박 승 TR(이하 박): Okay thank you for attending today’s interview and you may proceed with the first answer.
Student(이하 S) : For the first question, I agree with the assertions with the author is making about the passage, which is that alienation has a negative affect towards society.
Matthew(이하 M) : Please stop. Can you define the term alienation as it is being used in the article just so we have a really clear idea of what we are discussing?
Student(이하 S) : Of course. In my article, and on a personal level, alienation is basically how society has created a model that people are supposed to follow and by following this model, people lose their individuality and their natural desires that come to them in order to conform thus creating alienation.
M : okay.
S : Okay. So modern society has taken a lot more from an individual than given back to him. And this has created alienation by forcing people to conform. The natural equilibrium that is created by the natural desires and capabilities and abilities of an individual coalescing with the diverse demands and society is being destroyed. Or replaced actually. Replaced by a more materialistic state of mind which has created this class hierarchy of industrialization and fiscal dependence. This has pigeonholed future possibilities of people into a narrow and a more materialistic state of mind. As the passage states, “Human value is reduced to the values of the market place; you are what you earn.” Now I think this is the biggest problem and the most adverse effect that alienation has towards society. So people have stated to regard themselves as commodities; not as an actual living, breathing, thinking human beings but commodities, and therefore, their individuality and creativity is no longer cherished or upheld. Instead it is purely the abilities that society wants from them. Now and they have to participate in this rat race and those who don’t make it very far in the rat race, they are left behind and they are doomed to obscurity, those who do make it, but not to the end, but close to the end, will find that they themselves have spent most of their lives in servitude and not necessarily appealing to their own human nature. And therefore, cutting ourselves, and cutting themselves from the beauty of the world due to the diminishing returns in this case both monetary and well in this case also future prospects has made alienation a gradual and negative shift of our social structure.
M : Interesting. I’d like to hear an example of what it would look like, what a person’s life would look like who is in fact trapped in servitude to materialistic social structures. How does that person’s life look like and what are the consequences of alienation?
S : Okay. For this answer I would give a real life example. I have a friend that I used to know, well I still know. And I won’t mention his name so I’ll make up a pseudonym. Let’s call him Bill. So Bill, when he was young he found out that he was not very good at studies but he was good at dancing. He had a very light body. But in this case, i am talking about Korea which actually alienation is not that far off. In this case, he wanted to be a dancer. He wanted to be dancer, but society kind of prohibited him. It didn’t necessarily stop him like forced him directly. But imposed upon him values that made him rethink his courier choice. So in this case, he wanted to be a dancer, but he realized that being a dancer is a bad idea. Now why is it a bad idea? Because gains were bad. There were very little opportunities to make money and well compared to other more clerical jobs where those with university degrees, he wasn’t that highly regarded in society. This has created a system where people think that what they have, what desires they have are bad. Now this bad is also open to interpretation but here it just basically means that society doesn’t like it and therefore you should not like it too. And eventually he forwent all of his ideas of being a dancer. He stopped working out, he stopped dancing and instead studied, which, as I mentioned before, he didn’t do a good job. So right now, I don’t he has gotten very far in life, which would have been radically different if he just pursued his dancing courier. Alienation has created a system where this individual; in this case bill, had to sacrifice his abilities, his desires and his opportunities because society said it is wrong.
박 : you have argued that alienation has had a negative effect on society, but I want you to try to counter that argument and support how alienation and this structurised society, the hierarchy society, can be actually beneficial.
S : Alienation in a good sense, in this case a lighter side, would probably be this statement comes into play as I’ve mentioned before in the first answer “Human value is reduced to the values of the market place and you are what you earn.” Now this is a very strong point so we can use this the other way around. What if the marketplace is influenced by the people? So this situation we have right now where society wants you to conform was created because society just magically came up with this model and said you should do this. Instead, it is the other way around. People chose that courier path and more and more people chose that path and eventually the path became the greatest choice. So the marketplace didn’t create society, the society created the marketplace. It isn’t you are what you earn; it is people earn and you should too. So instead of being a social conformity, it could become a good advice instead, like a good courier choice, not necessarily the only which drastic alienation can create, but instead a choice, a good choice. And to those who think that monetary gains are the most important thing; now this could be because that person is a shallow materialistic person, or that guy has a lot of fiscal responsibilities to take care of, it doesn’t matter. But then, this choice is the best. And since many people share these problems, and when I say problems, I mean fiscal responsibility, this choice may appeal more.
박 : Okay. Then can you proceed with the second question answer?
S : For the second question, this is my opinion on how alienation has created a form of fascism and Nazism take place. So what alienation does to society is that it changes society to follow a more
Darwinistic approach towards human nature. What I mean by this is that, instead of promoting individuality, people are forced; not forced actually, it is more of they are made voluntarily and involuntarily to compete against one another. And because of this competition and rising population and lowering jobs, has created very few choices for people to make.
M : Just a moment. This idea of the Darwinistic model applied to society, how do you reconcile the fact that what Darwin’s model is a model of natural processes, so if a natural process is applied to society, how does this lead to alienation?
S : What I mean by Darwinistic approach is what you mean by the natural progress, but in a human society, this Darwinistic approach doesn’t work because this Darwinistic approach is basically the food chain, the weak get eaten by the strong, and the strong goes to the top which is what alienation is doing. But this natural process will work in nature because it is mostly about the animal basic needs of food and sustenance but in modern society it doesn’t work that way because everyone deserves the same rights. Everybody has human rights, from the youngest person to the oldest person, so we can’t say “oh, he is less important than that person.” Because they are the same human being.
M : ok please continue.
S : so, as I mentioned before, people are forced to compete against each other both voluntarily and involuntarily. Now what this creates is a class divide, where those who succeed in the competition either they were lucky, or they were worked hard, or that suited their needs or they were just born that way, whatever the reason, those who go to the top will naturally oppress those at the bottom. And this social structure, acts like a pyramid, and those who earn less go to the bottom and those who earn more go to the top. Now what this does is it creates a system where the weak will natural feel oppressed and the strong will natural feel that they are superior to them. And that causes to fascism and Nazism to occur in modern society.
M : ok I’m gonna stop you there. I think I’d like to redirect you to back to the actual content of the article. The article doesn’t actually address the rise of Nazism and fascism, it actually refers to the horrors of Nazism and fascism being a product of alienation. So I’d like you to tell me what are these horrors that are being referred to in the article of Nazism and fascism and how are they a product of alienation?
S : in order to answer this, the concept of alienation would have to change a bit since what I have mentioned until now was basically more of a structure based system where monetary gains and individuality don’t work together. But in this case, it would be more of how people have to distance themselves, have to detach themselves from human nature because society wants them to, because they no longer accepts themselves as human beings as I mentioned before. They don’t think of themselves as human beings and think of themselves as commodities to the point where they don’t think of themselves as human and living things, they think of themselves as a part of a machine. And this emotional distance with themselves has caused people to do atrocities or even go so far as genocide without feeling too bad because of a natural class difference. They think that those beneath them don’t deserve to live, because they didn’t get to where I am right now. So people can kill other people just because they think that person is inferior or they can oppress an entire race in the case of Nazism because they think that race is inferior to them because they haven’t reached their status.
박 : ok. Do you think the people who committed those horrors during Nazism, the peak of Nazism, not their leaders but the followers of Nazism, should be prosecuted because they lacked human nature due to alienation?
S : Well, in that case, first of all, we need to differentiate alienation with the human nature part because in this case their alienation wasn’t the product of their own ideas but instead has been implied upon them. It’s the whole gun and shooter debate. Who killed the person? Was it the gun or was it the guy who shot? Well people would say that if the guy didn’t have a gun in the first place, they wouldn’t have killed the person, but if the person didn’t shoot the gun, the person who wouldn’t have died. In my opinion, I don’t think that people don’t necessarily have to be punished. Because in modern society in itself, not even necessarily Nazism, people do bad things. Like in the case of South Korea, where a man pretended to plant a bomb in an airport just because he couldn’t get a job, what if that bomb was real? It turns out the bomb was fake, but what if the bomb was real? Many people would have died, and he wouldn’t have felt a thing, because society was bad to him. So was it his fault, or was it society’s fault, I would say it is half and half but a bit more towards society’s side because everybody deserves a equal chance, everybody deserves an equal opportunity and therefore that person is not beyond reprieve.
