Anti-Individualism And Society.

Individuation means becoming an ‘in-dividual,’ and, in so far as ‘individuality’ embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self.
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious - Carl Jung).

Memoir

The integral ability to look within the psyche, to reflect upon past subjective experiences and current psychological turmoils is an extremely underrated skill, if we’re permitted to call it a skill and not as an essential psychological toolkit. Betraying yourself is quite the disappointing affair, I’ve never been a fan of conformity by any means, I never liked been subjected to societal pressures both in their direct and indirect shape-shifting forms. Throughout my measly quarter of a century of life in this country, pressures that lingered and still linger around me every moment of my daily life drove me increasingly to be more myself, more of an individual, a rebel (Even though the archytype makes me cringe slightly) who refuses to bend over backwards to the enemies of life and humanity, the anti-individual squadron of sucking freedom out of the force of life. It’s something I grew up to appreciate more and more, and a miracle that despite all that influence, I still possess a sense of my own agency. I resisted leaning the other way, thankfully.

The often “devilish” and “tempting” nature of the false sense of security of adhering to the masses should be a force met with resistance if one hopes to grow and prosper psychologically. I attest to many such cases of wishful thinking I had as a child, as a teenager, and even recently. Moments where I firmly held false beliefs about how great it is to give up myself to belong to the flow of the blind, erroneous collective consciousness, I thought it was a virtue, I’ve been lectured about it being a virtue. Can you imagine my disillusionment after all these years?

Institutionalized Inside a Regime

If we look, for example, at some tyrannical political systems, It won’t take long before we stumble upon regimes of power where the force of conformity to a certain set of predefined and often reinforced behaviors and patterns of thought is too great to be resisted by individuals, we notice a constant pattern that arises from such schemes, a striking and horrible one, a pattern that consists of the slow, painful erosion of the concepts of individuality, self, freedom. A dystopian reality of everyone being a puppet. Which is exactly what was labeled rather poetically as “Losing one’s soul”.

You can never be who you truly are under a force that imposes restrictions on individuals by means of death, torture and exile. Either you become nothing by melting into a robotic, desolate, numbed, passionless, controlled group of humans stripped of their souls, or you face grave consequences. Who would tolerate living under a hellish situation? If you are one, I suggest booking your next flight to North Korea.

We know of no such society that flourished under those circumstances. Incidentally, and as a matter of historical, psychological and sociological facts, personal freedom, individualism is what makes the collective thrive. A great analogy is that of a computer, picture a giant computer made of billions of transistors transposed and connected in millions of circuits that cooperate to do a calculation say, if every part does its job and doesn’t stand in the way of other parts (a crucial point), everything runs in the most efficient manner to reach the end goal. Now, imagine our global civilization as the same giant computer (albeit an organic one, like earth in the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), If some of us, who have power, impose their own rigidity on the rest of us as it happens all the time, and if humans aren’t allowed to express their own ideas, their opinions, if we get restricted or resisted just for the mere attempt to be ourselves and contribute our computation to the rest of the world, the efficiency of our cultural, scientific, moral and ethical endeavors to solve our most pressing problems and meet our needs drops exponentially. We get infested by inner conflicts, impeding our own progress, dissociating and short-circuiting everywhere. This goes even beyond the mere economic or game theory points of view, which happen to support it and are good byproducts of embracing individualism.

The Contrast In History

We could present endless examples, of societies that were open to new ideas, that had a sense of wonder, of discovery and intellectual bravery. The dutch in the 17th century embraced political and intellectual rejects, like Galileo. Back in his own country, he was tried by the Inquisition and condemned for heresy for defending the heliocentric theory, which the Catholic Church considered heretical because it destroyed the fragile egos of its members, the anthropocentric belief that we are the corner stone upon which the rest of the immaculate and vast universe is built. America was a recent example of the benefits of embracing the free human spirit, it has its own problems, but not long ago, It stood as a haven for free thinkers, for scientists expelled by tyranny, Its founding fathers contributed much to society, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Frankling and others shaped the secular, modern , balanced state structure the world follows today. Another example is the Islamic Golden Age, needless to talk details, as everyone knows, a society of political and intellectual freedom that saw incredible advances in medicine, astronomy, mathematics and chemistry at a time when other societies hunted witches and believed in devils and divine punishment as the etiology of disease.

The Great Filter

Our only way forward as a species is to add to the richness of each other’s lives, by facing reality as it is, by non-apologetically rejecting the war on freedom. The great barrier we face now is metaphysical, psychological, we always struggled to get over it, we killed each other for nothing but hokum for so many years and it’s high time we grow the fuck up and discover the universe.

“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.” C.J