Individualism

Discussion

Individualism cannot lead to political change

Filmmaker Adam Curtis on Why Self-Expression Is Tearing Society Apart, in an Artspace interview by Loney Abrams:

Adam Curtis:

• Towards the beginning of HyperNormalisation you talk about a shift that happened in the ‘70s when artists detached from reality and retreated into themselves to mine content for their work. Your argument is that this kind of individualistic self-expression is antithetical to political change. How so?

Individualism is the really big thing of our time, and both left and right have been affected by it. It’s this idea that had been growing since the counterculture of the 1960s that really came to fruition in the 1970s—the idea being that what you as an individual feel and desire are the most important things, and that if you followed anyone who told you what to do you were inauthentic. People don’t believe they should give themselves up to the church or trade unions any longer. They want to be themselves.

It was a wonderful shift because it did stop us from needing to be told what to do by elites and old hierarchies. It freed us of that and that’s really great—we are, to a great extent, free individuals. The problem with individualism is that, whilst it is liberating and exciting and beautiful, when things get difficult you are very weak. If you go into the woods at night, by yourself, it’s frightening, isn’t it? You get scared by the slightest noise, the slightest snap of a twig. If you go into the woods with your friends in a group, it’s incredibly exciting and thrilling because you somehow feel stronger. It’s as simple as that. That’s one point.

The other part of that shift in the early 1970s was that more and more people looked to art as a way of expressing their radicalism in an individual way. Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids makes this very clear. People like her and Robert Mapplethorpe didn’t want to be just a part of radical groups, they wanted to be individuals challenging the system. While that may have dropped away with Mapplethorpe, it remained central to Smith’s belief. But what I was trying to say in the film was that the very idea of self-expression might not have had the radical potential they thought.

What rescued the U.S. economy from the economic crisis of the 1970s was a massive wave of consumer capitalism. And behind it were the forces of finance, because they offered credit to millions of people for the first time. In another series I made called The Century of the Self, I tried to show how the other essential component in that wave of consumerism was the idea of self-expression. People were encouraged to buy all kinds of stuff, not to be like each other as they had in the past, but instead to express themselves as individuals. In this way the very idea of self-expression became central to the modern structure of power.

We look back at past ages and see how things people deeply believed in at the time were actually a rigid conformity that prevented them from seeing important changes that were happening elsewhere. And I sometimes wonder whether the very idea of self-expression might be the rigid conformity of our age. It might be preventing us from seeing really radical and different ideas that are sitting out on the margins—different ideas about what real freedom is, that have little to do with our present day fetishization of the self. The problem with today’s art is that far from revealing those new ideas to us, it may be actually stopping us from seeing them.

This might be quite a difficult one to get over, but I think this is really important: however radical your message is as an artist, you are doing it through self-expression—the central dominant ideology of modern capitalism. And by doing that, you’re actually far from questioning the monster and pulling the monster down. You’re feeding the monster. Because the more people come to believe that self-expression is the end of everything, is the ultimate goal, the more the modern system of power becomes stronger, not weaker." (http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/qa/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation-interview-54468)

Individual liberty as prerequisite of community

by James Livingston:

"Individualism isn’t the antithesis of community or socialism. To think so is to assume that attaining autonomy as an individual requires the denial of all tradition and solidarity, whether inherited or invented, or it is to assume that economic self-assertion through liberty of contract is the path to genuine selfhood. We know better – we know without consulting Aristotle that selfhood is a social construction – but we keep claiming that our interests as individuals are by definition in conflict with larger public goods like social mobility and equal access to justice and opportunity.

We keep urging our fellow Americans to “rise above” a selfish attachment to their own little fiefdoms, whether these appear as neighborhoods or jobs, and their cherished consumer goods. In doing so, we’re asking them to give up their local knowledge, livelihoods, and identities on behalf of an unknown future, a mere abstraction, a canvas stretched to accommodate only the beautiful souls among us: we’re asking them to get religion. Either that or we’ve acceded to the anti-American fallacy cooked up by the neoclassical economists who decided in the 1950s that liberty and equality, or individualism and solidarity – like capitalism and socialism – are the goals of a zero-sum game.

By now we know what the founders did: that equality is the enabling condition of liberty, and vice versa. There were two “cardinal objects of Government,” as James Madison put it to his friend and pupil Thomas Jefferson in 1787: “the rights of persons and the rights of property.” Each constitutional purpose permitted the other, not as an “allowance” but rather as a premise. One is not the price of the other, as in a cost imposed on and subtracted from the benefit of the other. Instead, liberty for all has been enhanced by our belated approach to equality, our better approximations of a more perfect union; for example, by the struggles and victories of the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement. By the same token, democratic socialism enhances individuality. By equipping more people with the means by which they can differentiate themselves, if they choose, from their origins – income and education are the crucial requisites here – socialism becomes the solvent of plainclothes uniformity and the medium of unruly, American-style individualism."

(http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/how-the-left-has-won/)

Tocqueville on Well-Understood Self-Interest

Jonathan Bi, on the ideas expressed in Democracy in America:

"We need to separate between four concepts. Individualism, egoism, sympathy and sacrifice.

Individualism is a disposition that only extend cares within a small circle. It is related to but not necessarily egoism which is to care only about oneself and treat everyone as a means to my ends. I may be an individual who only cares and works to better my family but nonetheless not be an egoist and respect the public good.

Individualism is a recently coined expression prompted by a new idea, for our forefathers knew only of egoism. Egoism is an ardent and excessive love of oneself which leads man to relate everything back to himself and to prefer himself above everything.

…

Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which persuades each citizen to cut himself off from his fellows and to withdraw into the circle of his family and friends in such a way that he thus creates a small group of his own and willingly abandons society at large to its own devices. Egoism springs from a blind instinct; individualism from wrongheaded thinking rather than from depraved feelings. It originates as much from defects of intelligence as from the mistakes of the heart.

…

Egoism blights the seeds of every virtue, individualism at first dries up only the source of public virtue. In the longer term it attacks and destroys all the others and will finally merge with egoism. Egoism is a perversity as old as the world and is scarcely peculiar to one form of society more than another. Individualism is democratic in origin and threatens to grow as conditions become equal.

Aristocrats were not individualistic. They cared a great deal about their lineage and country, their superiors and inferiors. Equality makes us individualistic in two ways. First, since everyone’s power is relatively equal, no one has the force to really effect a large amount of people, unlike the feudal lord. Since it is not even a possibility to effect those beyond one’s immediate circle, people’s interests and scopes narrow in onto their private spheres. This is why Tocqueville will say that the industrialist is worse to his workers than the feudal lord is to his serfs. Second, with the removal of a stable hierarchy, equality renders society in a constant state of flux. This unsettles the individual from any embedded social context.

In aristocracies:

Among aristocratic nations, families remain in the same situation for centuries and often in the same location. This turns all the generations into contemporaries, as it were. A man practically always knows his ancestors and has respect for them; he thinks he can already see his great-grandchildren and he loves them. He willingly assumes duties toward his ancestors and descendants, frequently sacrificing his personal pleasures for the sake of those beings who have gone before and who have yet to come. In addition, aristocratic institutions achieve the effect of binding each man closely to several of his fellow citizens. Since the class structure is distinct and static in an aristocratic nation, each class becomes a kind of homeland for the participant because it is more obvious and more cherished than the country at large. All the citizens of aristocratic societies have fixed positions one above another; consequently each man perceives above him someone whose protection is necessary to him and below him someone else whose cooperation he may claim. Men living in aristocratic times are, therefore, almost always closely bound to an external object and they are often inclined to forget about themselves. It is true that in these same periods the general concept of human fellowship is dimly felt and men seldom think of sacrificing themselves for mankind, whereas they often sacrifice themselves for certain other men.

And in democracies:

Among democratic nations, new families constantly emerge from oblivion, while others fall away; all remaining families shift with time. The thread of time is ever ruptured and the track of generations is blotted out. Those who have gone before are easily forgotten and those who follow are still completely unknown. Only those nearest to us are of any concern to us. As each class closes up to the others and merges with them, its members become indifferent to each other and treat each other as strangers. Aristocracy had created a long chain of citizens from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks down this chain and separates all the links.

Despite being more individualistic democratic man are also more sympathetic to the entirety of the human race. They are more willing to help with small deeds and relate as well as pity the suffering of others. This is because 1. they all consider each other equal and 2. there are more shared experiences for them to relate to each other.

But the democratic man is not disposed to making huge sacrifices like the aristocrat. To die for one's country is foreign to the democratic psyche.

In democratic ages, men scarcely ever sacrifice themselves for each other but they display a general compassion for all the members of the human race. One never sees them inciting pointless cruelty and when they are able to relieve another’s suffering without much trouble to themselves, they are glad to do so. They are not entirely altruistic but they are gentle.

The cynical reading of this is from Rousseau, who said that the wider the scope of sympathy the less possibility for action. The enlightenment philosopher loves mankind as to not love his neighbor.

As a result, Americans are never motivated by grand virtues and aesthetics but rather by utility and self-interest. Only things that concern their immediate sphere they find reason to pursue. Therefore, they need to reason if something benefits their self-interest before doing it. This gets to such an extreme point even when you ask the American who is genuinely helping another, he would explain it as just pursuing his own self-interest. Pragmatic character means that one can only be motivated by very immediate ends:

When the world was controlled by a small number of powerful and wealthy individuals, they enjoyed promoting a lofty ideal of man’s duties; they liked to advertise how glorious it is to forget oneself and how fitting it is to do good without self-interest just like God himself. At that time, such was the official moral doctrine. I doubt whether men were more virtuous in aristocratic times than in others, but they certainly referred constantly to the beauties of virtue; only secretly did they examine its usefulness. But as man’s imagination indulges more modest flights of fancy and everyone is more self-centered, moralists fight shy of this notion of self-sacrifice and dare not promote it for man’s consideration. They are, therefore, reduced to inquiring whether working for the happiness of all would be to the advantage of each citizen, and when they have discovered one of those points at which individual self-interest happens to coincide and merge with the interest of all, they eagerly highlight it. Gradually, similar views become more numerous. What was an isolated observation becomes a universal doctrine and in the end the belief is born that man helps himself by serving others and that doing good serves his own interest."

(https://johnathanbi.com/book-notes-summaries/democracy-in-america)