"Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings"
About this Quote
Laing writes like someone trying to shake psychiatry awake with a cold splash of history. “Alienation” isn’t framed as a private neurosis or a vaguely modern malaise; it’s a collective “destiny,” something engineered. The line’s real provocation is its refusal to treat disconnection as the price of progress or the side effect of technology. Alienation, he insists, is made - and it’s made through “outrageous violence” people do to each other.
The phrasing is prosecutorial. “Achieved” drips with irony: we talk about achievements as triumphs, yet here the achievement is spiritual and social amputation. Laing’s emphasis on “human beings on human beings” strips away excuses. It’s not fate, not nature, not an impersonal system floating above us. Even when violence is bureaucratized, medicalized, or justified as care, it still has hands.
Context matters: Laing, a leading voice in the anti-psychiatry movement, was writing in a postwar world where mass violence had been normalized and the institutional management of “madness” often looked like another form of coercion. His broader project was to argue that what gets labeled mental illness can be an intelligible response to an unintelligible environment - families that gaslight, institutions that confine, societies that demand emotional self-erasure.
The subtext is a moral inversion: if alienation is our “destiny,” it’s not because humans are too fragile for modern life; it’s because modern life has repeatedly been organized around domination. Laing isn’t offering comfort. He’s assigning responsibility, and implying a cure that is less clinical than political: stop calling violence normal, and people may start feeling real again.
The phrasing is prosecutorial. “Achieved” drips with irony: we talk about achievements as triumphs, yet here the achievement is spiritual and social amputation. Laing’s emphasis on “human beings on human beings” strips away excuses. It’s not fate, not nature, not an impersonal system floating above us. Even when violence is bureaucratized, medicalized, or justified as care, it still has hands.
Context matters: Laing, a leading voice in the anti-psychiatry movement, was writing in a postwar world where mass violence had been normalized and the institutional management of “madness” often looked like another form of coercion. His broader project was to argue that what gets labeled mental illness can be an intelligible response to an unintelligible environment - families that gaslight, institutions that confine, societies that demand emotional self-erasure.
The subtext is a moral inversion: if alienation is our “destiny,” it’s not because humans are too fragile for modern life; it’s because modern life has repeatedly been organized around domination. Laing isn’t offering comfort. He’s assigning responsibility, and implying a cure that is less clinical than political: stop calling violence normal, and people may start feeling real again.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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