Half of Our Alienation Is Biology, the Other Half Is Policy

The complaints have been on the table for two centuries. People are dissatisfied with what they have. They measure themselves and each other by wealth. They are bored by their own work, or they cannot stop doing it. Marx called the bundle alienation, and the word has stuck because nobody has found a better one.

What has not stuck is any agreement about where it comes from. I want to split the phenomenon in two, because I think one half has been used to excuse the other.

The Half That Is Ours

Some of the dissatisfaction is simply what a human being is.

Consider what selection would do with a creature that was reliably content. It would sit down. The neighbour who wanted a little more would take the better cave, the larger share, the second mate, and the content creature's line would end there. A permanently satisfied animal cannot keep up with a dissatisfied one, so the animals that are still here are the dissatisfied ones.

That is not a moral failing and it is not a product of any economic system. It was in place long before markets, and no reorganisation of society will remove it. Anyone who promises a society of contented people is promising to change the species, and should say so.

I want this half stated clearly, because it is real, and because the honest version of the argument that follows has to concede it.

The Half That Is Policy

Now take the rest: the intensity of the dissatisfaction, the direction it takes, and the fact that it never seems to be relieved by getting what was wanted.

Here the economic and political system is not a bystander. The system lays down its own cultural ground, and it has interests in what that ground looks like.

It has an interest in a working population that is never satisfied, because satisfied people consume less. It has an interest in a population that consumes a great deal, because consumption is what the system measures itself by. It has an interest in a population that is less politically involved, because involvement produces demands, and it has an interest in that population being less connected as a group, because connected people organise.

And it has an interest in a distribution of income as unequal as it can get away with, since the people who set the distribution are at the top of it. That inequality then feeds back into the dissatisfaction: a person who would have been content with their lot is not content once they can see, daily, how much more the lot above them holds.

None of this needs a conspiracy. Each interest is pursued by whoever holds it, and the culture that results is the sum. I have written elsewhere about how outcomes like this emerge from organisations pursuing interests, without anyone intending the whole.

Why the Split Matters

Because the first half is used to wave away the second.

Point at workaholism, at the treadmill of consumption, at the way a raise stops mattering within a month, and someone will tell you that this is human nature, that people have always wanted more, that Marx was a romantic. All of that is true of the first half. It says nothing about the second.

The biological floor of dissatisfaction is fixed. Everything built on top of that floor was built by someone, and could be built differently. A system that dampened envy rather than manufacturing it, that measured success by something other than purchase, that let people organise rather than working to keep them apart, would still contain dissatisfied humans. It would contain fewer of them, less intensely, pointed at fewer things.

That is the honest promise. Not contentment, which is not on offer, but a society that stops amplifying a signal it currently has every incentive to amplify.

Where This Belongs

I file this under the problems of the economy rather than under psychology, because the psychological half is not a problem in the political sense. It is a boundary condition. Nothing can be done about it and nothing should be.

The other half is a political fact: a set of interests that shape a culture, held by a minority that benefits from the shape. That is exactly the kind of thing a system of government exists to address, and exactly the kind of thing ours does not, because the minority holding the interests is also the minority closest to the decisions.