I think I can say I understand, although I do not sympathize, with Herbert Marcuse with whom I spent the early morning sunrise.  This ride was a continued sharing with the philosophers of last century who pioneered the idea of seeking the self in an increasingly chaotic world.  Of course, the world has always been chaotic to most of us.  For a minority, the lack of coherence is the opportunity to profit handsomely without the encumbrance of a philosophy.

The professor who picked up the thread from Sartre and moved on to Marcuse had a very good time with the terms “alienation” and “banalization”. I had a very good time realizing that while he was talking about “banailizaition” he was making some very good sense.  Society itself causes alienation.  The examples he gave were of the sort that were represented by our television sit-coms that presented unreality as real and every moment an opportunity to get you to laugh along with the soundtrack.  Good examples are the subjects of an Emperor who has a desire to be nattily attired. He hired a tailor who showed him invisible samples of fine material. The tailor was a con man and he spun his clothing out of nothing. The Emperor was persuaded that he was the best-dressed head of a nation for leagues around.  Now, the nation knew that the Emperor had the prerogatives to legislate truth.  Therefore, if the Emperor thought he was the best-dressed dude of all the Emperor Dudes, it must be true.  All of the people, during the parade that showed off the tailor’s efforts, believed the Emperor looked really good.  It only took a little child, who did not have properly educated vision and the willingness to be told what to perceive, to point out audibly that the Emperor had no clothes. A funny story but it is not without a grain of familiarity.

Our society believes a great many unbelievable things.  Impossible things like the Holocaust of the World War II era have been banalized to the point where no one is upset or concerned any more – even though mini-holocausts occur almost every decade. They are, well, just banal. Ordinarily right thinking people accept the trivialization of such horrendous acts, so they either disbelieve they happened or they become alienated from the world in which they live.  They do not create utopias for themselves and act to live apart in a world of their own creation.  They become aliens and think of our world as an alien nation.

Marcuse and Sartre lived in a time that has long since been forgotten, as has much of history. We do not really live as though we understand history.  What we do understand is that the banal worlds of Laverne and Shirley, Seinfeld and much of the zaniness of M*A*S*H are comfortable places in which we can hide. You can do a lot of running away from our alien society but you really cannot hide.