text transcription
I was talking to a friend, and he was complaining about his job. He had this whole thing about how he’s so divorced from the work that he does, so disconnected from anything tangible, estranged from the products that he felt only tangentially involved in making. He has a boring office job and dicks around a lot, I guess. And this feeling was something that he’d been carrying with him for a long time, and he felt like no one talks about it, and it was, to him, one of the chief ills of society, the way that we have no connection to the work that we do. And he wished so much that we had a word for it, that people would talk about it.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Marx called that alienation of labor.”
“What?” he asked.
“You can google that phrase, ‘alienation of labor’ and you’ll get a ton of people talking about it,” I said. “It’s been a talking point for like, almost two hundred years.”
“They’re Marxists though?” he asked.
“Most of them, yeah,” I said.
He looked off into the distance, thinking about that. I was waiting for him to ask some questions, or for him to talk more about what he was feeling. “Well,” he said. “I guess I’ll get over it.”
There is no such thing as brainwashing
There very much is, it’s a technique Koreans used on American GI’s wherein they cleansed the brains of their captives of all the programming America had installed in them, by exposing them to the truth of matters. It was so powerful, these GI’s would defect and fight on the side of Korea! Their brains were as close to literally being washed as one could possibly imagine
Agreed, but I think many go too far in rejecting the extreme idea of brainwashing so as to also ignore that there genuinely are structural seams - not defects - in how our conscious self is generated from our brain processes.
I think most of that is a pernicious shadow of dualism, thinking that the Mind isn’t a system of physical relations that necessarily interacts with its environment and that had adapted social functions needed to exist long before it attained a level of awareness of itself. We have instincts and mental reflexes we don’t recognise as nonconscious and that are autonomous of our intentionality. Even when they get called “animal instincts”, it assumes our True Human Self was still somehow superior to them and not itself a part of the whole that needs to speak for, and mediate with, the parts that cannot.
Those elements that don’t require conscious oversight can be exploited to influence the rest of the organism, not by technomagic brainwashing, but through scientific study of behaviour - and it’s easier to do that on a population that isn’t thinking about themselves as a material system.
…hm, rambled on there, not sure it remained useful, but I spent so long that I’m gonna hit that damn reply button and walk the dog.