this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Sorry, but I'm gonna do the thing:
Have ya'll even read Marx?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
Attempting to translate into more modern parlance:
Capitalism gaslights you so hard, so consistently, so utterly and totally, in every single aspect of your life, that it functionally gives you, a worker, a pleb, a persistent trauma complex that causes you to inherently devalue and dissociate from yourself.
Or perhaps more succintly:
Capitalism gives cPTSD to everyone it exploits, which is also often so thorough and normalized that many never even realize this is the case.
It can be mental health and alienation, doesn't have to be one or the other.
Then there's the consideration that a lot of mental illness is socially defined by deviating hard enough from the norm of a good wage worker, and not by the need to have a dignified, fulfilling life. But it doesn't invalidate the struggles we go through, or that we'd go through under other modes of production.
What I am trying to say is that Marx was actually pretty prescient in broad psychological terms as well, that his description of Alienation...
...that just literally is his looser, less technically accurate, but still fundamentally accurate, observation/prediction that an increasingly exploitative capitalist society causes increasingly severe and deep-seeded mental health problems, which our more modern understanding of psychology can describe in more specific detail...
... it is just that uh, ironically, captialist psychology often doesn't explictly just say: a whole bunch of your stress and trauma is from work, is from social norms created by everyone commoditizing themselves, viewing themselves in a dissasociated manner as split between some core, true self, and then the... commoditized, wage-workerized, grindset-minded, corporate ladder climbing version of themself.
But also at the same time, yes, modern psychology and other fields of science have shown that there is a strong genetic factor, heritability factor for many forms of mental health disorders/conditions... but also also, epigenetics is a thing.
The whole picture is very complicated and multifactorial, and yes, mental health conditions shouldn't just be dismissed because 'its capitalism's fault, bro'... but they can be better understood with this knowledge in mind.
Think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Capitalism keeps the proles in a near constant state of tension, fear, and anxiety, regarding the first two layers...
How can anyone reasonably expect a mentally healthy society that is built on a precarious, shakey, unstable foundation?
Had we a society where the first one or two layers were essentially granted to everyone, via UBI, or a fundamentally more equitable and less stratified society, etc... I'd be willing to bet that the 'Nurture' from that environment would greatly lessen the prevalance and severity of many currently common mental health conditions.
Much of modern psychology also broadly agrees that true mental wellness, feeling fulfilled, 'thriving', comes from self-actualizing in at least some kind of formulation and expression of your own inner creativity into the actual, material world.
... But you can't get there without having your fundamental, basic needs taken care of first.
Also, from having a decent 'support network', a social situation where one can just go socialize with a number of other people in a non transactional manner.
... But capitalism robs us of our time and energy, destroys the commons, the public square, destroys social cohesion, atomizes us, sells convenience and facisimiles of social interaction back to us, in an exploitative and detrimental way.