Humankind has taken millennia to explore what it means to be an individual. Siedentop (2015) traces the conjoined ideas of the individual and individuality across human history, noting the ways in which Christian religion, Renaissance, and Enlightenment have played a part in generating an individualist fascination.
The individual emerges…
In his book, he argues that, “The identity of the individual – of a status which creates a space for the legitimate exercise of personal judgement and will – had broken through the surface of social life by the fifteenth century.” (p358) Its emergence came at the cost of the previous associations of humanity, namely the family, the clan, and the tribe.
Once the individual bursts forth and discards these original affiliations, the nation state is compelled to emerge as a means to manage this atomized but densely packed population. This is where Michel Foucault speaks about the development of a new modality of power, marking a shift from sovereign to disciplinary power, and where the practices of governmentality appear.
The Positive Power of Personhood
This shift sees the diminution of the collective and the apotheosis of the individual. But the truth is that only by recognising the vitality of the crowd rather than seeking to eschew it can we assert ourselves as human agents.
It is our presence as part of a collective that gives us the strength, confidence and necessary support to shape our world. The greatest act of individualism is to make the choice to join a collective – and to keep that commitment under constant review in terms of personal ethics and shared ambition.
This is an existential endeavour, a decision that serves to define us and the role into which we have stepped, as well as humanity at a more general level.
An “anti-social” ideology
In contrast, the dominant narrative in the contemporary period is summed up by the sort of rugged individualism to be found in novels like The Fountainhead (1943), summarised thus: ‘In the story of Howard Roark and his struggle against a tradition-worshipping society, Ayn Rand offers, as she puts it, “a demonstration of how the principles of egoism and altruism work out in people and in the events of their lives.”‘
This tends to focus on the constraints that arise out of the crowd, which is something against which human agents who choose to submit to the collective in order to amplify their effect in the world and combine their thinking and talents with others have to guard.
The other perspective is more productive, namely that we might stand out at times because of the crowd that we opt to join and in which we actively participate. But we can only stand out when part of that larger group. The heroic individual, the oft mentioned “self-made man” (sic), does not exist in a social vacuum. They stand out – if, indeed, it is possible to argue that this is the case – because of how they connect with (and, in many instances, exploit) others.
We see this in so many leadership situations: our politicians look to advance their careers as if they were not part of a party; entrepreneurs supposedly inhabit an ahistorical context that actively denies the presence of other people; and CEOs reside in a fiction that asserts that their position at the top of the tree determines all that happens below.
Embracing the crowd
Where humanity finds itself under pressure, there is an urgent need for a togetherness, as opposed to a reliance on the fiction of the heroic individual. The challenges we face are unlikely to be solved by a lone genius; we need the brilliance of the crowd – and a commitment to work in concert. We require a collective intelligence, which sees us conversing and thinking as a heterogeneous group rather than as some sort of hive-mind.
In contrast to a hierarchy, where any thinking undertaken is overwritten by the boundaries established by the thinking that took place in the tier above and hence tends towards a limiting consensus, the crowd is potentially an egalitarian space of ongoing inquiry.
Meanwhile, where people face crises, there is oftentimes a grassroots coming together to address the situation and ameliorate its circumstances. This is what Kropotkin called mutual aid, which stands in contrast to “dog eat dog”, the familiar way in which we are encouraged to think of our co-existence on this planet.
Rhiannon Firth argues that, in our contemporary socio-economic system, this is perhaps best understood as disaster anarchy, a humanistic political response to when human societies are placed under unbearable pressure. She discusses the way in which mutual aid manifested itself in grassroots responses to the challenges of Covid-19. A fascinating case study of this sort of development is offered as well by researchers who looked in detail at the politics of an informal organisation that arose to provide active support, including provision of food and detailed advice to individuals and families, in a district of Athens.
No crowd without me, no me without the crowd
The ideology of standing out from the crowd sustains itself by speaking directly to our ego as opposed to our intellect. Yet the idea of eight billion unbridled egos competing around the globe to climb head and shoulders above those around them is not a positive vision of the future of humanity.
Instead, now is the time to come together, to choose to collaborate, to surrender a small part of our agency in exchange for a collective intelligence and a connected commitment to do things together. Without the crowd, there is nothing from which to stand out; without the active choice of the individual to join (and continuously rejoin) that collective, the crowd is at best a mere decorative backdrop and at worst a mob.
To fetishise the individual is to naturalise hierarchy. And a focus on standing out from the crowd – such a major feature of our current culture, with its fascination with things like celebrity – is a concession to the ideology of individualism. This way of seeing the world denies the fact that humanity, when seen as a thoughtful collective of engaged individuals, urgently needs to apply collective intelligence and mutual aid to the challenges now being faced.
Hierarchy won’t fix the world, it merely offers aggrandizement to those at the top of the pyramid. Tackling the problems of humanity and finding better ways of co-existing needs that pyramid to be torn down so that all of the voices have the chance to be part of the necessary discussions.
Let’s stop trying to stand out. Instead, let’s find new and productive ways to stand together.
Radical OD 