Individualism is a modern phenomenon, the concept can only find
expression in a circumstance where society is big enough, easy enough and people
are isolated enough to be able to survive absent a tribe. Individualism is
constantly corrupted by the collective and the massive mass media narrative
that is at play now in the world. Individualism is in large measure a spawn of
the United States, an order, which aspires to deliver personal choice – the
first of its kind in history. I love individualism as it merges with democracy
and common law, because, at once, people act with autonomy and it is required
that they respond to the interests of others; this is a beautiful thing.
It seems that when you get more than a couple of people
acting together, autonomy gets challenged, especially in modern society, where
groups tend to coalesce around a “special interest”. “Special Interests” are
okay, what is unacceptable, however, is the way in which the actions of people
associated with a special interest tend to become associated with “left” or
“right” or one political brand or another. At the very moment, an issue becomes
attached to a political brand, it gets distorted because politics are about
power first and policy second. Given that in a democracy to forward an idea, one
needs political mass (power), acquiring political mass requires accommodating large
numbers of people and in the accommodation of large numbers of people,
distortions occur. It is optimum to seek solutions to issues rather than
distort issues to suit power, which rarely happens. By nurturing the
Individual, by creating self-supporting, self-sufficient, independent people we
begin to fracture “the group” and/or “group think”. This is a healthy thing,
as it permits people to bring a critical mind to challenges.
Individualism in the modern context of social media, has “individualism”
in effect being a branding exercise, one hopes that the broad-based ability to “mediafy”
one’s self begins to fracture the narrative – under the “post WW2” mass media
regime we were slotted into a bi-polar, tri-polar – or a limited polled
political space and then slotted into one of about 6 or 7 stereotypes. The old
media space held control over the populace’s thought under a narrow spectrum of
competition; the modern individual is able to draw on, and build the “individual”
from a broader spectrum in the social media space; allowing for a nuanced
projection of self and a general societal circumstance of a more nuanced
perception of others. Further, the coalescence of micro-topics or interests “on
the tail” brings oddities into the mainstream as they gain resolution in a
manner that would have never occurred in the past, generating a circumstance where
“individuals’” emerge in a more varied and nuanced way. This is a beautiful thing
as well, it is being challenged by the increasing regulation of the internet
space – governments are seeking to once again restrict and control the data that feeds the narrative – as, where the narrative goes society goes. This is the
paradox, the broader and more varied the data field, the broader and more
varied the individual becomes; this well-spring nearly always brings disruption,
and disruption scares the established and the established seek to suppress disruption
- yet we need disruption to advance.
We must seek to enhance the individual, to foster diversity;
individuals are rarely birthed in large monolithic institutions, in fact, large
monolithic institutions are hostile to the individual. Institutions “haze”
individuals out of existence or the bell curve does and forces them to fit the
mould, rather than liberate them from the mould. Every individual is a point of emergence,
we can smother that emergence with dogma, and conformity, thereby, retaining “norms”
& “stability” OR we can seek at every opportunity to feed the creation of
individuals that emerge un-subdued by the “old” and embrace the disruption that
they bring us.
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