The term “alienation”, like the term “equality”, invites completion.
Not really. Alienation suggests a sullen resentment and suspicion that other people think you are stupid and smell bad.
Just as we are naturally led to ask, “Equality of …?”, we are similarly led to ask, “Alienation from…?”
Nonsense! Only a shithead like Sen would ask 'Equality of what?'
And to this last question there have been many answers. The most common, perhaps, is the alienation of human beings from one another, or, what we might call, social alienation.
coz everybody thinks you are stupid and smell bad
Marx, though he was greatly concerned with this theme, saw it as related to other answers to our question, such as alienation from one’s work and alienation from the product of one’s work.
Marx was a deeply silly man who thought that the product of our work turns against us. Indeed, it becomes a vampire and sucks our blood.
Philosophers and psychologists have also had very interesting things to say about one’s alienation from oneself
No. They have nothing interesting to say. Moreover, they are stupid and smell bad.
and, more recently, with the growing alarm over an environmental crisis of existential proportions, a wide range of thinkers have come to write about our alienation from nature.
If you fuck a tree, you are normally somewhat miffed if it unfriends you on Facebook.
In what follows, I will, however, restrict my focus to our alienation from each other, that is to say, an alienated society or culture.
Why is it we buy and sell things rather than just give and take them in between hugging and kissing each other? Did Mummy charge you money for cookies? Why doesn't the waitress at the restaurant give you smoochy kisses instead of a bill for all the food you ordered?
One more quick preliminary remark. I have mentioned equality, a political ideal. Alienation, of course, is not an ideal, it is a malaise – in the focus I’ve adopted, a social malaise – and so it is the overcoming of alienation that we seek as an ideal.
We must get rid of scarcity. That way the plumber will come and unclog our toilet for free.
Marx himself saw it as the most fundamental of our ideals. Though he often spoke of a classless society as the fundamental goal of politics, he would have considered the achievement of such a goal as mere social engineering if it was not in the service of a more eventual ideal, that of an unalienated life and society.
One where people would enjoy unclogging toilets and do it for free.
But Marx’s discussion of the subject was moored in issues that arose in increasingly advanced industrial societies with the very specific economic formation of capitalism; and those issues, for him, concerned the social life of a particular class, wage labour, in such an economic formation. My interest in alienation in this brief essay will be at a level of abstraction from that mooring in Marx and is, perhaps, best described as an interest in the mentality, the way of thinking, that seems to reflect our alienation.
It is a magical way of thinking- one where people think it delightful to unclog other people's toilets just for the fun of it.
What I will equally seek, then, is to uncover something about the contrasting underlying mentality that exemplifies the ideal of an unalienated life.
It is one where everybody would praise me for my twerking and Beyonce would come to my birthday party and then the neighbour's cat will turn into a flying unicorn and take me on a magical trip to Candyland.
Most thinkers who have written on alienation – Rousseau, Marx, Sartre, to name just three – seem to agree that it is a malaise of the modern period.
Because folks during the Black Death were having a merry old time.
Pre-modern societies had many horrible defects but alienation does not seem to have been one of them. Serfs and slaves in times past suffered excruciating forms of bondage and deprivation (and indeed liberty and equality as ideals became central in modernity partly to address such suffering), but they did not seem to have suffered from an absence of a sense of belonging that we often think of as the defining feature of the alienated life.
This is because the person they belonged to kept whipping them.
Of course, if we seek to retrieve the ideal of an unalienated life for our own time, it would not be a recovery of exactly that sense of belonging of pre-modernity with its other oppressive accompanying defects.
Though Stalin and Mao and Xi were big fans of slave labour.
It must in some way nest with the ideals of liberty and equality.
Of the sort that obtains in North Korea.
Due to space constraints,
Bilgrami has rented out most of his brain to pixies
I will not be able to take up the question of such a theoretically complex nesting; rather, as I said, I will be able to do no more than try to present a rudimentary sense of what the mentality of an unalienated life consists in.
It is the mentality of a goat not currently being sodomized.
There are several ways into the uncovering of this mentality, but let me set up a dialectic within which I will try to explore it, one that plucks out some features of Marx’s own preoccupations with capitalism but without the detail of his analysis.
Because pixies are using most of my brain for an orgy.
It is frequently said
by cretins
that the conceptual genealogy of capitalism
which actually lay in the laws relating to capital markets
lay in the extended argument in the chapter on private property to be found in John Locke’s Second Treatise.
Which actual capitalists didn't bother to read.
A loosely reconstructed account of that argument might go like this: Imagine, in a conjectural past, an originary condition in some part of the world and call it a “state of nature”. It is inhabited by commoners who in a variety of forms of life ranging from foraging to casual cultivation sustain themselves on an expanse of land, the commons. These inhabitants then convene and agree by mutual consent among themselves on a certain set of arrangements and principles to live by, thereby immediately transforming the state of nature into a polity and transforming themselves, hitherto merely people, into citizens.
Why imagine any such thing? There were in fact, at that time, areas being colonized by settlers from Western Europe where something of the sort was happening.
This “social contract” is rational, it is said, if 1) no inhabitant is made worse off by these arrangements and many are indeed better off – that is, if there is a Pareto improvement over the state of nature,
Nonsense! The Social Contract may come into existence for the specific purpose of putting down piracy or banditry. Some inhabitants are made worse off by being beaten to death but they can't do shit about it.
and 2) the arrangements and principles to live by are freely consented to by all inhabitants.
Fuck off! It is sufficient if there is a 'decisive coalition' which backs the contract. Bilgrami is as stupid as shit. Locke was saying only those who consent to equal protection of the rights of others are citizens. The rest may be outlaws who are mercilessly hunted down.
A standard construction by which this gets exemplified is this: some among the inhabitants freely decide that if any one of them comes upon a portion of the expanse and fences it, and registers the enclosed land with a primitive form of bureau set up for this purpose, they may declare it to be “mine”.
by 'mingling their labour with it'. They don't need to register it or put up a fence.
Others in the group are left out of this process, but they are included in another role. The new possessors of enclosed parts of the land offer them work on their land for wages, something to which these non-possessors of land freely consent; and so, it is claimed, everyone (both the possessors and the non-possessors of property) is better off than they were in the state of nature.
This is the case even if there are no property rights in land.
This ideal of the social contract rationalized, i.e., literally rendered “rational”, was a process that had been occurring by brute force in the enclosures movement in England and other parts of Europe for some time before Locke.
Enclosures occurred by acts of Parliament not brute force. No doubt, there was brute force occupation as well. Essentially, if you held property by the force of your strong right arm, the law might recognize this so as to assess you for tax purposes.
The enclosures could now be presented as a sort of political and moral achievement.
They were represented in that way at the time of enactment. Bilgrami is ignorant of English history.
Let us now introduce into this dialectic
verbal diarrhoea is not dialectic
a counter-argument against this Lockean social contract and put it (anachronistically) in the mouths of some of the radical dissenters in that period, groups such as the Diggers and radical Levellers. (I say “anachronistically” because these dissenters pre-dated Locke and also because I will be using a vocabulary in the formulation of the counter-argument that is ours not theirs.). So let us ventriloquize onto Gerrard Winstanley’s (a leading dissenter against the enclosures) lips the following counter-argument appealing to the notion of what economists call an “opportunity cost” (an opportunity cost is an avoided benefit when we make a certain decision). He says to Locke: “You are right, the privatization of the land and the recruitment of wage labour to work on the land does make everyone better off than they were in the state of nature, but it does not make them better off than they would have been if the land was not privatized in the first place and there was a collective cultivation of the commons instead”.
Winstanley owned property. He understood the 'tragedy of the commons'. If anyone can help himself to land or its produce, there is no incentive to develop or protect it. You can't enclose 'common land' if the commoners kick your ass. But they don't have an incentive to do so. There is a free rider problem.
The matter cannot be said to rest here because a subsequent well-known move in the conceptual genealogy of the privatized ideal questions, on behalf of Locke, is a central assumption made by this counter-argument from opportunity cost. This is the assumption that there is a cogent ideal of the collective cultivation of the commons. It has been argued that the assumption is not cogent at all. Here, in the broadest of strokes, is how that familiar argument goes, appealing to the game-theoretic framework of a multi-person prisoners’ dilemma. The intractable problem is supposed to be that given human psychology, individual commoners are rationally required to behave in ways that undermine the collective; they are required to not cooperate in the ways necessary to sustain the collective. The cooperation necessary for the collective ideal requires each commoner to pay a certain cost (sometimes – in fact oftentimes – this cost takes the form of restraint, since often over-use or over-cultivation is the problem). If each individual commoner pays the cost, of course everyone gains. But each individual commoner will have to consider that if he does not cooperate (i.e. does not pay the cost), the gains are immediate whereas the gains from cooperation are long-term; moreover, the gains from non-cooperation are all for himself whereas the gains from paying the cost are spread over the whole group. Above all – and this is really the crucial and clinching consideration – he is never sure that if he pays the cost others will do so too. Since one is in the epistemic dark about whether others are contributing the bit demanded of them in the collective cultivation, one constantly fears that one’s contribution will be wasted if others don’t do their bit. (I stress this epistemic anxiety more than other considerations that drive the so-called “dominance argument” because it is what I want to fasten on to bring out what I have to say about the mentality of alienation.)
Just say 'free-rider' problem and be done with it. This is also why substituting hugs and kisses for money payment won't work for a big enough society.
On such an understanding of the collective ideal, some individual commoner who decides not to cooperate is always at an advantage since the gains of non-cooperation will be immediate, all for himself, and completely assured whereas the gains from cooperating are long-term, dispersed over the whole group, and, above all, always uncertain. Non-cooperation for him, as an individual, would thus be rational. But the common cannot survive if each individual does this individually rational thing. It is doomed. Thus, the tragedy. So, privatization is a better bet.
No. Privatization will occur where commoners, for whatever reason, don't kill the privatizers. This may be because they lose their taste for human flesh. Cannibals can be very effective in keeping bourgeois capitalists at bay.
It is just here in the dialectic that I have set up around the conceptual genealogy of capital, that the mentality of alienation impresses with its relevance. I want to claim that the driving question in this argument that the rational commoner is supposed to ask – What if I paid the cost of cooperation and others did not? – is only a question that would occur to one if one were alienated.
Very true. If you weren't alienated you would agree to suck the cock of everybody at the party in return for similar services in the near future. It is crazy to suggest that after you've swallowed everybody's jizz people will laugh at you and call you a cock-sucker. They will hold you in high esteem and guzzle your cum like nobody's business.
The question is a deep and yet pervasive symptom of an alienated society.
i.e. one where people don't suck your cock because they suspect you will laugh at them and refuse to reciprocate.
So, the ideal of an unalienated life exemplifies a quite different mentality. When one is unalienated, this question does not occur to someone. I say “does not occur” and mean it. The unalienated ideal is not the same as the ideal of fraternity or solidarity with others, and an appeal to unalienatedness as an ideal is not a moralist’s critique of self-interest. It is a rather more abstract claim, an epistemological or cognitive point. The question that drives the argument for the tragedy of the commons simply does not compute when the unalienated ideal is working.
Moreover, where the unalienated ideal is working, you will bend down and spread your ass cheeks secure in the knowledge that you won't be sodomized because the notorious sodomist who requested you to do so assured you he had no such perverse intention.
To explain why this is so, permit me the indulgence of a personal anecdote. It concerns an experience with my father. He would sometimes ask that I go for walks with him in the early morning on the beach near our home in Bombay. One day, while walking, we came across a wallet with some rupees sticking out of it. My father stopped me and said somewhat dramatically, “Akeel, why shouldn’t we take this?” And I said sheepishly, though honestly, “I think we should take it.” He looked irritated and said, “Why do you think we should take it?” And I replied, what is surely a classic response, “because if we don’t take it, somebody else will”. I expected a denunciation, but his irritation passed and he said, “If we don’t take it, nobody else will”. I thought then that this remark had no logic to it at all. Only decades later when I was thinking of questions of alienation did I realize that his remark reflected an unalienated framework of thinking.
No. It reflected extraordinary perversity of mind. Bilgrami's father was a High Court Judge. He knew it was a punishable offense not to hand in the wallet at the nearest police station. Oddly, in Bombay at that time, there were plenty of people who actually did behave in that way. My father had come to Bombay to sit the UPSC exam. He lost his wallet and went to the police station. A Sindhi man had handed it in. Not a single Rupee was missing from it. Dad was a journalist and thought there might be a human interest story here. He tracked down the Sindhi (he had given his address because if no one claimed the wallet, it would become his property) and discovered he came from a Refugee family. They had come to Bombay with nothing and 'slept on the footpath'. Within seven years they had started a business and now enjoyed modest affluence. I believe they are related to a Billionaire family currently in the news.
When we predict what others will do, we relate to them from a disengaged perspective.
I predict that Sindhis will obey the law. They prefer to rise by their own efforts rather than to steal money. This also means I am more inclined to do business with them. Long term, Sindhis gain by moral rectitude as the thing soon becomes 'common knowledge'.
That is the perspective that pervades alienated social relations.
High Court Judges have alienated social perspectives.
The “nobody else will” in my father’s response cannot be expressive of unalienatedness if it is interpreted as a prediction of what others will do.
It was foolish. If you lose your wallet you go to the police station because that is where lost property is handed in. I wonder why the Judge didn't tell his son that he could go to jail for two years if he kept the wallet. Perhaps, he was seeking to teach him a fundamental principle of Islamic ethics. It is up to a people to raise themselves by ethical behaviour. God will only help those who are ready and willing to raise themselves up. However, Bilgrami's father overestimated his son's intelligence. He should have said 'according to Section 403 of the Penal Code, we could be sentenced to two years in jail for not handing in the wallet. But, if we behaved ethically, there would be no need for Police officers and Judges to get involved. If everybody understands that honesty is the best policy both individually and collectively, then there is a non-coercive, non-judicial, 'correlated equilibrium' of a superior type.'
When we predict what others will do, we relate to them from a disengaged perspective.
We either attribute 'Muth Rational' expectations to them- i.e. consider that they will hit upon the correct solution to the Social coordination problem- or else we use a sub-optimal rule- e.g. adaptive expectations which give rise to discoordination games or collectively sub-optimal Nash equilibria.
That is the perspective that pervades alienated social relations. In fact, it is only when we view others from this perspective that we are prompted to ask the question that drives the tragedy of the commons: “What if I paid the cost of cooperation and others didn’t?”
You may gain a reputational benefit and gain through arbitrage between coordination and discoordination games. For example, the Sindhi who handed in the wallet had probably already benefited by showing good character and thus attracting investment funds.
From a detached perspective, what my father said might seem like naïve optimism about what others will do. But the assumption that others will not take the wallet if we don’t,
that was not the lesson Bilgrami's father was trying to teach. Everybody should hand in lost property at the 'Shelling focal' place to which the one who lost the property is most likely to go to report the matter.
or that others will cooperate if we do, is not made from that detached point of view. It is an assumption of a quite different sort, more in the spirit of “let’s see ourselves this way”, an assumption that is unselfconsciously expressive of our unalienatedness, of our being engaged with others and the world, rather than assessing, in a detached mode, the prospects of how they will behave.
Sindhis in Bombay at that time wanted to be well thought off. It helped them re-establish themselves in business and in society. But, the act in itself was worthwhile. The Sindhi gentleman could reflect he had done a good deed.
My father was suggesting, in other words, that my ground for giving my response to his initial question is a reflection of just the kind of falling short of the ideal of unalienatedness
the boy fell short of the ideal of licit behaviour expected from the son of a judge. He did not have 'Rational Expectations'. Suppose others were as selfish and short-sighted as this boy. Then they might deliberately leave wallets for them to find and others get them arrested and charged with 'theft by finding'. To escape a two year jail sentence, the boy's family would have to cough up plenty of dough for the charges to be dropped. Assume everybody is a rogue, just like you, and- if you are smart- you will see that it is prudent to abide by the letter of the law.
Bilgrami, being stupid, has confused irrationality with 'alienation'.
as I am claiming is reflected in the question that is supposed to occur to the rational commoner
that rationality must be 'Muth rationality'- i.e. consistent with the prediction of the correct economic theory
in a certain conception of social and political rationality that drives the considerations that lead to the tragedy of the commons.
A Judge would expect his son to reply 'it is lost property. We must hand it in at the nearest police station. That is what the law requires. Indeed, even if we were dishonest by nature, still, it is irrational to risk two years jail servitude just to hold on to a few Rupees. '
Bilgrami's father might then have quoted the judgment in the Ramakkal case (1937) which sets a high standard of care on the finder of money. Father and son might then discuss what possible defenses in law were available to the defendant.
The striking thing about this is that when the ideal of unalienatedness, so understood, is working, it does not seem to even be an ideal. It is only when we fall away from it, as in my declared ground for taking the wallet or the commoner’s driving anxiety about whether others will cooperate or not, that unalienatedness appears as an ideal, something my father needed to say.
Suppose Bilgrami's father had been sacked on the grounds of his religion. The family property had been transferred to a Hindu refugee family. The boy and his father are sitting on the beach waiting for a boat to take them to Karachi. They are wholly alienated from an Indian society which has turned against people of their religion. In that case, the boy would be right in saying 'we must keep this money rather than return it in. The Hindus have already deprived us of all that we rightfully owned. We owe them nothing except perhaps revenge.'
Since this was not the case, Bilgrami and his son were not alienated from Indian society. Rationality required them to act in conformity with the law- more particularly because of the draconian punishment the IPC prescribes for 'theft by finding'. This is also the 'Muth Rational' solution or the one predicted by the folk theorem of repeated games- i.e one absent any coercive or judicial mechanism.
In this sense it is quite unlike even some of our most central ideals such as liberty and equality that find their constant and explicit articulations in codes and constitutions and “policies”.
Bilgrami's dad should have explained the law to his son. He may, it is true, have stipulated that an 'alienated' person- e.g. a person insulted and abused by Society- might not be bound by the same categorical imperative. Perhaps, the law should be less severe in such cases. Religion, certainly, prescribes forgiveness rather than a rigid insistence on one's ounce of flesh.
I suppose, the Judge was so shocked by his son's stupidity and greed and forgot to mention that if tried as an adult, his son could have been sentenced to two years penal servitude if he kept the money. What is alarming is that Bilgrami still thinks that you should leave a wallet where you found it instead of handing it in at a police station.
These much too brief remarks have only been about the nature of an ideal. They have only been concerned to identify a rarefied malaise, a mentality or form of thinking, that the ideal of an unalienated life confronts with a quite different mentality.
A decent human being hands in lost property at the police station which is where people go to report such a loss. Otherwise the offence of 'theft by finding' is committed.
What sorts of social and institutional conditions foster such an ideal and such an alternative mentality must remain a large topic for another occasion.
Islam gives you the right mentality. Hand in lost property. Don't steal it. You will suffer Hell fire if you do. Hinduism and Christianity etc say the same thing. But Bilgrami is mad. He should see an Alienist.
But, as I close, I will say this. The ideal, as I have presented it, does not always come into view as necessary because it is often felt that the spectre of the tragedy of the commons is exaggerated, that the commons is not doomed to tragedy since it can be “governed” by regulation, by policing and punishing non-cooperation.
i.e. stuff Bilgrami's daddy was doing. Sadly, Bilgrami got hold of the wrong end of the stick. There is a 'positive externality' from following the law. This may be 'bourgeois', it may be un-cool, but it is what communities and countries do to rise up. Marx may not have approved but he was as crazy as a shithouse rat.
Who can be against such regulation? It is obviously a good thing. What is less obvious is whether regulation itself escapes the kind of thinking that goes into generating the tragedy of the commons in the first place.
The tragedy of the commons is caused by short-sighted, unthinking behaviour. Regulations may be stupid or neglect to take account of perverse consequences but that is not what Bilgrami is getting at.
It just occurs one step up. Even if we ignore the well-known difficulties of detecting many non-obvious forms of non-cooperation, the question arises why someone should cooperate with policing and detection and punishment if he can get away with not cooperating – by offering bribes, for instance, or making mafia-style threats against those who detect and police or those who cooperate with the policing and detecting (witnesses, for example)?
Make such behaviour a yet more serious criminal offense.
And for societies which pride themselves in having overcome a culture of bribes and threats, non-cooperation can and is pursued by loopholing the laws and regulations to make non-cooperation legal after all.
Plug loopholes by all means.
So, although we should obviously support regulation, it may thus be worth probing whether there is something more deeply problematic in the appeal to the tragedy of the commons – something in the mentality that underlies it and that can’t be rectified by solutions like “regulation”, something that needs to be confronted with an alternative mentality.
If people currently being raped and robbed stopped seeing rape and robbery as hostile or unwelcome acts, crime would fall greatly. Instead of having to arrest and incarcerate murderers, we could spend money on importing robbers and rapists from other countries.
As Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems within the thinking that we used when we created them”.
Which is why problems in mathematics are best solved by pussy cats.
It is this deeper goal which the ideal of the unalienated life addresses.
In between getting robbed and raped or trying to get the pussy cat to prove the Reimann hypothesis. Sadly, Bilgrami's daddy was too alienated to decide legal cases in this manner. Still, at least he didn't teach his son about Section 403 of the Penal Code thus launching him on a career as a moral philosopher who doesn't understand that you have a duty to hand in lost property at the nearest police station.
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