Recursive Alienation: A dynamic in which systems of domination not only constrain those subjected to them, but also mediate and partially estrange the agency of those who enact them, as their actions are routed through abstract structures that weaken direct authorship and feedback.

This is a structural-causal claim, not a claim about individual personality. Psychological patterns in dominators theorize how weakened authorship and feedback manifest within individuals; the structural condition is what produces those patterns, not what they are.

The concept names why domination self-reinforces and points to where possible leverage points for repair lie. It accounts for how domination becomes livable for those who enact it, and why the suffering it produces is asymmetrical but mutual. (“We are both the oxen here.”)

Marx gestures at this when he calls the capitalist personified capital, “but one of the wheels” of the social mechanism, whose agency is diminished and compelled by external coercive laws, yet he describes the dominator’s interior life only as “fanatical,” without theorizing what the structural condition does to it. Recursive alienation is the attempt to make that dimension explicit.

“Except as personified capital, the capitalist has no historical value, and no right to that historical existence, which, to use an expression of the witty Lichnowsky, “hasn’t got no date”. And so far only is the necessity for his own transitory existence implied in the transitory necessity for the capitalist mode of production. But, so far as he is personified capital, it is not values in use and the enjoyment of them, but exchange value and its augmentation, that spur him into action. Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. Only as personified capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth. But that which in the miser is a mere idiosyncrasy,is, in the capitalist, the effect of the social mechanism, of which he is but one of the wheels. Moreover, the development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount of the capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as external coercive laws. It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital, in order to preserve it, but extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation. So far, therefore, as his actions are a mere function of capital  — endowed as capital is, in his person, with consciousness and a will — his own private consumption is a robbery perpetrated on accumulation, just as in bookkeeping by double entry, the private expenditure of the capitalist is placed on the debtor side of his account against his capital. To accumulate, is to conquer the world of social wealth, to increase the mass of human beings exploited by him, and thus to extend both the direct and the indirect sway of the capitalist…. But along with this growth, there is at the same time developed in his breast, a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation, and the desire for enjoyment.” – Marx, Page 587 of Capital – 1.¹

While Marx explains the worker’s labor becomes an alien power that rules them, we also see here that the capitalist’s power becomes an alien structure that rules them. The structure you use to control others becomes the structure that shapes how you experience acting at all.

This dynamic of domination operates along several mutually reinforcing dimensions, which together produce the recursive loop:

♥︎ Structural conditions: action is routed through systems (institutions, markets, bureaucracy) that initially increase the dominator’s reach and effective agency, while making feedback indirect — delayed, filtered, or displaced. Isolation amplifies this, compounding the distortion.

♥︎ Cognitive-experiential effects: authorship becomes unclear; the dominator cannot fully feel themselves as the author of effects they cannot directly perceive. Internal legibility of agency (p_self) declines. Subjectivity destabilizes, becoming either fragmented or role-bound. When subjectivity is unstable, it requires an external anchor to remain coherent.

♥︎ Adaptive responses: as objecthood increases, reliance on the system increases — the system becomes the means by which a coherent identity is maintained through role. (“The capitalist is only respectable as capital personified.”) This reliance in turn reinforces the system’s logic, often including its expansion, as control and scale compensate for the diminished clarity of authorship.

The result is a recursive loop: the structural condition produces psychological effects that produce adaptive responses that strengthen the structural condition.

Psychoanalyst Daniel Shaw observes a related dynamic where control in traumatic narcissism functions not only to dominate others but to stabilize a fragile sense of self.² As internal coherence becomes threatened, increasing control over others serves as a compensatory mechanism. Recursive alienation extends this: an analogous dynamic operates not only to compensate for fragility, but to compensate for the reduced legibility of one’s own agency when action is mediated through systems.

Power can expand what you can do — your agency — while eroding your sense of being the one who does it — your subjectivity — and obscuring the purpose for which you act, especially when the system is inherited rather than built (the inheritor never had direct authorship to lose.) The institution isn’t just a tool of extraction. It can double as a prosthetic for mediated agency, helping actors feel like they’re the ones doing what the system requires.

Shortly after I wrote this definition of “recursive alienation,” a video of Marc Andreessen circulated on social media³:

In the interview, Andreessen says he has “zero introspection. As little as possible. Just move forward, go. Don’t get stuck in the past, at work or at home. Therapy is a modern construct. Great men of history didn’t sit around doing that. Feeling guilt and looking back on the past never resonated with me.”

In response, the host replies, “I’ve read 50 case studies of entrepreneurs — they have zero or little introspection. Sam Walton didn’t wake up thinking about his internal self, he just said,’I like building Walmart, I’m going to go build Walmart.’”

Andreessen is describing the rejection of his interior in favor of the momentum of the system. A diminishing interior is seen as a competitive advantage. The structural condition has become naturalized enough that its participants present it as a virtue rather than a loss of freedom.

Various psychological mechanisms, such as mirror neuron activity, power priming effects, and reduced empathic accuracy under conditions of asymmetric power, have been proposed to describe what happens cognitively in dominators. A 2017 Atlantic article titled “Power Causes Brain Damage,” written by Jerry Useem, summarizes a few (contested) findings: https://archive.is/20170618193509/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/ ⁴

The validity of the structural concept does not depend on any of these specific experiments replicating, and I would expect that individual variation would demonstrate that the mechanics are not uniform. The psychological mechanisms describe how that condition might manifest within individuals, but they are downstream of the structural condition.

This is Part 1. I’ll return to recursive alienation in future posts on accountability structures and processes that might interrupt the loop, on white supremacy, and on gendered domination. Future posts will also develop a related concept, negative agency, which describes how recursive alienation produces a gradient of foreclosed revisability across positions in a system. For now, the concept is offered as something to test against your own observations and experience.

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Footnotes:

A note on what this analysis is for. The purpose of structural analysis is structural change. Naming how systems amplify the harm individuals can do is not an argument for excusing individuals. Individuals are responsible for their choices. Conditions don’t excuse choices, but they shape what choices look possible and what consequences follow them. A cruel person without structural power produces interpersonal harm; a cruel person with structural power produces harm at the scale the structure permits. Identifying where domination flows and interrupting it removes the option to harm in that form and scale, regardless of individual disposition.

1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 587. ↩︎
2. Daniel Shaw, Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation (New York: Routledge, 2014). ↩︎
3. David Senra, “Marc Andreessen on Why He Has No Introspection,” YouTube Short, featuring Marc Andreessen, posted 2026, https://youtube.com/shorts/b6Zw50f5jJk ↩︎
4. Jerry Useem, “Power Causes Brain Damage,” The Atlantic, July/August 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/ ↩︎