Alienation required?

Alien. ALIENATION – a broad term which has gained several different meanings in different contexts. Over the years, the term alienation has been utilized to describe various situations from our existence. The term has gained its place in the writings of several well-known philosophers, of which most famous Karl Marx, who spoke of workers being alienated from their work and the products under capitalism. In modern law, alienation came to signify the transfer of ownership of property rights. However, ALIENATION is mostly associated with a demoralized state of the soul due to isolation, or difficulties in relating to the society. It is widely recognized as the state of estrangement or separation from one’s environment, or self. Consequently, it has gained its negative connotation instilled in the head of every high school student familiar with the plethora of literary works that contain some form of social or self- alienation as an underlying theme.

However, the other side of the coin reveals an important aspect of alienation that has been overlooked. It is the impartiality that comes with estrangement. Devoid of emotion and bias, to which no human is resilient, one could cool-headedly pass the right judgment and eliminate the tendency to be swayed and driven astray by one’s mood, circumstances, or relationships with others. An emotional distance is required to reflect on a situation in an objective way. Detachment often gives a clearer view on a situation and thus, better understanding.

In many ways this is similar to being an audience of a play: one critically observes the situation, yet, tries not to identify with the actors and to pass right judgment on their actions. However, even when a part of an audience, humans tend to bond emotionally to some characters; thus, even in the theatre, the need for estrangement has been recognized by some of the playwrights. The 20th century German playwright Bertolt Brecht used the term ‘Verfremdungseffekt’, with is often translated as the ‘alienation’ or the ‘distancing effect’ in English to explain this need for isolation. He believed that some devices must be instituted in the play that would, as he says, "prevent the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer." Hence, various techniques, such as addressing the audience, have been employed to disrupt the stage illusion and allow the audience to be an “analytical spectator” of the play.

Many of the everyday conflicts require from us the role of an analytical spectator that Brecht wished for the audience of his plays. The objective assessment of situations has a key importance in our lives. Yet, distancing is much more difficult in the real life, because the human tendency of emotional attachment is added to the equation. And with the addition of human nature, the equation rarely results in impartiality, which is needed not only in everyday activities, but more importantly, as an important aspect of some professions.

Health care professionals, for example, are widely considered as the ‘caregivers’, the ones that need to deeply and genuinely care for their patients. I disagree with this assumption, as these professionals need only be benevolent and act in a caring manner, but not to get emotionally attached to their patients. In this case, care becomes the vice of health care professionals as it impedes their reasoning and decision-making skills at work. A distance between the patients and the health care professionals need to be kept for objectivity in health care is of essential importance.

Another important field, in which this ‘self imposed distancing’ and ‘alienation’ would prove to be of great use, is our own journalistic one. In the time, when information is reaching the homes of thousands peoples in less than a minute, the threat of mass disinformation and manipulation is immense. A responsible journalist would not let his/her feeling interfere with the way in which he/she reports a story; on the contrary, an individual like that, aware of the responsibilities that his/her job brings, should be able to build the required distance from the subject and be able to approach it objectively. Same applies to judges and other arbiters.

But perhaps the most important type of required alienation is the time of self-estrangement that one should experience in order to assess one’s own actions clearly. It the fast – paced world we live in, most of us rarely have time to be contemplative about their lives. It is highly important to be able to critically evaluate not only situations and other people’s actions, but also one self’s – something that only few are able to do.

The same distancing from the topic of study and its accepted definition that I strive to promote is what led me to write this article in the ‘Alien Issue’ of our newspaper. Despite the negative connotations that ALIENATION has acquired, I sought to present you our desperate need for estrangement in some social situations: a need that should be recognized as an inevitable aspect of human life.