Alienation

Alienation

The OED defines “alienate” as “cause to feel isolated”; “alienation” is then “the state or experience of being alienated”. I have lived in the United States for 35 years and I am now officially alienated: I feel isolated, cut off, removed. It wasn’t always so—I used to feel integrated, joined. This is really the first time in my life I have ever experienced alienation; and it is multi-pronged, comprehensively so. I am hyper-alienated. How so? The obvious proximate cause is the political climate in this country, upon which I need not dilate, except to say that the level of stupidity has reached fever pitch. Many people feel this way at this moment, immigrants and non-immigrants alike. But I have a secondary (in fact primary) source of alienation: I am alienated from my profession, my history, my old friends, my erstwhile colleagues, university life, my previous life-style. Not completely alienated, to be sure, but the old framework has gone. I am no longer a part of the academic community in the country in which I live. So, I am doubly alienated. It is a strange feeling. It isn’t loneliness; it isn’t dislike, distrust, and disgust (though it includes those); it’s more a feeling of apartness, dislocation, dissonance. I look at the world differently; I see other people as alien (“unfamiliar and distasteful”: OED). I used to like talking to philosophers, but now I want to keep my distance, as if they have a disease (not all of them but the vast majority). I rarely interact with this particular demographic anyway, but I rather dread having to—I’m afraid of what I might say (would say). I tend to see people as a vast sea of atrocious aliens from whom I am violently estranged (this includes people I used to be good friends with). The alienation is comprehensive and deep. It isn’t a good feeling I can tell you. This means that I divide other people into two sharply distinct groups: the small group of people I am not alienated from and the much larger group that I am alienated from. All this is mitigated, however, by a highly contingent fact—I live in Miami. I find myself not alienated from the people I live among: Latin people, as they are known (to me they are just normal nice people, not nasty, not insane). These people are my people; I am not alienated from them. Cubans, Venezuelans, Colombians, Nicaraguans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and so on. I am also not alienated from Europeans living here. I am fortunate in this respect. I suppose the thing that nags at me the most is that the people I would have felt solidarity with at this political moment are the very people from whom I am most alienated—academics, professors, university types. Bear in mind that I have not been on a university campus in over ten years, after spending the previous forty odd years in universities; nor have I attended a philosophical meeting here. This is really quite alienating.