Alienation – material & popular

• People employ the means of production not because they are hungry but because they wish to shape their material environments and through the use of tools to extend themselves beyond their lesser selves; 
• People employ the means of disposition not because they wish to aggrandize themselves (which would be the point if they were defending their honor) but because they wish to belong to a larger, corporate body and, through membership in legitimate institutions, to extend themselves beyond their lesser selves. 
• The economic side relates and makes the lesser self greater by managing other things; 
• The political side relates and makes the lesser self greater by managing other people. 

The individual person civilizes himself by adopting a greater personna. When the person fails to establish that greater persona, we call that person alienated. A person becomes alienated when they stop building a greater self and they relate to their world only through your lesser self. Alienated people are not part of the program of civilization. 

• Those who are alienated on material grounds (insofar as they have been unable to extend themselves through the media of technology) become consumerist and begin to fetishize commodities; 
• Those who are alienated on popular grounds (insofar as they have been unable to extend themselves through the media of institutions) become vengeful and begin to fetishize the institutional regulation of conduct – ritual practice. 
• The Euro-leftists are alienated on economic grounds and they complain about their sense of alienation as it comes from corporate control of the productive sector; 
• The Islamo-terrorists are alienated on political grounds and they complain about their sense of alienation as it comes from Western control of the institutional sector. 
• The Euro-leftists revel in their sense of powerlessness and wish to be dominated; 
• The Islamo-terrorists revel in their humiliation and fantasize about their future dominance over the Europeans. 

Altogether it makes for a tidy little sado-masochist-style encoupling, which is what comes of dysfunctions in the mechanisms of power. 

Both the sadist and the masochist suffer from a deficit of self-empowerment.