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How to Navigate the American Mythology of Individualism   by Allan Lee

As a teacher who commiserates with students’ struggles to carve out a self-respecting individuality, I have pondered how to navigate the American mythology of individualism that pervades our social ethic from the notion of rugged individualism in the nineteenth century to the consumer narcissism prevailing in today’s corporate-driven culture. Democracy and capitalism are assumed to be the twin pillars of individualism, upholding the doctrine of equal and unalienable rights for all. Yet the principles of majority rule and individual rights conflict within democracy, while private profit and fair public trading conflict within capitalism. Furthermore, egalitarian democracy conflicts with the meritocracy espoused by competitive capitalism. These apparent inconsistencies are compounded when self-interest seems to collide with altruistic religious and secular ideologies and, most of all, with experience that does not fit ideological templates. Thomas Sabo Charms The result is confused ethics.

On one hand, equality treats individuals generically as members of the human species with characteristics and rights in common, holding their differences in abeyance. On the other hand, capitalist individualism validates rewards based on competing individual differences, which are easily related to one’s immediate subjective experience of being unique and apart from others. Equality, by contrast, is an abstract principle derived from cumulative experiences of empathy or solidarity that are extended inductively to all of humanity and thus harder to realize. In the classroom, confusion about equality may take the form of a relativist self-esteem, which holds that all opinions are created equal and that students have a “right” to theirs without a need for evidence or reasoning to support them. As for their individuality, many students ironically base it on variations of conformity, such as body piercing or other “lifestyle” fads. Less superficial, but still tying individuality to group conformity is racial and ethnic identity. Beyond that, individualism conforms to the broad cultural imperative of material success through cutthroat competition. That competitive self, combined with a “self-esteem” that presumes to deserve gratification as an equal right, may make it easy to justify cheating on the cynical grounds that others would do likewise.

Quite a few students disdain the lures of the mass-media-driven corporatized culture, seeing through crude attempts to “interpellate” them (to use Louis Althusser’s term), and there are plenty of honest students who earn their grades. Personal integrity and community responsibility are strong countercurrents. But even thoughtful students may find it difficult to tread an independent path through minefields of rhetoric when honor and altruisim are trumpeted by power brokers. Corporate elites hope to “reduce government” to a function devoted to their interests, by replacing government responsibility for “promoting the general welfare” enshrined in the Constitution with isolated individual volunteerism and philanthropy. Their strategy is to divide and conquer: that is, to divide average people from one another, to keep them from collective action, and to divide each person’s mind between Thomas Sabo Pendant self-aggrandizement and guilt over being the sole cause of one’s misfortunes, regardless of circumstances.

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