Alienation

According to Enclopaedia Britannica, the meaning of the term alienation has been analysed as under: “The idea of alienation remains an ambiguous concept with elusive meanings, the following variants being most common: (1) powerlessness, the feeling that one’s destiny is not under one’s own control but is determined by external agents, fate, luck, or institutional arrangements, (2) meaninglessness, referring either to the lack of comprehensibility or consistent meaning in any domain of action (such as world affairs or interpersonal relations) or to a generalized sense of purposelessness in life, (3) normlessness, the lack of commitment to shared social conventions of behaviour (hence widespread deviance, distrust, unrestrained individual competition, and the like), (4) cultural estrangement, the sense of removal from established values in society (as, for example, in intellectual or student rebellions against conventional institutions), (5) social isolation, the sense of loneliness or exclusion in social relations (as, for example, among minority group members), and (6) self-estrangement, perhaps the most difficult to define and in a sense the master theme, the understanding that in one way or another the individual is out of touch with himself.”

In today’s modern world, when we have so many new gadgets to talk to any person, in any part of the world at any time, we have the feeling of bonding that used to be there in the past times. A feeling of alienation has crept in. We often have the feeling of being ‘lonely in the crowd’. Man is not at peace with himself. So he cannot stay at peace with the society, his neighbours and his family. This instability and uneasiness that has entered into the modern materialistic life has led to the thinking man’s alienation. It also should be noted here that the feeling of alienation is a subjective term. We all have the level of alienation we feel or the kind of affinity we have with our surroundings.

It seems ironic that with the increase in methods and techniques of communication, the feeling of isolation, loneliness and alienation has increased, instead of waning. We have lost the opportunity of experiencing what Sir Edward Dyer said: “My mind to me a kingdom is”.