All Together Now: hyper-individualism and why we need more collective action

If you take any introductory level sociology class at the college or even high school level, one of the core things you learn about is the difference between individualist and collectivist societies. The two ideologies are usually pitted against each other and attached to strawmen like the US and China. Doing this creates a value judgement rooted in the perspective of Western culture, where individualism becomes a stand-in for freedom and the West, while collectivism represents communism and the East. It’s a false binary where one is seen as good and the other evil. Nuance is taken out of the conversation and it makes the idea of any sort of collectivist action unattractive to those in countries like the US. Collectivist action is deeply needed at a time when extreme individualism has left most people deeply unmoored. 

Before we start, I want to say that this isn’t an attack on the idea of self-determination and your own individual rights. We are each our own person. We should have the right to express ourselves how we want to, live where we want to, and choose our own careers, partners, or anything else that determines how we live our lives. The issues arise when we forget that we’re part of a larger whole. Unions are the perfect example of this. We’ve been told for the past 60 years that we shouldn’t trust our fellow workers and that the workplace is not a community. Despite every company calling themselves a family or a team, we’re not supposed to actually work as a team when it comes to the reason most of us are even working, our compensation. Real wages have flattened or decreased for the vast majority of jobs, all while corporate profits have skyrocketed. After unions started falling, the workplace became fraught with distrust and fear. Workers have to take it upon themselves to try to play what they believe is a zero-sum game where it’s kill or be killed. We’re all at the mercy of those above us and have to trust that our managers will do right by us if we do what we’re told. No matter how good we are at our jobs, we always come second to the bottom line and shareholders. Even though we’re the ones who actually do the work that creates the shares and there’d be no bottom line if we weren’t there. Without collective bargaining rights, there’s no way to ensure fair treatment, there’s also no way to guarantee a truly stable job, and there’s no unity. It becomes a game where no matter how close you are to your coworkers, you're always looking over your back. This works to employers’ advantage because it allows them to keep workers in line out of fear, which in turn keeps costs low. It’s why Amazon spends millions of dollars each year lobbying to prevent unions. If the warehouses unionized they’d no longer be able to undercut employees or maintain the hazardous and intense conditions that bring in billions of dollars a year. If you asked them though, that’s not what they’d say. They frame unions as someone else getting in the way of you and your compensation. It’s you giving up your power instead of increasing it by joining with other people. To them the community is dangerous and they want you to feel that way too. This framing invokes American individualism where you are the only person who matters or who can be trusted. 

We see similar things happening within communities and families. First off this not going to be me making the conservative argument around “the destruction of the American Family”. Family systems have become more dynamic over time and I love that. The 50s nuclear family left a lot to be desired and led to a lot of unhappy people who are to blame for a lot of our current problems. The reason our families are fracturing is due to a certain strain of unchecked individualism and unstable conditions. In collectivist societies, people often define themselves by their relation to others, Parent, Sibling, Friend, etc. In modern individualist cultures, people define themselves mostly by their careers or what they have. The connection with others takes a backseat to our own interests. There’s this gulf between us and others. People who have cut off toxic or abusive family members have every right to do so, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about how it’s becoming more and more common for people to become estranged from one another because they just don’t think it’s worth it to connect. To them, family members aren’t seen as part of the same unit. We’re all just in our own bubbles and may interact with others but there isn’t real connection. Everyone is just a means to an end for achieving something in their own self-interest. Growing up I envied my friends from immigrant families because to me their families were true units where they built each other up. They shared ups and downs. No matter what happened they always made sure to come back together. It wasn’t just about the individual success of each person it was about the family and what it means to be part of something bigger. 

While families are getting more disconnected I think it’s worse in our communities. Again this is not for the reasons the conservatives like to point to. Those experiencing houselessness are a perfect example of this. People blame them for their circumstances because we’ve been trained to believe that every individual is fully responsible for where they end up. We don’t see these people as being part of our society or as someone’s family. We don’t see them as the product of choices that society made. We gentrified the neighborhoods. We knocked down their houses to make skyscrapers and artisan coffee shops. We made healthcare unaffordable. We got them hooked on cheap opioids. We essentially discarded part of our community but blamed them for it. Nobody’s actions are done in a vacuum, and we need to evaluate what it actually means for us to live next to other people. This goes for our housed neighbors as well as our unhoused ones. We don’t know our neighbors anymore. How weird is it that we don’t really talk to the people we literally share a building or block with? For most of human history, those were the people you trusted your life with. Now you avoid eye contact with them for fear of conversation. I’m not saying we all need to become best friends with the elderly neighbor upstairs, but we should at least make an effort to view ourselves as part of a community. We’re part of a group of people, many groups in fact, and those groups make us as much as whatever we do on our own does. 

This focus on individualism has taken an extreme toll on mental health. I’ve written before about the loneliness epidemic and this is definitely linked to that. If you feel like it’s just you facing this deeply fucked up world, it’s going to put you in an incredibly lonely place. Not to mention fill you with existential dread. It’s hard when we feel like no one is there for us, and everyone is off just trying to do their own individual thing. I’m not blaming anyone here because it’s what we’re taught. As I mentioned up top with unions, it’s all about it survival of the fittest. That system makes you put all this pressure on yourself, so if things aren’t going well you put all the blame on yourself. Which just makes you feel worse and even more alone. I’ve written before about us all feeling like an island and that feeling is hard to ignore when everything is telling you exactly that that’s all you are.  

I could go on a long-winded rant about the effects of technology and capitalism in all of this but you can find those arguments in most of my other pieces. The short of it is that technology has created a personal bubble and echo chamber for each of us. These bubbles make it harder to identify with those outside the bubble. (Just look at the political polarization in the US.) While capitalism in turn makes each of us into an asset that’s judged for how much we produce and the value we have to the system. That value is based on numbers attached to the individual. Almost all achievement is linked to the individual and numerical value, either in cash or some other meaningful metric. So we get caught up in increasing that individual value not what we do for or with other people. Looping in unions again, this is why it’s easy to manipulate people against them. People are scared that they’ll lose their “value” if they all work together. 

All is not lost though and I’m going to do something that I never do, actually give praise to influencers. Surprisingly they are actually counteracting some of this economic individualism with “hype houses” and creative collectives. As annoying as they are “hype houses” are this weird form of collectivist action. Everyone goes in on a place together so that they have a space to live and create in. They collaborate on projects and play to each other’s strengths. The system is still the system, so it’s not like they’re bargaining for contracts together but those contracts are the results of collective action. Resources from those contracts also go back to help other people in the house, whether it’s rent, equipment, or anything else. There’s a lot of bullshit and fake drama that goes on in these houses, but at the end of the day, it’s people pooling their resources together to help each other live a better life. There are other examples of collectives in other industries too. I talk a lot of shit about social media platforms but they are allowing the collectives to form. I think we’ll only see more of this as young people respond to hyper-individualism and the cutthroat nature of trying to make it in the current economy. 

Another area where I see collectivist action growing is among friends. This has always been the case but it’s more true than ever now that friend groups have taken over from family, work, or neighborhoods as where you go to be a community. We all have different groups for the different sides of us, the fantasy football league, your festival group, the day ones, each one provides a different version of community that relies on everyone in the group. A lot of them also pool resources together to do things like rent incredible Airbnbs or go on trips that some in the group wouldn’t have been able to go on otherwise. It’s easier than ever now to form these groups and act together. Again, I’m doing something I don’t usually do but this is an area where we can use technology to help create community rather than isolate people. We need to nurture these friend groups as it might be one of the few ways to combat the existential angst of facing all of this alone. 

I’m not advocating for a 1984 world where we’re all part of an amorphous blob and don’t have our own individual lives. I do believe though that we’ve gone too far with the push for individualism. Even though we’re individuals, we’re also part of something bigger. We are a collective, many collectives. The further we isolate ourselves and the more individual pressure we put on each person, the harder it is to live a decent life. We have to be able to share the weight so that we can all thrive together. It’s how our ancestors basically won at evolution. We learned to work together to overcome our weaknesses. No one can truly do anything on their own. We have a chance to build an extraordinary world for our kids and their kids based on what’s available. Not just from a resource perspective but from a cultural perspective. The only way we do that is together.