I’M NEITHER A PSYCHOLOGIST nor a psychotherapist, but I do know that COVID 19 is increasing people’s alienation from themselves. While I’m not qualified the write about the myriad of issues that are inherent with alienation, Dr. Gabor Maté is. The following is a segment of his incredible speech on human nature – and the implications culture has on our ability to maintain it……
How Society Makes you feel Alienated
In the 19th Century, Karl Marx talked about alienation, which is a separation, of being a stranger to something, and you’re an alien to something, and Marx said there are four alienations in this culture, and we become:
Alienated from Nature
Well, at a Conference dedicated to looking at the natural and physical environment, I don’t have to say much to you to show you how alienated we are from nature; when we are destroying nature itself.
Alienated from Other People
That means we have less contact, we have less intimacy, we have less trust, we have less of a sense of relationship and that, of course – as I’ve shown you – leads to an increased propensity to illness; physical and mental.
Alienated from Work
A lot of people no longer do any work that has any meaning to them and that means that, in a sense, human beings are productive creatures; that we really are created in the image of God, we are meant to create. When we do work that is not creative, that doesn’t reflect who we are, that imposes depression, anxiety, a sense of meaningless; and when we have a sense of meaninglessness we will want to substitute that sense of meaninglessness or that sense of meaning that we have lost by all kinds of other activities and then we get all hung up on how we look, or how people feel about us, what we’re going to think, what we’re going to possess, what successes we are going to achieve. In other words, all the false substitutes which cannot possibly compensate us for the lack of genuine meaning. And, of course, what this society does is that it sells us a lot of products that substitute for that loss of meaning. In fact, much of the economy is based upon the loss of meaning in our culture.
Alienated from Ourselves
Let me ask you a question: How many of you had the following experience: you had a powerful gut feeling about something, but you didn’t pay attention to it and you were sorry afterwards? The answer is invariably ‘Yes’. If I asked you the adverse question: you had a powerful gut feeling and you ignored it, and you were glad afterwards, very few would answer ‘Yes’. Do you know what that is telling me? It tells me that at some point in your childhood you got separated from yourself because no infant is born without gut feelings. An infant is totally connected to their gut feelings – have you ever met a 2-day old who didn’t know how to express their gut feelings?! And that means that, in this culture, something very powerful happens to alienate you from your true self because the world couldn’t really stand who you really were, and your parents were too stressed themselves to honour and recognise who you really were, just as a parent I did that to my kids without meaning to. And then we become alien from ourselves, we shut down our gut feelings – and our gut feelings are not luxuries, you know – they tells us what is right and what is wrong, they tells us what is dangerous and what is friendly, they tells us what is safe and what is dangerous, and they tell us what is true and what is false. So, when we are alienated from our gut feelings, we no longer have a sense of reality, no longer have a sense of truth. Well, the good new is that human beings can regain their sense of connection to themselves, just as we can regain our sense of connection to our nature.
I will make just one final point about the economics of it. A Harvard study 3 years ago showed that the lack of medical insurance in the US leads to 45,000 deaths annually. This is not an ideological question about healthcare, and the most recent president (Bush): “There is no problem – everybody can show up in the emergency ward”. Sure, you can, once you have had a stroke because you didn’t get treated for your high blood pressure, which you got because you were so stressed. You can go to the emergency ward and get treated for your stroke, but the lack of healthcare that is available to people, which is very much a socio-economic question, in itself is a significant factor.
Well, the good news is that we can regain a connection to ourselves, and empathy – which is a genuine human quality – is within us. We are wired for empathy – even rats are wired for empathy. When you stress rats in the laboratory by shocking their feet with electricity, they are more stressed watching other rats being shocked than when they are shocked themselves.
Their stress hormone levels are higher. That is our nature as human beings so, contrary to the myth in our culture that we are a separated individual, aggressive, competitive creatures, we are actually wired for empathy, wired for connection, wired for love, wired for compassion. So, really, to move forward all we have to do – not an easy task but it is certainly available to us – is to get back to our true nature.
Last Word
A recent Spanish Survey taken during the COVID-19 pandemic stated that loneliness is associated with higher emotional distress, adding to the feeling of alienation. While I understand that to reduce the spread of COVID-19, ‘self-isolation’ is necessary, ‘alienation’ is not. To be part of human life is essential; lockdown is not how we humans are supposed to live.
