The Phantom of Liberty

I find a lot of things disturbing about present-day society and culture; I suppose most people do. The thing I find most disturbing (because I think it’s largely responsible for most of the other things that disturb us on a daily basis) is the widespread and seemingly increasing fragmentation or atomization of society.

Certainly in Western culture, and perhaps increasingly in the rest of the world, we accept without question nowadays the notion that society is nothing but the sum of the choices and actions of individuals.

Political and economic theorists claim that this is as it should be, that each person should have maximum freedom to pursue his or her best interests, because in doing so we will all benefit each other by creating the best (and most prosperous) possible society. From a more psychological point of view (if that term is still allowable in this age of “behaviorism”), we must all have the maximum freedom to “express” whatever is unique about ourselves; and this, too, will redound to the benefit of society as a whole by enabling our “creativity.”

It’s hard to argue against “freedom,” of course, so these claims tend to be viewed as self-evident, and the debates tend to focus on how we can best enable (and who is the best enabler of) the “freedom” and “individuality” that are held up as such high values, perhaps the highest.

I would never argue against freedom or individuality as ideals. But I am compelled to point out that most of what passes for “individuality” today is illusory, and most of what’s called “freedom” is a lie.

What we have instead of individuality is individualism, which I’m going to define as “the assembling of a personal identity through selective self-identification with a collection of intellectual components such as beliefs, ideas, attitudes, interests or affinities, and physical activities, possessions and displays.”

The lack of real individuality, and the lack of real freedom, can be summed up like this: “I’m going to the mall to buy some individuality.”

In effect, we must make use of the materials at hand to assemble our identities. If our educational system and our mass media withhold certain ideas and promote others, they render us unfree to make fully informed choices about what we want to believe or know. And if most of us are persuaded (or, less charitably, programmed or brainwashed) into relying on certain kinds of material objects to “express” our personalities, where will we find the “uniqueness” we want to display?

I think this focus on fake individualism is nothing less than a betrayal of our true nature as humans, and this overemphasized so-called “freedom” is just the license to choose from a strictly limited menu, and therefore a kind of hidden totalitarianism. I will develop these claims in coming entries; the next one will examine not whether you and I are related, but how closely.