The Humanistic Psychologist, 42: 283291, 2014

Copyright # Division 32 (Humanistic Psychology) of the American Psychological Association

ISSN: 0887-3267 print/1547-3333 online
DOI: 10.1080/08873267.2014.928175

SPECIAL SECTION: COMMENTARY

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Cyborgs, Zombies, and Planetary Death:

Alienation in the 21st Century

Daniel Burston
Duquesne University

If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you, I
would let you know. With these angry, despairing words, Ronald David Laing captured the
imagination of the 60s generation (Laing, 1967, pp. 185186). A humanist who was deeply
versed in existential-phenomenology, theology and literature, Laing was the most famous
(and infamous) psychiatrist of his timeand arguably, of the whole Cold War era. Laing was
a champion of the mad, and a fierce opponent of involuntary hospitalization and coercive psy-
chiatric treatments. But in this specific context, he was not speaking to or about mad people, but
addressing the normal or nominally sane members of society, who suffered, said Laing, from a
form chronic and pervasive self-estrangement called alienation.
What is alienation? Definitions vary according to the context and the user. At the most basic
level, alienation is the most common English translation of the German word entfremdung,
which simply means estrangement. In 19th century psychiatry, the term was often used with
reference to hallucinations and delusions, which loosened the patients grip on consensually
validated versions of reality, engendering a loss or distortion of a patients sense of personal
identity, which estranged them from themselves and others. Because of its potentially cata-
strophic consequences for patients and their families, alienation in this specifically psychiatric
sense was by definition severe, and considered symptomatic of some (as yet unknown) patho-
logical process occurring within the mind or brain of the patient.
But with the passage of time, the term alienation took on a much broader meaning. As the 20th
century wore on, the term alienation was used less frequently in psychiatry, and more frequently
in the humanities and social sciences, where it typically referred to a widespread state of discon-
nection, mystification and a general sense of disempowerment that affects broad segments of the
general population. Alienation in this second, sociological sense may blight our interpersonal

Correspondence should be addressed to Daniel Burston, McAnulty College Hall, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh,
PA 15282-1707. E-mail: burston@duq.edu
 284 BURSTON

relationships, but is usually sub-clinical, and seldom erupts in florid psychosis. Moreover, it not
really a matter of individual psychopathology, because it supposedly affected broad swaths of the
general populationworkers, the rural poor, blacks or the young for example.
In the Cold War era, many authors were preoccupied with the generation gap, or the palpable
lack of trust in the establishment that spawned the 60s protest movements and the counter-
culture. Authors like these often construed the (mostly conscious) sense of alienation among
the young as a symptom, not of psychosis, but of disappointment, mistrust, or of developmental
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arrestof their maladjustment to a relatively benign or even admirably rational social order.
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With rare exceptions, theorists like these assumed that the fault for young peoples estrangement
from society lay in faulty parenting or socialization, rather than in the contradictions or hypoc-
risies of the society they grew up in. By contrast, authors like Theodor Rozack and Kenneth
Kenniston thought that feelings of mistrust among the young reflected a decline of intergenera-
tional identification, and the fact that the culture itself failed to address youngs peoples
underlying human needs, prompting them to seek new cultural forms of expression (Kenniston,
1974; Rozack, 1968.)
Although Laings ideas and utterances had undeniable appeal to the young people of that
era, alienation in the sense Laing was talking about meant first and foremost a fundamental
alienation from experience; the fact that, in a very real sense, without knowing it, we average,
ordinary, normal people are strangers to our selves, and do not know our own minds. According
to Laing, however, our self-estrangement is not merely a product of repression, or of uncon-
scious self-censorship, in the Freudian sense, but of diffuse and encompassing social and inter-
personal constraints on our awareness that he described variously as social phantasy systems and
interpersonal defenses. And although Freud emphasized the intrapsychic (as opposed to social
and interpersonal) determinants of neurotic suffering, Laing emphasized that social phantasy
systems and interpersonal defenses tend to mitigate inner and interpersonal conflict, and promote
a relatively frictionless adaptation to ones cultural surroundings. In so doing, they normalize our
experience and behavior so that they conform to prevailing cultural norms and expectations,
while robbing us of our authentic selfhood. To use a medical analogy, Laing regarded friction-
less adaptation to prevailing social realities not as an expression of vibrant mental health, but as a
kind of deficiency disease, characterized by the atrophy or attenuation of our sense of the tragic,
the sublime, the absurd and our capacity to think critically about our enveloping social contexts
(Burston, 1996; Laing, 1967).
And so, by the middle of the 20th century, we already had a somewhat problematic state of
affairs. Theorists in the social sciences, e.g., sociology, political theory, history, and so on, used
the term alienation to refer to a conscious experience or a state of feeling at variance with or
mistrustful of the status quo (for one reason or another), while psychologists and psychoanalysts
were often using the term to refer to primarily unconscious mental processes that rendered
people comfortable with the status quo, despite the fact that these (interpersonal and social)
processes robbed them of the opportunity to experience their own deepest thoughts and feelings.
Finally, and not surprisingly, by the mid-20th century, there were some theorists who used the
term alienation to refer both to conscious feelings of estrangement from others (or society at
large) and to unconscious processes that alienated people from their own experience, without
recognizing the ambiguous and potentially confusing consequences of such usage.
To put this burgeoning confusion of tongues in historical context, remember that Laings
emphasis on the social and interpersonal processes that shape normal experience outside
 ALIENATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY 285

of conscious awareness was not unprecedented. Before Laing rose to prominence, Erich Fromm
was probably the best known theorist of this persuasion. Fromms work on alienation was
extremely influential in the 50s and early 60s, and drew considerable inspiration from Karl
Marx, whose theory of alienation was outlined in some unpublished texts known variously as
The Paris Manuscripts and The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. According
to Marx, human beings spontaneously seek to objectify their mental and physical powers in
the products of their labor. The effort to objectify oneself in this way is a (prosocial) form of
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self-affirmation and self-expression that in optimal circumstances is highly prized. Workers only
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become estranged from work, from others, from their own bodies and nature itself when work is
reduced to the status of a mere commodity, and they are objectified by others, by being rendered
utterly expendable and virtually interchangeable with any number of their competitors in the
labor market. Reduced to abstract labor power, their humanity is diminished, their individual
contributions go unrecognized, and the products of their labor are appropriated through violence,
rendering them powerless to influence the process of production, the way their products are used
or applied, and even their own share in the rewards (Burston & Frie, 2005; ONeil, 1996).
The positive upshot of Marxs way of approaching the issue is that alienation, however per-
vasive, is not inscribed in the human condition per se. According to Marx, it is an artifact of a
class-divided society, a process that occurs as a result of specific economic and historical forces,
when work ceases to be a creative and voluntary expression of our selves, and becomes drudgery
performed for the sake of mere survival, or a process which pits us in adversarial struggle against
other workers, our employers, and so on. Capitalism, by Marxs account, is the most alienated
form of social organization, because more than any other, it obligates us to fill our material needs
in ways that are at variance with our existential needs for solidarity with others and for authentic
self-expression. However, Marxs grim assessment of capitalism had an upside. Alienated labor
is not inherent in the human condition per se, but can be transcended in the fullness of time
through revolutionary praxis (Fromm, 1961).
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which Fromm introduced to English
speaking audiences in 1961 (with help from sociologist Tom Bottomore) were not part of the
orthodox Marxist canon. On the contrary, they were a closely guarded secret until the late
1920s, when David Ryazonov, Director of Moscows Marx-Engels Institute, allowed copies to
circulate in certain central and Western European intellectual circles. Because of its obvious debt
to Hegel, and to Marxs contemporaries, Ludwig Feuerbach and Moses Hess, Marxs theory of
alienation received a very chilly reception from Soviet Marxists and their Western surrogates,
who dismissed it as a belated expression of an early idealist phase, and therefore as being
pre-Marxist or even anti-Marxist. The main exceptions to this trend in the Soviet orbit were
the remarkable Ernst Bloch, and the extraordinary Hungarian philosopher and literary critic,
Gyorgy Lukacs. In fact, Lukacs managed to make a somewhat sketchy adumbration of the early
Marxs theory of alienation compatible with his (early) theories of reification and class conscious-
ness and his (later) writings on the ontology of social relations. Likewise for Lukacs friend
Lucien Goldmann, and his Hungarian followers Istvan Meszros and Agnes Heller, who gave
Marxs early writings even more credence than Lukacs had (Kolawkowski, 1984).
Although Eastern European Marxists made some worthwhile contributions to the theory of
alienation, with rare exceptions, their political situations obligated them to focus almost entirely
on the problem of alienation under capitalism. They seldom directed their critical attention to the
vicissitudes of living in the Soviet EmpireAdam Schaff, a Polish Marxist and friend of
 286 BURSTON

Fromms, being a notable exception to this general trend. Not so for Western Marxists, however.
Fromm in particular used the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in much the same
way that religious scholars recently used non-canonical gospels to question prevailing or main-
stream understandings of the tradition. As a result, he was able to (a) level a scathing critique
of Soviet communism as a fundamental distortion of Marxs message, and (b) demonstrate
how advanced capitalist societies, although much freer than their Soviet bloc counterparts, were
nevertheless quite repressive, preventing ordinary citizens from even glimpsing, much less
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realizing, their full human potential (Fromm, 1961.)

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However, Marx wrote about alienation in 1844, when industrial capitalism was still in its
infancy, so it remained to others to update the theory of alienation for their time by demonstrating
the impact of mass markets in advanced capitalist societies on our mental health (or lack thereof.)
In Man For Himself (Fromm, 1947), published a century after the Paris Manuscripts were
composed, Fromm first addressed the impact of mass markets on human experience and behavior.
To get a handle on Fromms thinking, remember unlike a country fair or a medieval market, the
modern market is not a place of actual meetinga place where consumers actually get to know
the producers of goods, appraise their wares carefully, and negotiate directly. In modern (or
mass) markets, producers and consumers are utterly disconnected from each other, encircled
on either side by armies of middle men whose market machinations render the price and des-
tination of commodities something that is entirely beyond the control of producers and consumers
alike. Moreover, in mass markets the packaging, presentation and advertising of goods assumes
unprecedented importance. Because they cannot trust individual producers, whose work and
products they know, and call to account if they feel cheated, people tend to rely on brand names
and labels, and in due course, image and perception tends to overshadow reality in the judgment
of most consumers (Fromm, 1947, chapter 6.)
So unlike its ancient and medieval counterparts, the modern market has become an utterly
impersonal (though extremely complicated) mechanism that increasingly dictates to producers
and consumers howor even ifthey may engage in their respective roles. (Fromm, 1941;
Fromm, 1955). And among the various commodities that are bought and sold in the modern
market is human labor itself. That being so, Fromm stressed that people in search of stable
employment in an anonymous and unpredictable labor market must market themselves aggres-
sively to avert failure and unemployment, often regardless of their ability (or the lack of it). Here,
making a good impression or creating the right image may be more important than the possession
of substantive skills or attributes. Quite apart from encouraging shameless self-promotion, mass
markets for human labor promote a tendency to experience oneself and others as commodities, or
as mere bundles of attributes that may or may not be in demand, but in any case are bereft of any
intrinsic value. As a result, we become mildly schizoid, and experience ourselves as parts in a
machineas fungible, interchangeable, expendable, and useful if (and only if) we fit the required
role specificationsor if need be, do violence to ourselves so that we fit ourselves to them
(Fromm, 1955, 1970.)
Adults whose entire working lives are spent in conditions like these may become dependent on
their currency and success to maintain their self-esteem. The kind of chronic, low-grade de-
personalization they experience, and must inflict on others in turn, often prompts them to lose
their critical faculties and their moral compass, and become what Fromm called marketing
characters (Fromm, 1947, chapter 6). People like these are highly adaptable, but lack principles,
and are incapable of love or genuine intimacy, however friendly they may be on the surface.
 ALIENATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY 287

This contributes to a state of affairs that Fromm referred to as the pathology of normalcy, and
the loss or attenuation of core to core relationships in the advanced capitalist milieu.
Laing shared Marxs view that capitalist societies are more alienated than their pre-modern
counterparts, but unlike Fromm, he largely ignored the kind of alienation engendered by
economic forces. Instead Laings focus was highly personal, experiential, and as he described
it, interexperiential. Laings approach to alienation borrowed extensively from existential-
phenomenological thinkers, notably Heidegger and Sartre, to create what he termed an inter-
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personal phenomenology (Burston, 1996). Although the effort was extremely commendable, in
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its own terms, it glossed over some unresolved difficulties. For example, the early Heidegger
(1927=1962), author of Being and Time, believed that self-estrangement, and our attempts to
overcome it, are not just an artifact of class society, and therefore something that may be trans-
cended in the fullness of time, but an integral feature of the whole human condition. He believed
that to become attuned to ones innermost being, one has to cultivate solitude, and break off con-
tact with das Man. And despite his reputation as a Marxist, in Being and Nothingness (Sartre,
1943=1956), the young Jean-Paul Sartre articulated an ontology of social relations in which
individuals are always locked into stark and tragic alternativesto objectify others, or to be
objectified by them. This was hardly an alternative to the capitalist status quo (Kirsner, 2003)!
So, although he invoked Marx occasionally, Laing never addressed, much less resolved, the
tension between Marxs theory of alienation and the more pessimistic perspectives of Heidegger
and Sartre. Instead, he spoke eloquently about a pervasive societal alienation from experience
and, above all, of our collective estrangement from inner space evidenced in our bizarre cultural
attitudes toward the nuclear arms race, galloping environmental degradation, and the sacred
and, last but not least, in our tendency to denigrate and de-humanize the mad (Burston, 1996;
Laing, 1967).
Although Marxism, existentialism, and phenomenology inspired the burgeoning literature on
alienation during the 50s and 60s, another school of thought was emerging concurrently in
France. It was strongly influenced by the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, the
post-War musings of Martin Heidegger, and the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure.
Borrowing from these sources, Jacques Lacan developed a theory of alienation that focuses on
infancy and childhood, and has virtually nothing to do with labor and its vicissitudes in adult life.
He argued that after the mirror phase, a prelinguistic interlude, it is our relationship with lan-
guage, not labor, that is the primary source of human self-estrangement, and the primary factor
in the constitution of human subjects. So like the younger Heidegger and Sartre, Lacan said that
alienation is so deeply inscribed in the human condition that no amount of social transformation
or revolutionary praxis can transcend it. Lacans emphasis on the primacy of language in the
ontogenesis of alienation clashes starkly with the Marxist account, but was widely shared by
many French theorists whose influence grew during the 70s and 80s (Bailly, 2009; Borch-
Jacobsen, 1996). So much so, in fact, that this approach to alienation is the dominant one in
the discourse of the mental health professions nowadays. Why?
One reason is that Fromm, Marcuse, and many Western Marxists embraced some version of
Marxist (or socialist) humanism, a philosophical and political movement that all but vanished
since the collapse of the Soviet empire. Was Marx right or wrong, prescient or off the mark? Were
his self-appointed followers faithful to his message, or did they distort his goals and ideas?
Nowadays, when Marxism is neither a tangible threat nor a credible alternative to capitalist
society, the most common response to questions like these iswho cares?
 288 BURSTON

Another palpable problem is that humanism itself has fallen on hard times, not least because of
the heated antihumanist polemics emanating from many structuralist and poststructuralist theor-
ists who share Lacans characteristic emphasis on the primacy of language in the constitution of
human subjects. Following the later Heidegger, many of these (predominantly French) thinkers
have a wary, if not dismissive view of human agency (ONeil, 1995; Soper, 1986). Not so for
Marx and his followers, for whom praxisboth individual and collectiveare absolutely central
to understanding human affairs. Similarly, on a micro-social scale, Laing argued that our
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self-estrangement is mediated, in part, by our inability to own or even experience our active com-
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plicity in the social and interpersonal processes that make us strangers to ourselves. Thus, for
Laing, the goal of therapy was ultimately to de-mystify our selves and our relationships to others;
to translate process into praxis, or to render opaque and seemingly impersonal social and inter-
personal processes intelligible in terms of what he sometimes called operations on experience.
Either way, alienation is not simply something that happens to us as a result of external social
forces; it is also something we do to ourselves in the interests of adapting to them.
Needless to say, Fromm and Laing wrote in the Cold War era, when psychoanalysis still
dominated American psychiatry. But when Marx wrote about alienation, psychotherapy was
not yet invented. Even after psychotherapy and psychoanalysis took shape, in the late 1880s
and 1890s, proletarians seldom sought psychotherapy in large numbers. Psychotherapy
wasand to some extent, still isa mostly middle class affair. So it is important to note that
though they often come from working class roots, most members of todays dwindling,
embattled middle class are just as alienated as their proletarian counterparts were in Marxs
day. Chartered accountants, software designers and academics do not perform the back-breaking
physical work that their forebears did. But we are still profoundly alienated from ourselves, from
others, from nature and our bodies; a fact amply attested to by the current epidemics of chronic
insomnia, depression, obesity and pornography use among working-age adults.
Along very similar lines, sociologist Sherry Terkel has written a book called Alone Together,
which demonstrates that increasing numbers of people prefer the companionship provided by
robots and computers to face-to-face relationships with other human beings. This galloping
preference for human-machine interactions, and=or machine-mediated interpersonal exchanges,
is seldom accompanied or justified in terms of a conscious despair about human relationships.
It is simply presented as a legitimate preference. Even more disturbing, perhaps, adults who
can afford it rely increasingly on robotic minders to care for the very young and the very old,
rather than provide such care themselves, or through human surrogates (i.e., nannies). Terkels
book eloquently attests to gradual atrophy of the desire for direct human connection, giving
the phrase technophilia new and disturbing connotations (Terkel, 2012).
Another striking symptom of our alienation from nature (and our own bodies) is the recent rise
of the posthumanism or transhumanism movement. Posthumanists like Ray Kurtzweil welcome
and promote technological upgrades to our basic biological equipment that will put us in even
deeper and more constant rapport with emerging technologies than is presently the case, facilitat-
ing the eventual merger of flesh and machines. This raises a troubling question that is seldom
addressed in the literature nowadays: how do we relate humanly to our own tools and machines?
Are they merely our creations, instruments and extensions of our (individual or collective) wills,
or are they so deeply embedded in the fabric of our culture now that theyve started to rule us?
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud remarked that science and technology confer
powers of perception, communication, of movement and destruction that we are accustomed
 ALIENATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY 289

to take for granted, but that would have appeared magical or god-like to our ancestors. In his
words, modern technology (circa 1930) had made us all prosthetic gods. But a dramatic shift
has taken place since Freuds time, as the Enlightenment project of fostering science and tech-
nology was intended to promote general human emancipation, and the entities post-humanism
seeks to engender are even more god-like, and no longer really human. Moreover, let us recall
that a prosthesis is an artificial limb or body part, and that Freud was talking about telegraphs
and telephones, telescopes and microscopes, balloons and biplanesall of them prostheses, in
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that they can be turned on or off, attached or detached at will.

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Posthumanists are not talking about prostheses in Freuds sense, but of radical biological inter-
ventions that will have irreversible consequences: electronic implants in our brains and bodily
organs, modifications to our DNA, RNA, mitochondria, and so on, through genetic engineering
and nanotechnologymodifications that are not detachable, and cannot be switched off at will
(Kurzweil, 1999). Who knows where this process will end? Pondering the hopes and claims of
many post-humanists, one wonders if our collective death trip, and our eagerness to render our
own kind obsolete, is a result of an cultural tendency to worship our own machines and man-made
environments, and that as a result, technophilia has displaced the spontaneous sense of awe and
reverence for nature, and the intricate interdependence of life-forms that constitute the web of life
necessary to sustain a sane societyone rooted in the love of life, and therefore capable of averting
self-destruction that is rationalized in the interests of science, development, progress, and profit.
One thing seems certain; as the planetary eco-system totters toward complete collapse, the
development and implementation of these new technologies will seem ever more attractive to
the emerging technocratic elite that can afford them. As more and more resources are devoted
to research and development along these lines, less and less priority will be placed on the welfare
of us ordinary mortals. In short, increasing indifference toward and detachment from their own
progenitors will likely be the inevitable result of the whole post-humanist project.
Another striking symptom of alienation in the 21st century is the astonishing popularity of the
zombie and vampire genres in novels, movies video games, comic books, and television shows.
Granted, stories about zombies and vampires have existed from time immemorial. But they have
never been as popular or pervasive as they are today. At the most basic narrative level, a vampire
or zombie is a pseudo-human entity who feeds off of our life blood, and therefore seeks to negate
human life, or at the very least, to diminish or subdue it in the interests of establishing hegemony
for itself and its own kind. Our collective preoccupation with the undead, and our heroic efforts
to escape, resist, overcome orincreasinglyto simply subdue and=or romance them, are a sad,
symbolic commentary on the increasing prevalence of a deep inner deadness, a loss of empathy
for others and hope about the human prospect, albeit one that seldom registers directly in the
consciousness of consumers. And for those who revel in such stuff, it is also a symptom of
alienationan effort to overcome the problem in fantasy, rather than face it in its true, and
deeply disconcerting dimensions.
Quite apart from its bodily, interpersonal, and cultural expressions, our galloping estrangement
from nature is evidenced in the fact that we are rapidly making our planet completely uninhabi-
table. Scientists inform us that the current rate of species extinction exceeds anything that occurred
on earth since the demise of the dinosaurs. We are not yet on the endangered species list, but if
present trends persist, it is only a matter of time before we are all hurtling toward extinction. Had
he lived long enough to witness it, Sigmund Freud would probably have attributed this state of
affairs to the silent operations of an implacable death drive. Erik Erikson, who did anticipate
 290 BURSTON

our present predicament, contended that our looming ecological catastrophe is the result of a
crisis of generativity, or the atrophy of deep concern for the welfare of future generations
brought on by collective cultural fixation in the adolescent phase (Burston, 2007, chapter 6).
So sadly, despite its obvious relevance to contemporary social life, and to a host of disorders that
psychologists are currently called on to treat, the concept of alienation may never regain its former
importance in the discourse of the mental health professions. Why? There are several reasons. One
relatively minor reason is that by the middle of the 20th century, as noted previously, the term alien-
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ation had already become a sliding signifier which referred to a state or a process which may be
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conscious or unconscious, mild or severe, prevalent or pathological, intrapsychic or sociologically

determined, all depending on the theorists disciplinary background and intended audience. The air
of ambiguity that bedeviled collective discourse in the mental health professions in this arena was
quite interesting and fruitful in the short term, but was also problematic in the long run.
Another more significant development that contributed to the current state of affairs was the
collapse of the Soviet empire, which for many theorists, rendered debates on alienation in Marxist
circles irrelevant and anachronistic. As a result, in recent years, reflection on the alienation occa-
sioned by class divisions, the transformation of work (and of workers) into commodities, and so
on, have been overshadowed by theorizing about the societal problems engendered by racial and
gender inequality. In fairness, the modes of (conscious and unconscious) alienation that flow from
these structural and systemic injustices are just as severe and just as worthy of our attention as
those that Marx described. But by the same token, that is no justification for the current neglect
of alienation in the workplace.
Finally, the most formidable barrier to reviving serious reflection on alienation in the 21st cen-
tury is that since the late 70s, Marxist-oriented theorists (whose numbers are steadily shrinking)
have stressed the formative role of labor in the ontology of social relations, and structuralist and
poststructuralist approaches to this issue have stressed the primacy of language in the constitution
of human subjects. The former stresses the importance of marco-social forces, including the rapid
pace of technological change, the impact of mass markets, the decline of organic communities
especiallythough not exclusivelyon adults. The other approach centers on processes that pre-
sumably take place in infancy and early childhood, involving language acquisition and relations
with family members, which are deemed responsible for many kinds of adult psychopathology.
The former believe that alienation can be transcended, or at any rate, ameliorated through radical
social transformation and=or psychotherapy, in some instances, although the latter flatly deny that
possibility altogether. The former approach leaned toward radical humanism and=or existential-
phenomenology; the other is radically antihumanist, and in some instances, even post-humanist
(e.g., Haraway, 1991.)
The tensions resulting from this protracted disagreement are still palpable in critical theory
circles. Marxist leaning theorists often wonder aloud what the real world implications of the
structural-linguistic and postmodern critiques of alienation are for the pragmatics of social
changeif any. Meanwhile, representatives of the French schools view the materialist conception
of history as laughable. According to them, it is not even a useful heuristic, but just another grand
narrative that is ripe for deconstruction. For theorists of this complexion, a concept of alienation
that is not primarily based in language is already beside the point, a complete nonstarter. And so on.
One possible way to overcome the critical=conceptual stalemate that has roiled the waters for
the last few decades is to assume, for the sake of argument, that neither labor nor language
are paramount in the constitution of human subjects; they are equipotent and equiprimordial
 ALIENATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY 291

processes in engendering alienation (Burston & Frie, 2005.) This is a neat diplomatic solution, but
unless or until the implications of this proposed truce are fully fleshed out, it cannot address, much
less clarify, the role of human agency in human history and culture, and our prospects for trans-
cending alienation, which by earlier accounts, was the main goals of revolutionary praxis.
Meanwhile, if there is some grand synthesis that will reconcile these disparate approaches to our
contemporary malaise, and help us to confront our collective death wish before the proverbial day
of reckoning, it hasnt materialized yet. So in the absence of a clear-cut solution, it falls to us to
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reflect, regroup and to think these extremely complex issues through again with the benefit of hind-
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sight and a sense of renewed curiosity. Perhaps, despite our best efforts, a grand synthesis is really
not possible, but the concept of alienation will somehow regain some of its former relevance as we
attempt to recover our humanity and save our planet in the face of increasingly daunting odds.

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AUTHOR NOTE

Daniel Burston is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, and the author
of The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991), The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of
R. D. Laing (Harvard University Press, 1996), and Erik Erikson and the American Psyche (Jason Aronson, 2007).