5.4.6. Subjective Alienation
At the level of subjectivity, humans experience the world through their behaviours. They also emotionally interpret the world. Humans can feel alienated or non-alienated in an objectively alienated or non-alienated world. Objective and intersubjective alienation can, but does not necessarily have to result in emotionally experienced alienation. Slave workers, citizens in a dictatorship and people in a theocracy do not necessarily hate the slave masters, dictators, and theocrats. Physical, structural and ideological violence can make them accept domination, which can also result in a moral accommodation with their situation so that they cannot imagine a diferent situation and feel emotionally at ease with the dominant order. Objective alienation however nurtures potentials for emotional alienation, i.e. emotional experiences of dissatisfying labour, political dissatisfaction and cultural discontent.
Such subjective alienation may just express itself as apathy, disinterestedness, or apathy. It can however, especially in situations of crisis, also nurture potentials for politicisation and political engagement. Reflection, social ruptures and movements can trigger individual empowerment (anti-capitalism, politicisation, cultural literacy) that at a social level can as aggregated and networked social phenomenon result in class struggles, political protests and struggles for recognition. There is no guarantee that such struggles are successful. If they however are successful, then non-alienated social conditions can be the result. There can however also be counter-struggles so that non-alienated conditions can turn into alienated ones.
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Critical Theory of Communication