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Individualism, the overall philosophy of leaving each person's life to their own choices, has prevailed in American culture in many ways for at least decades if not longer, in contrast to Eastern cultures where collectivism is more common and people work as families or communities. I had an Indian roommate in 2008 that said that when he came to the US, he was utterly shocked by the fact that roommates didn't even talk about personal issues with each other, and questions that were considered normal and even caring in his culture were met with a "none-o-yer-buzinezz" response here in America. Unlike India, we get offended very easily in this culture when someone asks about our health or finances, and unlike China, we expect people to move out on their own by their mid-20s typically without much in the way of multi-generational households. While multi-generational living does exist here, it is not seen as desirable or glamorous, but more of something people "put up with" reluctantly when economically unavoidable. It has gotten so extreme that many people even when unmarried and faced with significant financial distress are still not willing to consider living with a roommate.
This is all fine and dandy, but what is really troubling me is that even in a pandemic that has claimed the lives of over 300,000 Americans, a toll exceeding that of World War II, lots of people are still operating under a "I'll do me, you do you" mentality. Discussions in other threads have often taken a turn for some very strange version of "individual freedom" that ignores the impact of one's actions on other people. When the issues faced by a society are necessarily collective due to basic biology and epidemiology, almost half the adult population are (seemingly delusionally) approaching this as an issue of "individual freedom". Individual freedom is fine when you're dealing with an issue like how much money to spend on a car, but it is not OK when you are potentially spreading a deadly pathogen in such a way that someone's grandma could pass away as a result.
Worse yet, people have talked about the $600 unemployment checks last spring/summer as a deterrent to work, as though it is more important for people to keep the Wall Street Journal numbers high than to stay home to flatten the curve, in other words, "personal responsibility" has become elevated to a greater importance than life itself.
In "normal" times, when things are safe and people have their basic needs met, individualism in America is simply a cultural difference between the Western and Eastern worlds which I can accept or even embrace as a successful way of life. But the problem is that the individualist way of thinking has now crossed the line from a culture to a dogma, a dogma that is so entrenched that even a dire global emergency cannot enable people to question it or to temporarily suspend the individualist belief system until the crisis has passed. I think this should be a wake-up call for our society that we need to be less rigid and dogmatic with the individualist belief system. It needs to be modifiable based on circumstances, not absolute, "I-don't-care-if-your-mother-is-killed-it's-still-none-of-yer-buzinezz" sentiment.
Short answer, Yes!
The "individualism" is a legacy of the colonial era, combined with little need/pressure to change in the rural states. Compared to EU/Asia, US has fewer people, more land. It's really just an inversion of the "elitist" concept. People who have never experienced other countries/cultures have no yardstick to measure against.
I don't understand it, OP. It's irrational in the current context.
But I'd like to point out, it's not only "Eastern" cultures that are more oriented toward the common weal, than the US is. Canada and Europe are that way, too. Which tends to leave the US as the odd one out in the industrialized world, and much of the rest of the world, in fact.
I bet to differ. Individualism would have been a foreign concept in the American colonial era. Having emerged from the middle ages, there was a clear concept of one's place in society and the body politic. This was true of MA as well as VA. Some rich, some poor and one's place went back as far as Wintrop when he came with his great fleet in 1630. By 1775, New Englanders may have been hostile to the "airs" of the Virginians who came but they had a clear idea of where they fit in the order of their society.
In VA, an individual had rights as determined by race, sex, family, property and status but there was an obligation and a rigid hierachy. It was something someone couldn't avoid. The more you had, the more the obligation. Thus, Washington and Madison may have been ambivalent about religion but they were members of their respective vestries; they ran plantations which were in effect small towns with hundreds of people meaning they also sat on juries and other civic bodies even if they chose not to run for the House of Burgess. You couldn't avoid it really in VA. Starting in 1657 all tithable people hand to work on the roads. In 1676, Col. Hill of Charles City County, a man of status was fined for not working on the road as required. In 1690, Governor Nicholson ordered that if the justices overseeing the roads did not enforce the work requirement, the justices would be fined. I could go on, but this continued. Even being in the militia was mandatory. (It still is in VA, technically under § 44-4. whereby all able bodied men and women between 16 and 55 are in the Unorganized State Militia - it was last called up in 2017 - but only a handful during the unrest in Charlottesville where they took over some traffic duties to free up State Police.)
The late Bernard Bailyn (1922-2020) wrote about this relationship in his works. The role of class and individuals is a theme running through his work.
Unlike India, we get offended very easily in this culture when someone asks about our health or finances, and unlike China, we expect people to move out on their own by their mid-20s typically without much in the way of multi-generational households. While multi-generational living does exist here, it is not seen as desirable or glamorous, but more of something people "put up with" reluctantly when economically unavoidable. It has gotten so extreme that many people even when unmarried and faced with significant financial distress are still not willing to consider living with a roommate.
In most of the U.S. it is considered rude to pry into how much salary someone is being paid. If they want to share that they can volunteer that information. Not sure about the health part either as friends will ask about each other's health. A friend of mine told me she had colon cancer just last month. Yeah not good to stay at home once you are an adult, lest you mind wind up like this guy. What about his parent's right to privacy without having to care for a grown adult who raids their fridge? I now live in a multi-generational home, but not out of my choosing and it blows. It's not like having roommates who have their own lives, but it's more like having a dependent with memory loss and lots of bad habits. In China parents contribute to their children's mortgage/down payment so there is some reciprocity, but that is not usually the custom here. I now go into work three days a week just to get out of our overcrowded home.
I think Americans are more prone to cooperate when in crisis, but less so outside of one. E.G. during WWII we had rationing, victory gardens and women working in factories. That most of those ended with the war speaks to their temporary necessity. It is much like how in China the bicycle was the primary mode of transportation just a generation ago and now almost no one rides one. They advanced economically to the point where they had another more desirable option and went with that. I'm sure there is a minority there that still ride and some may get nostalgic for those simpler days, but the masses have spoken.
Also the fullest extent of collectivism, politically speaking, is communism which is impossible in the U.S. due to very strong private property rights. Collectivism therefore has a negative connotation, but one that nevertheless can be overcome if furnished with justification.
Now I do agree that it's stupid not to wear masks in public, but for the rest you are barking up the wrong tree.
Last edited by verybadgnome; 01-10-2021 at 10:48 PM..
In most of the U.S. it is considered rude to pry into how much salary someone is being paid. If they want to share that they can volunteer that information. Not sure about the health part either as friends will ask about each other's health. A friend of mine told me she had colon cancer just last month. Yeah not good to stay at home once you are an adult, lest you mind wind up like this guy. What about his parent's right to privacy without having to care for a grown adult who raids their fridge? I now live in a multi-generational home, but not out of my choosing and it blows. It's not like having roommates who have their own lives, but it's more like having a dependent with memory loss and lots of bad habits. In China parents contribute to their children's mortgage/down payment so there is some reciprocity, but that is not usually the custom here. I now go into work three days a week just to get out of our overcrowded home.
I think Americans are more prone to cooperate when in crisis, but less so outside of one. E.G. during WWII we had rationing, victory gardens and women working in factories. That most of those ended with the war speaks to their temporary necessity. It is much like how in China the bicycle was the primary mode of transportation just a generation ago and now almost no one rides one. They advanced economically to the point where they had another more desirable option and went with that. I'm sure there is a minority there that still ride and some may get nostalgic for those simpler days, but the masses have spoken.
Also the fullest extent of collectivism, politically speaking, is communism which is impossible in the U.S. due to very strong private property rights. Collectivism therefore has a negative connotation, but one that nevertheless can be overcome if furnished with justification.
Now I do agree that it's stupid not to wear masks in public, but for the rest you are barking up the wrong tree.
You misunderstood. I was not arguing that we need to get rid of all the individualism. I was simply providing those as examples of what I mean by individualist vs. collectivist thinking (since these terms have a lot of related but distinct meanings). I specifically said individualism is fine when it comes to issues like moving out of your parents' home or buying a car. But the point I'm trying to make is that it has become dogmatic, which is to say, the belief is treated as such an unquestionable pillar of belief that it has spilled over into realms where it is not reasonable, such as how to handle a pandemic. There is a difference between practical or pragmatic individualism (of the kind you seem to favor) on the one hand vs. dogmatic, unchangeable, ideologically-absolutist individualism on the other. It is about the willingness to consider the circumstances.
Right now, a lot of people are unwilling to take this crisis seriously, it is very different from World War II. Back in March and April, we cooperated for a period of time, air travel dropped by 95% and we had enhanced unemployment. But patience only seemed to last 2 or 3 months at most, and then people just decided to ignore the emergency. Now we have 10X as many cases as we did in the spring and air travel is now almost 50% of normal. The sense of urgency and crisis seems to have been lost and the individualist belief system has been re-instated. The complaint I have is that the individualism has become such an unquestionable ideology that people only tolerated suspending it for 2 or 3 months, rather than until the crisis is actually over or at least under control.
Yes. It's hard to too individualistic if you live in a society that requires people who take each other into consideration. I'm not knocking it though, one of those considerations we give is allowing people to live their lives the way they want, which is great if people have the space to do that and don't stray too far from the social norms. This can start to become a problem though when larger groups of people who share a desire for one thing conflicts with another large group who desire something. Then balkanization starts happening, issues grow from there.
Since you mentioned Covid specifically I'll just say that there are 2 or more camps of people with different ways of thinking bout the virus and the vaccine. While I'd love to say of COURSE people would come together on serious issue that effects everyone, and I think we do when it's something more visible like a natural disaster or a 9-11 type of event, the particulars around Covid haven't played out so neatly. It's far to mixed up with international relations and politics for whatever reason and that never leads to anything unifying. Maybe if we hadn't lived through years of toxicity that had everyone giving each other the side eye already we'd be seeing more cooperation, but who knows.
Right now, a lot of people are unwilling to take this crisis seriously, it is very different from World War II. Back in March and April, we cooperated for a period of time, air travel dropped by 95% and we had enhanced unemployment. But patience only seemed to last 2 or 3 months at most, and then people just decided to ignore the emergency. Now we have 10X as many cases as we did in the spring and air travel is now almost 50% of normal. The sense of urgency and crisis seems to have been lost and the individualist belief system has been re-instated. The complaint I have is that the individualism has become such an unquestionable ideology that people only tolerated suspending it for 2 or 3 months, rather than until the crisis is actually over or at least under control.
Well, can you blame people? How long did "they" and "their" cronies expect us Americans to put up with this plandemic? 2 months? 2 years? Forever? Especially considering that SARS, MERS, and Ebola of the past were barely a blip on the radar. Nothing was closed. No masks. No social distancing. Those diseases were just something people were vaguely aware of.
People are willing to put up with temporary inconveniences (like social distancing) for the greater good. But "they" abused the privilege and betrayed America. So when people's patience ran out and real-life observations went against MSM's messages, people realized they were being had. So they took matters into their own hands, and resumed a normal life as much as possible.
You misunderstood. I was not arguing that we need to get rid of all the individualism. I was simply providing those as examples of what I mean by individualist vs. collectivist thinking (since these terms have a lot of related but distinct meanings). I specifically said individualism is fine when it comes to issues like moving out of your parents' home or buying a car. But the point I'm trying to make is that it has become dogmatic, which is to say, the belief is treated as such an unquestionable pillar of belief that it has spilled over into realms where it is not reasonable, such as how to handle a pandemic. There is a difference between practical or pragmatic individualism (of the kind you seem to favor) on the one hand vs. dogmatic, unchangeable, ideologically-absolutist individualism on the other. It is about the willingness to consider the circumstances.
Right now, a lot of people are unwilling to take this crisis seriously, it is very different from World War II. Back in March and April, we cooperated for a period of time, air travel dropped by 95% and we had enhanced unemployment. But patience only seemed to last 2 or 3 months at most, and then people just decided to ignore the emergency. Now we have 10X as many cases as we did in the spring and air travel is now almost 50% of normal. The sense of urgency and crisis seems to have been lost and the individualist belief system has been re-instated. The complaint I have is that the individualism has become such an unquestionable ideology that people only tolerated suspending it for 2 or 3 months, rather than until the crisis is actually over or at least under control.
I was just responding to the examples set out in post no. 1. Given that I see what you are trying to illustrate and how it may tie in with those behaviors. All people and societies should recognize that change is inevitable and those that adapt best will succeed whereas others will flounder.
The U.S. has responded well to military threats but doesn't seem to adapt to public safety threats. Its not just COVID, but even things like automotive-related fatalities are much higher here than say Germany. In the 80s there was a burgeoning anti-drunk driving movement which helped reduce death rates, but on other fronts, e.g. pedestrian/bicycle safety there has been little progress. Even with all of the new safety technologies automobile deaths are at a 5 year high in my city.
I wished there had been more consensus on the COVID threat, one considering a worst possible scenario, e.g. Spanish Flu, and then an appropriate response. "Pragramatic" is a good term for this.
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