Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

THE CHOICE OF ALIENATION

Alienated: ostracized, outcast, irrelevant, indifferent, without value to the group, independent, alone.

Why have we evolved this feeling?

Because it is an instinctual warning that our status is low. Not only are we not desirable mating material. But we do not provide the other members of the group with value. They see no promise that we will provide value. And we see no promise of providing value. So our wishes can be comfortably discounted in any group decision. We need not consume group effort and resources. And we can be left behind in duress (die or be fired). We evolved that feeling so that we would be desperately incentivized to find a way to provide value. In history it was a death sentence. Today it is a subject of cognitive therapy.

What causes this feeling in history?

The organization of humans engaged production has been declining from the tribe (Hunter gatherer), to extended family (agrarian settlement), to nuclear family (prohibition on inbreeding), to the Isolated family(industrialism) to the individual (information age and feminism), as the division of labor and knowledge increases due the increase of people in the work-force.

We evolved to use visible signals, emotional expressions, and personal knowledge of one another, living in bands and tribes, and we now communicate by pricing signals and a hierarchy of manners, ethics and morals, whose only visible feedback is negative, and our only success metric consumption and survival. We are not administered by the knowledge of others, but by antique religious norms, contemporary-religious norms (Postmodernism), an inconceivable network of laws, and a system of credit information which cares nothing about the vicissitudes of our lives. We live in physically isolated spaces, free from the compromise with others, free to imaging our own status within our family, tribe and nation, as whatever we dream it to be. We choose to live alone. We choose our spatial freedom. We choose our freedom to consume. To spend our efforts on the self, without compromise to the family, extended family, clan, tribe and nation. We choose it on purpose. Willingly. And almost universally, all people, who have the opportunity to choose spatial freedom, person consumption, and freedom from compromise do so whenever possible. We are confronted not with inequality, but with the pervasive evidence that we are all equal in our near-irrelevance to one another outside of the mother-child bond. The further west we move the less tangible is the tradition of kinship, so even genes do not guarantee us membership.

But given the choice we almost always choose consumption. Because we are too selfish to forgo the opportunity for stimulation, experience, consumption and status to compromise with others and reduce both the opportunity to gain stimulation, as well as the chance that the illusion of our status, be erased by constant interaction with others who would dispel it.

Alienation is the price we pay for selfishness. And we pay it willingly.

We complain about the prevalence of a McDonalds hamburger, which has more calories than most people could consume in a week, and more chemicals that they could absorb in a lifetime. We complain about the cost of everything, even though our purchasing power is unrivaled.

We criticize the cost of living near good schools. We envy those with clothes, goods, cars and homes as conspicuous consumers when the only difference between their goods and ours is the status signal that accompanies it, and the conflict this causes between the illusion of our mating status and our observable reality.

Status in american life requires little more than a college education, a two income family, that provides someone else what they want, so that we can get what we want. But most other people want something the provision of which is mundane, uninteresting, boring, repetitious – because that is what makes something inexpensive.

We complain about military spending, while it is paid for almost entirely by exporting debt, so the dollars can be used in the market for petroleum, and then we inflate the debt away, conveniently taxing the developed world for our military, while providing us extraordinary trading rights, and the stabilization of prices of commodities, without which americans would lose between a quarter and a third of their standard of living.

Will women choose to restore the nuclear family and abandon the workplace? Will people forgo selling their labor at ‘jobs’ and return to direct participation in production and commerce, and the risk that comes with doing so? Will they abandon commerce altogether and resort to sustenance farming? It does not appear so.

Will the american society become as redistributionist as the smaller nations try to? No. We are no longer kin, or near kin. and People sacrifice only for kin. Kinship can be determined by values and culture alone, not genetic relation. But we are not homogenous enough. WHy? Because human moral codes are determined by family structures, family structures by the allocation of property, and the level of technology involved in production. People will not fund alternative moral codes. Redistribution is for the small and homogenous, where homogenous means homogenous family structure, and homogenous morality, homogenous values, and marginally homogenous kinship. Trust is necessary to avoid the economic friction of corruption and a diversity of manners, ethics, morals, values and family structure leads to a competition for status signals, a competition for power, divisiveness, and a decline in trust necessary for the prevention of corruption and the low friction of trade.

We still worship Marx’s moral vision, which all of us would embrace if it was possible, even though we know that without prices and incentives to inform us what to do, we would be at the merciless subjection of those who would command us into equality. But where our only possible equality is in poverty.

Everyone wants the same thing: the illusion that is Denmark. The problem is, all the adults can’t figure out any other way to get there. The only way we know of is ‘small’.

Equality of care for one another amidst the inequality of value to one another is only achievable with kin.

And that’s where we got the feeling from.