THE ERROR OF THE INDIVIDUAL

When you see a group of teenagers expressing their individuality, all you really see is group identity. Fashion and the way popular media-forms impinge on consciousness guarantee that individuality is a con. This lack of individuality can even be seen in the ‘rights’ we have won for ourselves in recent decades.
Yes, we won rights for women, for gays, for ethnic minorities; we brought in meritocracy and a more open culture – as long as you have a mortgage, wear designer clothes and buy a new car every year. We have gained only the freedoms that do not upset the fundamental order of things. In all other respects, we are chained to the capitalist creed. We are Corporate Man personified.

BIRTH OF INDIVIDUALITY

The crowning glory of the individual came in the defining of the Existentialist. The centre of his own universe, the Existentialist is chained only to his ability to choose. Personal choice becomes the new mantra, and we are free. Yet isn’t it strange that ‘choice’ is also the ethic of capitalism? Could it be that in gaining the illusion of freedom, we simply knuckled under to what capitalism wanted us to be?
Individuality itself was born out of the Non Conformist rebellion against ritualised Christianity. To the Non Conformist, Catholicism and its Anglican puppy maintained a strangle hold on knowledge and culture. Hence, it was inevitable that a new ministry would rise, taking authority away from the Church and placing it in the words of the Bible.
When a preacher picked up a Bible and quoted directly from it, he was speaking with the authority of the very words of God. Yet, if God’s word was so absolute, how is it that so many Non Conformist denominations arose?
The obvious answer is that words are inefficient things and bend to the ideosyncracies of the reader. The new preacher simply picked the words he wanted, and in doing so, created the cult
of the individual and gained disciples to his cause. And the same process of guru worship is with us today, the latest expression being the pop star who expresses his individuality by imposing his group culture on the masses.

ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT UPHOLDS THE ESTABLISHMENT

The Non Conformist preacher and the pop star share another ideosyncracy that, rather than being anti-establishment, is really a force to uphold establishment. For with the preacher we gained spiritual validity to the growing middleclasses who went on to power the Industrial Revolution and the capitalist world of today; and in the pop star, we have an ever changing fashion and music industry which turns into billions spent in order to maintain the capitalist way.
Individuality had to be a con, for we are the product of our genes and community. We exist in a cauldron of actions and thoughts of others. We are shaped by what we see in our community, and how members of that community treat us. We are defined by how our peers interpret us as much as we interpret ourselves.
The human being himself exists in three realities. Look in the mirror and you see the individual. Look into a microscope and the individual becomes a community of cells. Look into the subatomic, and we are nothing but an electrical vibration indistinguishable from the rest of the universe. It seems, therefore, that our very ‘self’ is an illusion.
The purpose of these musings is not to bring down the capitalist system, but just to show that what we think is individuality is not always so. It could just be the natural way society has formed us to be. And that society is formed by the established order we accept, not as individuals, but as a community.

© Anthony North, April 2007

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