Abstract of: : BEYOND ALIENATION * (Work and the Psychohistory of the Future) Alberto Guerreiro-Ramos School of Public Administration University of Southern California March, 1971 Paper delivered at the National Conference on Comparative Administration, Syracuse, New York, April 1-4, 1971.Abstract of: Beyond Alienation * (Work and the Psychohistory of the Future) by Alberto Guerreiro-Ramos Contemporary society is pregnant with a new type of man. Because contemporary history is characterized by unprecedented factors,, the human psyche is now showing some unprecedented features. For instance, individuals today face the problem of identity formation in a peculiar pattern that is not coincident with that which prevailed in the previous century. Thet is, among other reasons, why Erik Erikson proposes a revised view of Freud's theory of the human psyche. On the other hand, authors like Keniston and Lifton focus on today's youngsters with a dialectical eye, trying to discover to what extent, in their character formation, patterns are emerging that are specific to this historical moment and indicative of an emerging type of human psyche. Similarly, in focusing on work in a psychohistorical perspective, one can analyze the psychological implications of the new and peculiar nature work may assume in future social systems, It is essential in this framework that the meaning of work be closely correlated with the issue of alienation. The term work itself is ambiguous. Man has always worked, In his early Paper delivered at the National Conference on Comparative Administration, Syracuse, New York, April 1-4, 1971.uustory, two basic features comprise man's approach to work. (Q) He was directly rewarded by the total outcome of his efforts; (2) he never worked in obeyance to any commands extraneous to his will and motivation, ‘That working man was able to achieve his own goals, and as a worker, he was not a separated self but a total being. Other features of this approach to work could be stressed, but these two are sufficient to clarify the basic point of this paper. In the circumstances just described, one could define work as being non-alienated. It may be argued that the indivi- dual had to expend a great amount of energy in merely surviving; nevertheless, he would basically enjoy freedom, in that what- ever he did derived from his own determination. He was a self-actualizing being, although within a comparatively narrow range of possibilities. For that man, the following equation was valid; work=production=consumption, One may consider as his consumption the utilization of the scarce capital he produced, such as tools, weapons, and other materials which made his daily living less difficult. Alienation begins when accumulation of capital becomes an autonomous objective process, not under the direct control of those who produce. In other words, alienation begins withcivilization and is coterminous with it while it exists. In this context, alienated work becomes prevalent, i.e. .ne average individual (1) no longer is directly rewarded with the -tal results of his work; and, le (2) has’ w prowwes wo. way to commands extraneous to his will and motivation, Civilization is a creation of alienated work and neither one of the two can be abolished if the other remains. One can conceive of two periods where alienation is not a necessary requirement of human life. One existed prior to civilization, ‘The other is a possibility today. Are we now leaviug the age of alienation? The core of the next paragraphs deal with this question. ‘Two aspects of possible future work behavior deserve attention: (1) the decline of the profit and competition motive; and, (2) the ephemeralization of reality. Man has no intrinsic proctfvity to any institution=1 pattern of work, What a psychological revolution was necessary to transform the serf into a wage earner! The feudal society relied on serfdom, which meant thet its long existence was guaranteed by a peculiar type of psychological accomodation to production. The serf could never conceive that his productive capacity and the products of his labor could be priced in monetaryterms. He was fixed on the land as a natural element and fixed in a social structure where he was protected by lords to whom he rendered a number of obligations in terms of services and goods. He saw such conditions as naturally derived from God's design of the universe. Thus he was not a mobile individual and could not envision production from the standpoint of profit and competition, His needs were stable and rather inelastic, and his work behavior was psychologically dovetailed to such conditions. In the later stage of feudal society, there began to emerge attitudes toward production which would seem unorthodox to the majority of persons living in that moment, Nevertheless, the capitalist social system, which suceeded feudalism, made a new attitude prevalent toward production, which came to be characterized by the wage earner. In contrast to the serf, the wage earner sees himself as a commodity and is essentially mobile in the physical and social space. He envisions production from the standpoint of profit and compe~ tition, and is able to internalize the requirements of the market. ‘The advanced industrial system is generating new attitudes toward work , although without apparently realizing that this outcome demands its own radical institutional renewal. As Riesman has pointed out, character now is increasingly formedout of the influence of labor, as we know it today. The number of years people spend in school has significantly increased. Most of the workers in this country have a high school education and one can foresee now that education is about to become an area in which the average man has to spend most of his lifetime. This single factor is sufficient to entail a psychological mutation within the social system and this is actually what is occuring. For a significant part of youth, the profit and competitive motive seems to be rather a feature of social pathology. Those who represent this life~ style are increasing in numbers and represent a serious social and political phenomenon, Psychohistorians like Kenneth Keniston are offering empirical evidence that work is less and less considered from the standpoint of competition, In his description of the new life-style, Keniston underlines that the youngsters tend to reject any condition which "interferes with ‘people being people’. " (Keniston, 1968: 280) He write: "The depersonalization of life, commercialism, bureaucratization, impersonality, regimentation, and conformity, .. seem destructive and unnece~ ssary to these young men and women. Bigness, impersonality, stratification, fixed roles and hierarchy are all rejected, as is any involvement with the furtherance of purely technological values.Efficiency, quantity, the measurement of human beings--anything that interferes with ‘the unique personality of each man and woman-- are strongly opposed, In its place, post-modern youth seek simplicity, naturalness, individuality, the avoidance of fixed roies, and even voluntary poverty." (Keniston, 1968: 282) ‘Those are psychological trends not congenial with organizational requirements which prevail today. ‘The findings of Lifton in his research about contemporary youth seems to be supportive of Keniston. From the standpoint of protean life style that Lifton sees as contaminating the new man, the zest for success and profit, now institutionally required, defines a ratner absurd world. The protean man has a "specific talent for fluidity, " (Lifton, 1970: 342) and he would never fit into a world where fixed roles are assigned \o the participants of the organization, Another sort of empirical evidencé in comiiter wisn a fundamentalist view of the competitive motive is offered by Hugo Bettelheim in his Chitcren of the Dream, in which he reports his observations on the kibbutz system in Israel. He sees in such an organization the absense of competitiveness. ‘The work behavior which prevails in the kibbutz is coincident with what American youth wants to implement in this country, and one can see the ideal cf cooperation already working inseveral experimental communities in the United States. ‘Tne perception of competitiveness in American society as a pathological condition enhances the argument for a new social vision, The fact that an increasing number of people agree with this viewpoint is evident and suggests that for many Americans to adapt to work behavior, as now required, is an extremely painful experience. As Ayres has pointed out, the present social system “welcomes and resists" abundance. (Ayres, 1966: 229) In this paradoxical situation, are trapped today all sorts of public welfare policies, systems designs, and organizational development models, not geared towards the abolition of alienated work. In the short range, there is a way of maintaining the established order of society by the escalation of direct and indirect repressive means and the consequent mass stultification of the human being. Even so, it remains to be seen if this strategy pays off in the long range. Another utopian trend concretely effective in present days is what deserves to be called the ephemeralization of reality. Indeed, today reality is already ephemeral, permissive for some, either under a perverted form, i.e., for those whoseeoit to rugs, or in aeound way, tes, for.thege luesy few who are already achieving in their personal lives the best alternative future. Elsewhere, Ihave subsumed the characteristics of these persons under the model of the paranthetical man: One feature of the psyche of this new man, who 18 already Living in our midat, ie that his image of reality is very peculiar. iis psyche cannot be understood by the sharp dualisms which inflate the currents of traditional psychology For instance, the dichotomy postulated by Freud between the reality principle and the pleacure principle, under which he saw the dynamics of the human payole; ‘s valid only in a world of acercity where delay of satisfaction is required by the smperative of accumula- ting capital, Indeed, what Freud called reality is coincident with the social environment. However, Freud did not speculate about different modes of environments. The environment he considered as reslity is only one limited case. It isan environment in which the ego is forced to deny oF postpone pleasure or satisfaction in order to than Reed iy pee of capital accumulation that Marx sees a5 constituting the essence of the civilized period. Throughout such a period, man tn general, except for tiny minorities, is discontent with the social environment,Freud's model of the humen psyche derives from an epproach of resignation. He never gave consistent thought to a model of man as creator of reality. As Wilhelm Reich has pointed out, "Preud neither questioned the irrational in, reality', nor did he ask which kind of pleasure is compatible with sociality and which kind is not." (Reich, 1961: 179) There are aistoric.l indications that the Freudian dualism of the pleasure principle ersus reality principle, reflects 8 fundinwatansi. at least, deserves qualification, When work is virtually equivalent to consumption or enjoyment, the reality itself becomes pleasurable. This has happened in many remote societies and may happen, for better reasons, in post-industrial societies, The institutional framework that hae guaranteed a high rate of accumulation of capital, and which is predicated on the dichotomy between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, is not an ''unquali- fled blessing, " and in these days may be "surviving its useful- ness as a method of buman living." There are several human natures, In other words, man has presented several natures in different historical periods and he faces now a horizon in which he can begin to live according to behavioral patterns that have never existed before, Living far short of this new mode, the=~ average man today is in general an anachronic creature, He has been so long habituated to submit himself to work as pain, or postponement of satisfaction, that he thinks such an episodical condition is ontologically founded, He bestows it with an ethical content and tends to believe that leisure is sinful, That is what makes him anachronic. He is afraid to make the choice of leisure, not only because it would imply an institutional revolution, but it would imply a psychic renewal aswell. Consequently, he gives himself up to self-deluding reasoning by attributing to technology an irreversible and intrinsic determinism beyond the reach of his conscious choices, Recent orientations in paychology and psychoanalysis Support the contention that the advanced industrial society contains possibilities of human development that are institu- Honally thwarted, What is wrong with Freud's psychoanalysis and all varieties of psychological fundamentalism, as pointed out by Theodor Adorno, is that they assume that a peculiar Principle of reality characteristic of an episodicel form of Socialization is " an extra-social, natural attribute of the individual. " (Adorno, 1967: 77) Adorno questions the ethical neutrality that Max Weber assumed in his conception of the functional rationality of the social system. At this point inae time, Adorno contends: "...the demands made on the individual by the rationality of the syctem are immanently irrational." (Adorno, 1967: 72) ‘One reason for people's skepticism towards the abolition of alienated work is their mistaken notion of leisure. Ina world without alienated work, men, contrary to what is commonly assumed, will not be necessarily idle and unproductive. Noticing that in the present industrial system, man utilizes a very small percentage of his capabilities, Herzberg contends that "compared to cases of physical stunt, most people are psychologically unable to walk, (Herzberg, 1969; 55) Ina stage of true leisure, people may very well be extremely busy. Free to utilize his Potential, man will engage in "serious work," as an activity essential to his actualization, One may indeed equate leisure with "serious work, "that is, an activity not subordinated to “pecuniary excitements" or "meretricious incentives." (Mumford, 1970: 407) As Lewis Mumford has pointed out, "the economy of plenitude, in achieving briefer work periods, would make it Possible to restore initiative on a voluntary basis in many forms of work now denied to the beneficiaries of affluence who are chained to the demand for compulsory ‘consumption, " (Mumford, 197 406) Leisure is not the absence of work, but freedom of=i choosing one's own task. A man of leisure may be, and more often is than not, tough in doing what he thinks and acknowledges as necessary. In this sense, de Grazia writes: “Leisure and free time live in two different Worlds. We have got into the habit of thinking them the same. Anybody can have free time. Not everybody can have leisure,,,, Leisure refers to a state of being, a condition of man." (de Grazia: 7-8) In viewing those who are now having the chance to live 89 individuals of leisure, one may find indications of an “intensification of life"" and creativity that will characterize the post-industrial society. This is a society of great variety of styles where productivity will not decline, but on the contrary, will increase, although not within the framework of the present institutional criteria, ‘That production may be achieved in a climate of fun, 60 ‘uch different from that which occurs in today's factories, offices and shops, can already be seen in Brazil, mainly in rural end suburban neighborhoods, When one intends to build house, clean a field, or accomplish a difficult task, he calle a "mutirao, "i.e. he assembles relatives and friends, normally on holidays or weekends. On such oceasions, there prevails an atmosphere of festivity as people work and simultaneously enjoya8 = each other, Somehow identical to the mutirao is what takes place when one calls for the help of friends in order to move from one house into another. Hard endeavors are accomplished in such instances. In challenging moments of good will or ideological, campaigns, disasters and calamities, the human potential to accomplish things could be called amazing. Why can work in everyday life not be fun? Pi Ha THe ACA Ina stage of highly technological development, conditions are proper to engage people in temporary production teams, more or less along the same lines as festivals and other numerous group marathons engaged in by America's youth, People will always come alive by getting together in order to accomplish a commen goal. Work is only dull and alienating when the individual realizes that his activities and efforts are means to an end he does not feel as his own, What are the implications of these trends in the developing countries? (The last part of the pager tries to answer this question)