By contrast, in a traditional agrarian and trades-based society (or even further back in a hunter-gatherer societies) the product is closely aligned with one’s own efforts and ingenuity. We still find this to be the case in small businesses and in the work being done by many professionals (if they operate independently) and artisans. Unfortunately, many contemporary workers are employed in large organizations that offer little in the way of direct purpose or achievement. In such an environment there is a loss of meaning and little sense of one’s reason for being alive. The alienated worker finds little at the end of the day in which to take pride—unless it is with how one’s children are being raised or how one has contributed (as a volunteer) to some community-based activity.
Even when one turns to the family for a sense of purpose, the specter of alienation often appears. In an agrarian society, all members of a family participate in the “family business.” The same can be said for those who operated craft shops or relied on the extraction of nature resources for the generation of income. Typically, fishing, mining, and herding were a family business, as were shops specializing in stone carvings or finely woven fabric. This is rarely the case in contemporary societies. Today, in an urban or suburban setting, parents go off to work and children go to school. At the end of the day, children are likely to witness only their parents trying to escape from the drudgery of work (through consumption of alcohol, watching TV or trolling on the Internet). The children, in turn, are likely to have homework to do or they too slip off to the distraction of the Internet or Tweeting. Members of the family thus become isolated from one another. Alienation exists even with the family unit.
Life Purpose, Indifference and Psychopathy
What then does this have to do with psychopathy? I would suggest (in alignment with many social critics) that pervasive alienation leads not just to a lose of meaning and life purpose, but also to the potential diminution of one’s mental capacities and a dampening of one’s emotions and passions. We become depressed and find no support for our deep grieving among significant others in our life. We substitute substances that are mind and mood altering for a sense of life purpose, and soon become addicted—which leads to exacerbation of our own proclivities toward depression and delusional thought.
There is one final dynamic of alienation that I wish to bring forth. In describing this dynamic, I turn once again to the writing of Richard Sennett. In his insightful and often disturbing book on Authority, Sennett (1980) describes various ways in which this social force has operated throughout Western history. Much as he has done in describing the shift from public to private self, Sennett suggests that the very nature of authority has changed over the past few centuries in Western societies.
