- Alienation is towards an object, and it’s not something that you ever got to attach to because it wouldn’t exist without you. So in alienation, something starts as a part of you, and then it gets cut off or separated in some way.
- The classic example of economic alienation is a worker who puts a lot of time and effort and love and care into making an object, but when he’s done, the object belongs to the company, and the company goes to sell it, not the worker. It’s forever separated from the worker. And then the worker might be walking down the street and see the product of his labor in a shop window with the glass separating them. That’s the feeling of alienation. So the thing wouldn’t exist without you, but now it’s in no way “of” you.
- In contrast, Detachment is towards the Big Other. It’s not towards an object, it’s towards something that’s bigger than you and precedes you and doesn’t exist due to you. Detachment exists as a precondition of your existence - the baby has to detach from the mother to start existing - so the chronological direction is always from detachment toward increasing attachment, while for alienation it’s the opposite. For something to be alienated, it has to start intrinsically as part of you and gradually grow apart.
- In capitalism (Society), it corresponds to the Sacral stage. So we are like the teenagers, becoming independent, becoming alienated from the Big Other. So the Big Other experiences alienation towards us, while we start to also become creative forces, so we also start to experience alienation towards our own creations.
- But we’re not becoming separated from that feeling of Agape, from universal love.
- In premodern times, we lacked a universal mindset - we lacked access to a universal perspective. So our love was like that of a child - it aspired to that universal love in imitation of the parents and of God, but it only manifested as a localized love, like a child’s familiar love. Now, in the modern age, we seem more individualized, but our alienation has given rise to a global spirit. So in a way, we are closer to that universal love than ever before.
- The teenager experiences universal love in a negative sense - by becoming, for the first time, aware of its universal absence. Compare, for example, the love of a child for his parents, which has a very particular character. The child is imbued with the specific memories and experiences of his specific life and upbringing. Compare that to a teenager’s romantic crush. The romantic crush, that feeling of “falling” in love, in that moment of falling, opens a universal dimension. The moment of falling is the moment where there is no love story to tell, so in that sense, it’s universal. Each human experiences the fall.
- So the teenager is only halfway there, towards the universal love of agape, but it’s closer than we’ve ever been. C.f. the parable of the prodigal son - the son who doesn’t understand love because he never left, vs. the son who left and discovered in so doing what love really means, by noting its absence, its alienation from him.
- But for instance you can think of the outpouring of love and aid people are sending to Turkey in the wake of the earthquake, even traditional rivals like Greece and Armenia are sending vast amounts of money and resources, and people are risking their lives to help those who may have hated them a month ago. That kind of thing didn’t happen in earlier structures.
- In the Middle Ages, the most pious, God-fearing people might abstain from taking advantage of the situation, and even most people who were reasonably pious (Christian, Muslim, whatever) might take advantage of the situation to declare war, for instance.
- Now, for the first time, we know about all the suffering in the world, and we care about all the suffering in the world.
- In a way, it’s the absence of detachment, because we know about the whole world. We know that nobody’s exempt from suffering, nobody’s set apart from us.
- We’ve produced this world, we’ve seen what it’s wrought, and we love it, but it’s out of our hands, out of our control.