Quote:
Originally Posted by Wapasha
Individualism, be responsible for yourself...
|
, and befitting from your own ideas and the sweat of your labor, is the motivation that drives people to work to improve their own situation in life.
With individuals working within a community, they are depending upon each other as they are each going about their day working to improve their own lives.[/quote]
There are a multiplicity of motivations that drive individuals and not all of them are based upon self-improvement. There are actually people who at the sacrifice of personal self interest are driven to serve the community. But having said that you've, unsurprisingly, missed the point.
The individual is responsible to themselves
and to the society, just as a society cannot deny individual expression, ambition and initiative for neither the individual or a society survive without the other. This is why pitting individualism against collectivism is a false dichotomy. In order to the individual to thrive a society much provide an environment where that is possible and by the same token the individual must contribute to the society that provides that environment. The question that confronts every social organism is how to balance the needs and requirements of both the collective and the individual, be that society as rudimentary as a society of hunter gathers or a complex industrial nation. Every political economist from Adam Smith to Karl Marx understood this relationship.
Being responsible for yourself is a wonderful platitude, but if is a sophism, it is deceptive because human survival from archaic humans to modern man where the species simply could not have survived by simply being "responsible" for oneself. There are too many aspects of human survival that have and still require collective effort. When we go about our day to improve our lives, we are in fact going about endeavors that for the most part ultimately are for the benefit of society as a whole. In short even individual endeavors are collectivist by nature.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
