Alienation deepens precisely when people happily identify with imposed existence

Evidence

A group in a New York ghetto was presented a coded situation showing a big pile of garbage on a street corner—the very same street where the group was meeting. One of the participants said at once, “I see a street in Africa or Latin America.” “And why not in New York?” asked the teacher. “Because we are the United States and that can’t happen here.” Beyond a doubt this man and some of his comrades who agreed with him were retreating from a reality so offensive to them that even to acknowledge that reality was threatening. For an alienated person, conditioned by a culture of achievement and personal success, to recognize his situation as objectively unfavorable seems to hinder his own possibilities of success. — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 499 (#complicates, via linked claim)

This double negation, however, is in a sense self-destructive. One of two things happens: Either I make myself not-be a certain being, and then he is an object for me and I lose my object-ness for him; in this case the Other ceases to be the Other-Me—that is, the subject who makes me be an object by refusing to be me. Or else this being is indeed the Other and makes himself not-be me, in which case I become an object for him and he loses his own object-ness. Thus originally the Other is the Not-Me-not-object. Whatever may be the further steps in the dialectic of the Other, if the Other is to be at the start the Other, then on principle he can not be revealed in the same upsurge by which I deny being him. In this sense my fundamental negation can not be direct, for there is nothing on which it can be brought to bear. What I refuse to be can be nothing but this refusal to be the Me by means of which the Other is making me an object. Or, if you prefer, I refuse my refused Me; I determine myself as Myself by means of the refusal of the Me-refused; I posit this refused Me as an alienated-Me in the same upsurge in which I wrench myself away from the Other. But I thereby recognize and affirm not only the Other but the existence of my Self-for-others. Indeed this is because I can not not be the Other unless I assume my being-as-object for the Other. … My wrenching away from the Other—that is, my Self—is by its essential structure an assumption as mine of this Me which the Other refuses; we can even say that it is only that. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 777 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The for-itself becomes itself only by assuming its alienated being-for-others — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 777; Alienated people may deny their own oppressive reality as self-defense — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 499; Artistic alienation means conscious transcendence, distinct from Marx’s alienation concept. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 290 (+6 more)

Related

• Alienated people may deny their own oppressive reality as self-defense (similarity 0.84)
• Self-objectification is the founding condition that makes human alienation possible (similarity 0.83)
• The for-itself becomes itself only by assuming its alienated being-for-others (similarity 0.80)
• Being-for-others alienates me into an objectivity I cannot reclaim for myself (similarity 0.80)
• The concept of alienation functions as criticism without requiring a Utopian counterpart (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Alienated people may deny their own oppressive reality as self-defense #complicates (0.80) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 499
• The for-itself becomes itself only by assuming its alienated being-for-others #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 777