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ALIENATION
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Exploitation, alienation, poverty, disempowerment,
fragmenting and debilitating labor, production for
the profit of a few -- much less harsh homelessness,
starvation, and degradation -- are not like gravity.
They arise from institutional relations established
by human beings. New institutions, also established
by human beings, can generate other vastly superior
outcomes. Defining and working to attain those new
institutions ought to be our economic agenda.
-- Michael Albert
I
think it must be conceded that it is possible to create
a society in which the response to market failure
is not a swing to socialism, but an exacerbation of
individual efforts to stay ahead by making and spending
yet more money. Does the public health service have
long waiting lists and inadequate facilities? Buy
private insurance. Has public transport broken down?
Buy a car for each member of the family above driving
age. Has the countryside been built over or the footpaths
eradicated? Buy some elaborate exercise machinery
and work out at home. Is air pollution intolerable?
Buy an air-filtering unit and stay indoors. Is what
comes out of the tap foul to the taste and chock-full
of carcinogens? Buy bottled water. And so on. We know
it can all happen because it has: I have been doing
little more than describing Southern California. Now
it is worth noticing two things about the private
substitutes that I have described. The first is that
in the aggregate they are probably much more expensive
than would be the implementation of the appropriate
public policy. The second is that they are extremely
poor replacements for the missing outcomes of good
public policy. Nevertheless, it is plain that the
members of a society can become so alienated from
one another, so mistrustful of any form of collective
action, that they prefer to go it alone.
-- Brian Barry
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"The
natural world is the larger sacred community to which
we belong. To be alienated from this community is
to become destitute in all that makes us human. To
damage this community is to diminish our own existence."
~ Thomas
Berry
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By
alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the
person experiences himself as an alien. He has become,
one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience
himself as the center of his world, as the creator of
his own acts -- but his acts and their consequences
have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may
even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with
himself as he is out of touch with any other person.
He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced;
with the senses and with common sense, but at the same
time without being related to oneself and to the world
outside positively.
-- Erich Fromm |
Human
beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they
can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact
capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does
the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated
humanity supports this system as its own involuntary
master plan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration,
as a record of people's own failure as individuals.
-- Vaclav
Havel |
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“We
have to heal our wounded world.
The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today
are a result of the alienation that people feel from each
other and their environment.”
-- Michael Jackson
Family
traditions counter alienation and confusion.
They help us define who we are; they provide something steady,
reliable and safe in a confusing world.
-- Susan Lieberman
Young
alienation, disappointment and heartache is all a part of
the first real growing up that we do.
-- Judd Nelson
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In
our hectic, fast-paced, consumer-driven society, it's
not uncommon for people to feel overwhelmed, isolated,
alone, and even alienated. Many are re-discovering
the healing and empowering role that community can
bring to our lives. The sense of belonging we feel
when we make the time to take an active role in our
communities can give us a deeper sense of meaning
and purpose.
-- Robert
Alan Silverstein
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I
don't want to express alienation. It isn't what
I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate
engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate,
wake up.
-- Susan
Sontag
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Another
cause for the increase in alienation and cynicism
is a feeling that too many policy decisions that affect
individuals
have been taken out of any system that has accountability
or that they can influence.
-- Robert Teeter
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"A
reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by
which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted
. . . and by which our so-called prisons shall be
virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops,
from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful
members of society, instead of the alienated citizens
they now are."
-- Victoria
Woodhull
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