Alienation – The Binding Chaos Lexicon

1. The process by which many smaller endogroups are created within a wider endogroup. This can happen organically as a wider endogroup dissolves or weakens, and it is also a political strategy used to weaken rival endogroups. 2. A separation created between two or more endogroups. 3. The separation of a part of the self, such as seen in those with refracted or amputated cores.

Expanded explanation

Common usage treats alienation as a feeling of being cut off from work, others or oneself. Marsh makes it an action with an agent and a result, and runs the same action at three sizes. A wide endogroup breaks into smaller ones, sometimes on its own as the larger group loses hold and sometimes because someone splits it deliberately to weaken it. Rival endogroups open a separation between them. And inside a single person a part of the self is cut off from the core, the refracted or amputated core. Treating these as one process is the point: the force that fractures a population into hostile camps is the force that fractures a person from their own core, which is why the term sits with the self rather than in sociology.

In Heather Marsh’s words

Marsh is explicit that the first sense can be engineered.

“This can happen organically as a wider endogroup dissolves or weakens, and it is also a political strategy used to weaken rival endogroups”
The Creation of Me, Them and Us

Examples

A splintering coalition: When a broad alliance loses its shared enemy it often breaks into feuding factions, each smaller and more suspicious than the whole.
Divide and rule: Setting rival groups against each other to keep them weak is alienation used deliberately, not by accident.
A self at war with itself: The amputated core is alienation performed inside one person, where the self treats part of itself as an enemy.

How others use it

Alienation has a long history. Hegel used the German Entfremdung for the self becoming estranged from itself. Marx made estranged labour central, cutting the worker off from the product, the work, other workers and their own nature. The existentialists, among them Sartre and Heidegger, treated it as estrangement from an authentic life. Sociology added Durkheim's anomie and Melvin Seeman's five varieties. In all of these alienation is a condition to be diagnosed. Marsh turns it into an action, a drawing of separation, which lets one word cover a splitting society and a splitting self.