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Lesson 21: American Culture and Individualism

Social ProblemsRobert Wonser

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Karl Marx

“Production by an isolated individual outside society... is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.”

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

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Max Weber

“This inner isolation of the individual…forms one of the roots of that disillusioned and pessimistically inclined individualism which can even today be identified in the national characters and the institutions of the peoples with a Puritan past..”

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Emile Durkheim

“Man is the more vulnerable to self-destruction the more he is detached from any collectivity, that is to say, the more he lives as an egoist.”

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Individualism is a belief system that privileges the individual over the group, the private over the public and the personal over the social; it is a world view where autonomy, independence, and self-reliance are highly valued and thought to be natural; and it is an ideology based on self-determination, where free actors are assumed to make choices that have direct consequences for their own unique destiny.

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Culture of Individualism

“You have no one to blame but yourself”

“God helps those that help themselves.”

“Think for yourself”

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”

“Know thy self”

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”

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Culture of Individualism

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Maine’s ‘Last True Hermit’

"But you must have thought about things," I said. "About your life, about the human condition."

Chris became surprisingly introspective. "I did examine myself," he said. "Solitude did increase my perception. But here's the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn't even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free."

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However, these beliefs are not sustained by reality. To become a person, one is dependent on others, especially one's family and friends.

As one becomes a person, one is confronted by different group memberships and the rules of conduct associated with those groups, which again limits one's independence.

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Confronting the social class system, some individuals learn that hard work and responsibility have little connection to the American Dream; they are buffeted by economic forces they little understand.

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Individuality is Limited by Social Forces

Social forces limit the freedom of each of us. e.g., Ted Kaczynski, or in social

change, Rosa Parks

Most people won't need a book to tell them this; they will know it from their own experiences.

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Is there Anything Wrong with Individualism?

promotes a narrow and limited understanding of freedom.

it can limit our ability to locate solutions for our most challenging social problems.

it legitimates social isolation and contributes to an increasingly alienated lifestyle

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In order to believe in individualism, you must be willing to believe that what we do has no effect on the outside world, that there is no causal relationship between anything that we do and the things we see around us.

It's easy to put the lie to this by simply taking a look at any interaction between people with a material conflict or perhaps this: the nuclear industry and those individuals working for it are making the best decisions for themselves, but it comes at a terrible cost to many others.