Daily Times

“If anxiety is more than a general malaise, if it is an existential condition, then this so-called ‘age of anxiety’ is distinguished by the extent to which anxiety has disappeared from expression” (Herbert Marcuse).

For psychologists the moment of birth proves the moment of an apocalypse, of the biggest trauma for the infant. From that moment on he keeps finding his relatedness with the world since separation from the womb becomes isolation from security. “Each society,” according to T Lidz, “has a vital interest in the indoctrination of the infant who forms its new recruits.” This is the tragedy of modern human beings. No sooner is he born he is confronted by an alien world with which his association is based on pre-determined, paradoxical and ambivalent relationships. It is a world where love and hate, productivity and destruction, freedom and oppression live side by side. Living with constant contradictions proves exhaustive and cumbersome, hence a pervasive unhappiness creeps into the everyday life of the individual.

The association tainted with alienation, reason as prisoner of ‘civilised’ unreason, the shaky foundation of vague hope resting on hopelessness, disintegrates his personality. He finds himself surrounded by a fantasy island inundated with fake, fanciful things, novel but unrealisable ideas and fictionalised realities. It is a world dominated by the internet, cell phones, iPods and all other modern mediums of communication but complete lack of association. It is a universe of scarcity and of abundance, exploitation and affluence, alienation and coordination. It is a globe where opposites are reconciled in such a way that self-imposed exclusion from the community becomes inclusive for the individual who, while remaining isolated from himself and society, hunted by the rationale of technology is kept constantly engaged in senseless productivity. ‘Society’ becomes ‘everything that the individual is not’. Hence neither society nor the recluse in which he tends to find his refuge provides him any solace.

Amidst the crowd one remains lonely, alienated and unwanted — an individual without history. It is a world where everything moves but nothing changes. The echoes of regrets, failures and unfulfilled dreams follow him as a beast of prey, making him weary of his solitude. Sly eros loses its charm. The option of seeking respite in slumber becomes a necessity. Akin to Hemingway, he begins to love his sleep else life tends to fall apart. But this innocuous demand is already conquered by technological rationality where sleep inducing pills and modern gadgets rule the roost. “The dreadful,” as Heidegger says, “has already happened; the human is thrown into a freedom”, a freedom from which, as Sartre states, “he cannot choose to be free”. This is a world of stupefying labour, perfect alienation, of entertaining waste and not only of piled up means of destruction but the real, heart wrenching scenes of annihilation that do not provide sufficient time for a heart to recover from pain since one monumental chaos and ruin follow the other. Its no more a world of Herbert Marcuse where means of destruction and of perfect waste are produced peacefully but it is a world where they are being used with nonchalant, unrelenting impunity without a tinge of guilt.

In a struggle for self-preservation, a half-crazed human not only ends up losing his ego but the very essence he is striving to rescue from civilisation, the ‘self’ he seeks pride in. With the most outrageous violation of his self, the human tends to adjust to a repressive civilisation — rigged against the human and the climate — that is fast becoming incompatible both with his survival and nature, the mother of every living organism. In the name of productivity, dominant interests demand the individual’s submission, his adjustment to his nemesis, to the ultimate extinction of his specie through inequality and environmental destruction. To adjust he is to maim himself: “Something in the manner that beggars maim and mutilate their children to make them fit for their future situation in life” (Laing). With this catastrophic suffering all he manages to secure is his own preservation. For mere existence it is a price too heavy to pay.

The theme of self-preservation negates the self. Despite this debasement of humanity, the system based on exploitation and alienated labour is preserved, reproduced and embraced. Contrary to seeking the possibility of human freedom, every other alternative is ruled out as Utopia. Adjustment with the given conditions with slight cosmetic changes is propounded as the only possible means of existence. Life under this established reality has no essence beyond wasteful productivity. Failing to transcend the performance principle, life has become ‘aim inhibited’, devoid of eros. All life impulses — instinctual, intellectual and spiritual — are subjugated and compromised. It is mere survival, a primitive biological need, regression to the past without any reconciliation with the present. The history of humankind needs to be redeemed. Hence freedom implies the reconciliation of past with present, otherwise there will be no end to destructive transgression. In this regard the triumph of civilisation has not attained the reason that can lead the human to his freedom. The past is neither reconciled nor conquered. The reality based on scarcity and unfreedom being an outright domination of man by man continues to be irrational. Hence, “the wounds of the soul”, as Hegel states, are left to “heal” but not without leaving permanent scars.

The human being is yet to fathom the depth of degradation and self-abnegation in which he has been immersed. In some euphoric moments one may consider himself free but freedom in choosing waste or false needs is no freedom. The culture of consumerism — if at all it is worthy of being recognised as culture — brings a repressive satisfaction that augurs frustration, leading to fierce competition. Every repression despite sublimation sooner or later catapults into aggression, into the death wish. Spinoza has described this illusory freedom simulating a stone crashing down in free fall, which while continuing its motion is capable “of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact that men are conscious of their own desire but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.” The only query worth asking remains: is the majority of the human specie conscious of its desire or merely following the dictates that in the name of ‘freedom’ have been imposed upon it by the dominant interests?

The word ‘imposition’ has its own dimensions. Every oppressor utilises it for his/her own advantage. Society demands it to maintain a status quo, civilisation to avoid anarchy, a system to maintain inequality and the human being, in the weak moments of ‘false’ consciousness, introjects this teasing, tantalising troika into his mind to preserve and reproduce the apparatus that objectifies his alienated labour. The initial response to subjugation is acceptance associated with annoyance if not outright resistance. Later this servitude automatically becomes a part of the human psyche. The domination becomes unquestionable. In this demolishing of thought all bondage seems natural. Despite the realisation that advertisement is a hoax, mere propaganda meant to create false needs, conditioned and contained by its strength, the majority succumbs to the repetitive insistence and the power of beguiling ‘beauties’ who fancifully present a meaningless object as an absolute necessity. In this identification of false needs the human being ends up losing his own identity and becomes an automaton of technological rationality, a robot having real flesh and blood who in his servitude acts affirmatively to every command, finding no real will to react negatively when asked to conform, even against his own interests.

(To be continued)

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com