The concept of the individual isn’t a new one by any means. The idea itself is wide and detailed enough to fill countless magazines, volumes, and shelves. It is a construct that offers, and has offered, a great many positives. It is certainly something to be celebrated and goes a long way to showing the variety and depth of the human experience. It has given us awareness of individual needs, freedoms and differences that are constantly under social consideration and review. However, the freedom of individuals is frequently battling against the existing model of equality, and it’s winning. In fact, you only have to see how Kentucky town clerk Kim Davis has been spared law makers in the US to witness how individual freedoms are given precedence over social attention.
Our whole social arrangement is built on the foundation that the individual deserves more importance. Any other message would be a jarring change of direction for everyone, and we’re too scared to make it. However, even the title of this article should show that you can’t maintain both the individual and the collective without coming into a spot of bother.
Money acts as an established and accepted measure of human value and makes it much easier to disregard people with nothing
We are told from our early years that we decide our own success: we will prosper if we put in more effort than others, because it’s a competitive world out there; no one makes your future but you. If you fail, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough. It is this myth of the individual that exists outside of society, born from a capitalistic mentality of personal gain, which creates the injustices in our human conduct towards others and our separation from social concern.
This flight from obligation to others begins at our measure of human worth. The main reason we have a moral complacency in affluent societies is because we exist around the concept of worth and worth translates all too easily to money. Money acts as an established and accepted measure of human value and makes it much easier to disregard people with nothing and celebrate people with something. If someone’s not earning money it means they’re reliant and worthless based on the reasoning that money is earned.
Charity, the great bolt-on addition to mediate the vices of capitalism
Our economic structure has made it easy to create competitive divides by favoring personal gain over mutual, communal growth. In short, we have over time created the idyllic form of the free, money making individual and valued it over and above society. Wonderful! Sounds progressive. Capitalism is certainly that, but the issue arises when this idyllic, free individual is chained to others and is forced to exist within societies that make demands of them unjustly.
We have therefore come to an uneasy truce where we support individuality, but we’re not sure how much we should. If we go all the way, we have no argument to say that successful people should help others, because we have agreed to accepted liberty. Charity for example, the great bolt-on addition to mediate the vices of capitalism, is seen as a choice that we should be lionized for partaking in, in place of the duty we actually have.
We all rely on others and a good stacking of the deck in order to succeed
Henley innocently supported free will and venerated the individual in the words we are ‘the masters of our own fate’, but we forgot, cheerfully humming with pride at our own success, that Henley was completely wrong. No one is autonomous and self-sufficient within any civilization. One only has to look at items around their immediate selves to see how much they haven’t contributed to their own lifestyle. Collective human knowledge alone is a growth industry despite some evidence to the contrary from time to time. What this means is our contribution as individuals is getting considerably smaller from being trivial to begin with.
This isn’t meant to bring about an existential crisis regarding self-worth; it is to show how much we, as the human race, owe to others. We don’t carry the burden of success or failure completely upon our shoulders. We all rely on others and a good stacking of the deck in order to succeed: varied measures of both determine how much.
Suggesting random events or determinism had anything to so with their success is quickly dismissed as rubbish
Regardless of what side of the philosophical coin you land on, it is fairly well understood that an individual’s fortune and fate is significantly affected by things outside their control. Yet the majority of us regard this as false, taking an almost libertarian position, as we choose instead to side fully with free will being the rational truth because it suits us and our lifestyle. It renders us devoid of meaningful empathy towards those we view as being beneath us, or those we pass on the side of the street because we feel we have, against the apparent odds that we see ourselves overcoming, succeeded. We put in the work, or we have the talent that we earned using our own freedom. In so doing, we remove ourselves from obligation to others under the pretense that they deserve their problems, because they didn’t put in the work as we did. The debate surrounding welfare is a good example of this.
Despite my many lambasts on social media regarding errors that people throw vehemently into the public arena surrounding welfare, the argument regarding whether the benefits system should help those who aren’t in work, is constantly within public discussion. Those who criticize high welfare costs, are those people who believe in liberty over equality, over their own success ignoring the fact that they may have started the great race of life before the starting pistol started. Suggesting random events or determinism had anything to do with their success is quickly dismissed as rubbish. I am still not sure how they come to this conclusion; they must be under the impression the race is fair from the start.
These individuals are somewhat comforted by the self-deceit that they deserve to be better off
This attitude of individuality also extends past geographical boundaries so that the admiration of our own nation is seen in a similar way to defend against those in desperate need of salvation. I have lost count of how many ‘patriotic’ messages fly around social media with regard to the current refugee crisis. From them it’s more than obvious that many people feel little obligation to others outside the UK, or in fact in some cases view migrants as sub human. Why? Many ignorantly believe asylum is to help people who are poor rather than those looking for sanctuary. So again, we are back to human worth, money, the concern over the benefits system and how it’s unjust that people should be helped who don’t ‘deserve’ to be.
These individuals are somewhat comforted by the self-deceit that they deserve to be better off, or that hardship is due to an person’s own choices, or more so that success is down to their own. Therefore, they have little moral responsibility to act. They use the argument of the individual as a shield to hide their true selfishness: ‘We deserve to be more successful as a nation and shouldn’t have our way of life affected in anyway by others’. This is not to say these people wouldn’t help someone in front of them, but when they are able to wield their democratic freedom away from judgmental eyes, they, and others, act in accordance with their true feelings, and we as a society have proven to support governments that make sure those who ‘don’t deserve’, those who have ‘failed’, stay in hardship because of it.
It is this fallacy of the individual within society, born out of our inaccurate measure of human worth, which renders us incapable of feeling truly obligated to others, and especially those in need. Migration is a key topic in the public symposium at the moment, and to question whether we owe it to someone to pull them to the metaphorical or actual safety of a boat, we should examine how much we ourselves owe to others, and how much we deserve to be in the boat or on the shore in the first place rather than in the water waiting to die.
Image: Klaus Wagensonner
