are all reducing the cost of "people".
A typical example is the factory assembly line, which significantly improves the efficiency of capital multiplication, but also dissimilates people into machine parts.
To put it simply, you and your boss have conflicting interests. If you want income growth and job stability, you need to pursue irreplaceability, while he wants to reduce the complexity of workers' work and reduce the cost of employing people.
Your work SOP, which means that many people are capable, then your feeling is only likely to be bad because your boss can always find more tools than you work.
You say you are very capable, you are an amazing talent, then he must find someone cheaper than you.
Tool people pk workload and who cost less, is not the inner volume?
Two years ago, there was a very popular article, called "Trapped in the Algorithm Takeaway Rider" -- the ultimate goal of the algorithm is to squeeze the rider's physical strength to the limit and reduce the cost to the limit.
This is also the logic of social algorithms, which will eventually drive down the wages of workers to the point where they can only maintain the reproduction of labor.
In other words, the money you earn at work only allows you to recover and go back to work the next day.
Like a battery, it is charged to discharge until it ages and then discarded and replaced.
If you work today so that you can continue to work tomorrow, then what is the point of your work?
The reason why people are human, lies in the needs of people, in addition to survival instinct, there are emotional needs and value realization, but capital proliferation regardless of this, just tries to keep the cost down, the people's battery.
Finally, the relationship between people and people is also alienated into the relationship between things, money and money.
For the multiplication of capital requires not an increase in the total utility of society, but an increase in exchangeable value.
A little hard to understand, isn't it? An example will give you the idea.
Does your mom create utility when she cooks you a table? Of course, it does, but it's not exchangeable value. The process of capital multiplication is when a nanny cooks you a meal and you pay her wages.
So what does capitalism encourage?
It encourages your mother to cook for someone else and get paid, and it encourages you to pay someone else's mother to cook for you.
It is right to feel distorted, because in this process, the relationship between people is distorted for the relationship between money and money, so the bigger the city, the less warmth there will be.
Above, alienation can be summed up in one sentence -- this should be the goal of production, but it has become a means of production.
Alienation work, which has no creative realization and makes people feel unfree, is a negation of human nature and the principle of happiness.
The alienated society separates people's need for creativity and freedom from their need for sociality -- if you want to be accepted and recognized by society, you must give up creativity and freedom; If you want to be creative and free, you cannot be recognized by the general values of society.
This is the root cause of many people's frustration in the workplace. To enter the work, they must suffer the pain of alienation; If you don't work, you will suffer the pain of being
excluded from social relationships. No matter how we act, a part of us is stripped of our basic human needs
Do you think that's all that causes people to suffer? Not enough!
German sociologist Rosa also put forward the concept of "new alienation".
The reason for the new alienation is "social acceleration" -- Mu Xin said "slow in the past", which means "fast now", and faster and faster!
Why faster and faster? Of course, it is brought about by the progress of science and technology. In the past, the mail of cars and horses was slow, and now how fast is the plane WeChat?
The question is, isn't science and technology advancing to save time? Why is it making leisure less and less?
First of all, because the total amount of people's tasks has become more before there was no WeChat, the communication efficiency is low, but there are not so many things brought by WeChat -- Old tour is a model worker I admire very much, he ate lunch, he will save more than 50 messages have not been returned.
Secondly, contemporary society is a high division of labor, interdependence, interlocking, chain of infinite collaboration network, your work time is not determined by you, even by your boss, but by customers, colleagues, upstream and downstream of all links to decide.
For example, if a star explodes a big melon late at night, does the new media editor have to work overtime immediately?
Everyone is tied to the same conveyor belt, others speed up, and you have to speed up, otherwise, it will be out of touch, and squeezed out.
Some people say, well, why don't everyone just slow down? No!
Because competition is always there.
The logic of competition, from the top down, from the perspective of discipline, is struggle, Wolf nature, and happiness...
But from the perspective of the bottom worker, education, income from work, children's achievements, conspicuous consumption, even marriage -- everything -- is used to engage in an "arms race."
Only if you win the game, can you get more social distribution, including both resources and psychological, such as superiority.
Competition, requires you to do more things, and can not stop, commonly known as the internal volume.
The logic of collaboration and the logic of competition interlock with each other to form a meat grinder called society, which rolls faster and faster:
1. It is driven not only by desire and greed but also by fear and anxiety.
For example, today's young people from the high school entrance examination, college entrance examination, to work, to buy a house ...
Along the way, the chance of tolerance is very low, as long as you don't keep up with one step, others will tell you that your life is over.
2, the faster the social machine is turning, the higher the energy requirements to maintain rotation, so we feed it more and more time and energy.
3. Society is accelerating faster and faster, but there are always parts that cannot be accelerated, such as the ecological environment, the way decisions are made (democracy takes time), and the psychological load of human beings.
The problem of psychological overload brought about by the acceleration of society has become more and more serious, and the first thing is a strong sense of oppression and powerlessness.
In modern society because of the high degree of cooperation and division of labor, the formation of an "everyone on the assembly line" situation, your work pace, personal time, by the "social conveyor belt" operation determined, you can only passive participation, resulting in what you do, even if you voluntarily, is not what you want to do.
Voluntary but not free, there will be a sense of oppression that you can't resist.
To keep up with the speed of society and avoid disconnection, you also need to engage in more and more topics, add a lot of information, read this, and know that... The pile-up keeps you in a constant state of anxiety about having too many tasks to do and never getting them done.
Even more paradoxically, algorithms can constantly tempt you to deviate from your to-do list, and in the new media age, it's easy to find "quick highs" alternatives, like short videos and video games.
Compared to these "high-speed pleasure products" that can generate instant feedback, reading books, systematic long articles, etc., can take a long time to complete the happiness mechanism.
And human willpower is consumable when you stand on the "line called work", your willpower is in a state of consumption, you must repeatedly control your words and deeds, not offend the boss, not offend customers, not make colleagues unhappy, do not resign...
When you get a chance to pull out of this system for a short time, you will be physically and mentally exhausted, and you will have a serious compensation psychology -- you need to be happy, and you do have not enough willpower to resist the impact of instant pleasure.
It's only after you swipe your phone that you're faced with a longer, more unreachable list of tasks, and you're left with an increasing sense of emptiness and anxiety.
Above all, social alienation not only suppresses people's creativity, imprisons freedom, and distorts social relations, but also intensifies people's psychological load, making people feel more and more oppressed and anxious.
You can't be happy in such a system!
And there's nowhere to hide, because the capitalist system of issuing debt for hundreds of years has permeated every aspect of
people's lives, and we're all welded to the conveyor belt of socialized production.
It's also hard to rebel against. Unlike slave societies and imperial societies, there is a direct and specific object of criticism. Who do you rebel against in an alienated society? Commodity fetishism? The logic of social competition? Don't forget that you are actively participating in it yourself!
The key to escape alienation is to escape the algorithmic rules of capitalism.
And the key to escape from capitalism is to return to humanism From capital to people!
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