Dialectics of Defeat and Modern Anti-Society

“Modern capitalist society imposes loneliness upon men. In fact, this loneliness is a major theme of a lot of new writing and art. Modern society is anti-people.” ~ G.P. Deshpande (Dialectics of Defeat, p.8)


This is truer of those men who have been detached from their classical family structure in order to cope with the system engendered by modern industrialization and technological economics. Thus, those who are migrating to the cities are succumbing to increased tensions rising from social isolation, the so-called attempts to build up an organizational society failing despite all team outings and retreats. Modern capitalist society dehumanizes people by evaluating them commercially and treating them as parts of a machinery, parts that must be abandoned when they become useless to the machinery; in that case, capitalist society is similar to socialist society, excepting that in a socialist society the machinery is the State, while in the capitalist society the machinery is the money-minting organization. In that sense, Deshpande is right when he calls modern society "anti-people". This is particularly severe in towns and cities. Where brute mammon has taken on the reins of a society, spirituality is betrayed into the hands of utilitarianism, love is crucified on the wooden cross of self-promotion.