The concept of Marxist alienation focuses on the deformation of consciousness of which we fell victim in our early skiing days in our relationship with the threatening environment, at that time, and perceived ourselves as simple ‘things’ thrown into nature.
When we apply Marxist philosophy to skiing, our consciousness went through three stages, which corresponded to specific periods of our skiing history and by which we defined ourselves as skiers.
In primitive self-consciousness, the environment dominated us; in self-alienation, because of our skiing interpreted as ‘property’ and ourselves as ‘things‘, the environment became an object for us. In order to achieve our aspirations, we rescinded our skiing as property in order to achieve our self-realization.
During our beginner experiences, we felt defeated in the face of the environment, and instead of self-realizing ourselves, we perceived that we did not belonged to it, resulting in a feeling of depersonalization and alienation.
We experienced a loss of connection with our creative faculties, and this was no longer regarded as a part of our aspirations as we perceived skiing as an obligation that could not be sustained. In this situation, we were unaware of what was happening to us, since alienation annuled our free will, causing us to lose our identity as skiers-in-potency.
As alienated beginners, the situation prevented us from thinking freely about how to solve it because we were under pressure from the ski instructor, from our peers, and from the whole situation. We were not ourselves because we were distanced from the skiing reality. We distorted it; we did not see skiing as our own but as something alien, something external to us, and something that, momentarily, did not satisfied us emotionally.
