The Darkness Night Has Been Leaving But The Sunrise Has Not Been Coming: A Self-Narrative Research Report by Jacob Ho — Part 1
If you have ever spent leisure time watching philosophy, science school or anything they big-data you on youtube channels then you may have a basic understanding of how scholars deconstruct performance situations which could be developed from sociology or postmodernism theories such as The Society of the Spectacle. How did people deal with daily life and how did they cope with change in modern society? Situationists were the pioneers who criticised this issue. Modern life has transfigured humanity and human beings but it has brought permanent alienation, crossing everywhere and every-time. If we adopt Situationists’s viewpoint to describe this issue, it is meant that you feel unfamiliar about yourself. The feeling of playing a role in the movie could be one of examples in my opinion.
Situationists also illustrated the failure of self-realisation on a daily basis due to the comprehensive alienation. Self- realisation is and always about why or how people want to do something they want but not have to. But situationists had claimed it was hard to reach because the alienation has taken place everywhere, not just the working place. Alienation has penetrated from ideology to daily basis and people suddenly have a lot of things to do after a war period, during the time of regrowth the economy. For example, people have been taught to buy a private car and have been conceived to have a perfect family size and then to believe it is better for people to spend leisure time by entertainment. From SI’s research- to understand how capitalist society has fundamentally changed people’s identity and experience- has equipped us to understand these basic needs, like, time schedule, taking rest, secure society, higher salaries, comfortable likelihood that we have prioritised now could be factors to alienate everyone. It seems likely that people were exactly volunteering to choose what they want to do or what jobs and life they admire whilst those are pre-selected by this society from Situationists’ criticising. Despite people having lived, worked and taken rest repeatedly as a loop, situationists told us that how people undergo this boring circle is not reason to alienation. Humans take alienation because the authenticity of what they really want and how to live in the world as a human has been replaced by capitalism. The relationship between the world we live and how people identify as human has been transferred. Nobody can fully return this change. The artificial units such as the price, the law, the role, the jobs, the future, the cars, the dreams have replaced the human condition.
The pre-selecting is a long process for the social totality and there are many negotiations and compromise within it. If you had suffered the trauma of surviving during the war time, the capitalist society which can promise a better future will and must be people’s first choice. A stable and safer society was great for people but the consequence was unknown or compromised before the decision making. No matter how this situation hurt them, people have taken this and continue to live in this human condition as usual.
If we look at the contemporary era- 2020. The world seems to have collapsed again because of the trauma and shock of the COVID-19 pandemic. This planet is filled with apprehension and fears because we have no ideas about what the future holds. The great attempt of globalisation since the 1990s has been debated but this is not just because of this disease. The global distribution and the economic promise have no niche to continue as they were. We have already stepped into late- globalisation as a growing sense of division such as the far right groups in the European continent as well as the new fascists in north America and the unbalanced situation in southeast Asia. The collapsing seems earthquake shocking everywhere and the fears of pandemic seem tsunamis which are triggered by aftershocks.
The success of globalisation has ended. The late- globalisation and how to take a better one will be the next phase to all humans. Despite globalisation creating an international platform supporting diverse cultures, perspectives and agency, countries do not share equal freedom, interests and stability such as social issues of M-shape society, taxation system and democracy. Although several countries have rebalanced the unfair condition as best they can but multilateralism and cultural diversity seem a slow-motion car accident in the past 30 years. The third world probably takes advantage of multilateralism because all industries move to there which makes deindustrialise countries building good relationships with them. The problem of fewer job vacancies and economic weakness should be addressed by those high developed countries. Nations, democracy and economy do not work perfectly in the structure of globalisation.
Hollowing out of industry slows down the economic growth. Nations have to support profitable and stable industry in the condition of international division of labour. If manufacturing and traditional industries have been moved to the Third world, finance and world trade are supposed to be the leading and highly developed industry for these countries, especially banking, insurance and mortgage. This would be the core of the economy because business does not work perfectly without finance and a good financial system. The system of high-speed transferring money or those abstractly financial algorithms have been taken over people’s lives. Our lives have been shipping from the capitalist society which led the sense of everyday alienation to the next destination- the world of financial gammer and the world taken over by data.
(The following paragraph is to be continue in the Part-2)
