96. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE INDIVIDUAL: On The Incoherency of Individualism

A student asked if we could imagine a world where the Prime Minister announced a shortage of petrol (or toilet roll, or dried pasta, or…name whatever limited resource you like) and, instead of immediately triggering panic buying, the announcement was greeted by a wave of collective reason.  I will only buy the limited good if I really need it right now, understanding that others may need this now limited resource more than I do.  Perhaps usually I fill up my car whenever it hits the final quarter of a tank?  Now that I know there is not enough fuel to go around then maybe, in these circumstances, I’ll wait until I’m closer to empty?  That sort of thing.

The room thought about it and admitted it was certainly conceivable.  There was no necessary entailment from announcing a limited resource to its inevitable panic buying.  The phenomenon was purely cultural.  And other cultures, indeed other worlds, are entirely possible.  That we live in the culture that we do - the one where queues of panic buying drivers clogged up roads and forecourts last week, trying to squeeze the last drops of remaining fuel into cars that had more than enough petrol to see them through - is a matter of ideology rather than an inevitable selfishness being revealed.  We are simply not a society trained to think of others.  Indeed, in the very school classroom where we were having this discussion, the same students asking these questions would soon be needlessly competing against each other to determine who ranked highest between them in mathematics, history, art, biology, physics, chemistry, philosophy (a nonsensical and irrelevant idea in every case) all so they can compete against each other, and every other young person in the country, for the limited jobs available for them to afford a decent living in our unfair and unequal society.  The classroom was sitting in a school where, since the government took away the mandatory masking of students to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and left it to “individual personal responsibility” very few people bothered to wear them anymore.  Masks, of course, being a perfect symbol of individualism vs collectivism right now being as the mask doesn’t keep its wearer safe from this coronavirus, but instead helps protect others from the wearer’s potential infection.  The choice not to wear one is therefore a choice to gamble with the health of others for our individual comfort.  Just as the choice to fill a car with petrol that already has half a tank full is a choice to deny the ambulance on empty the ability to refuel, or the delivery driver who will not be able to pay this week’s bills if they cannot drive their van.  In a society where we are more and more on our own as the welfare state continues to erode, where we can literally be left to die of poverty with a shrug of our collective shoulders, and where any social safety net there may have once been has been weakened to the point of being barely able to function anymore, the message is so often repeated, both explicitly and implicitly: you have to look after number one before you can worry about anybody else…because nobody else is going to look after you.

As I thought of someone I knew, recently told they would be paid a measly £27 a week in maternity pay to cover all their costs as they take time off work to have a baby, another student echoed the words of Margaret Thatcher: there’s no such thing as society.  The argument goes like this: if a society is merely a collection of individuals then there must necessarily be no such thing as society. There is only the individuals the collective is made of.  To philosophers this is a claim which perhaps commits the fallacy of composition, assuming something is true of the whole (society) just because it is true of the component parts of which it is composited (they are individuals).  But for many the idea seems to bear out when we see scenes like we saw in the UK this September.  From COVID in classrooms to panic over petrol, the idea of society, of our inherent interconnectedness, seems something forgotten as individuals are encouraged and socialised more and more into doing just what they like, consequences be damned.  Brexit itself, the central cause of the fuel shortages, is, of course, a further symptom of such individualism.  Rather than forming a collective with others across the shared continent, we decided as a country that we would rather go it alone, even if it means plunging Ireland into uncertainty, alienating our allies, and leaving our supermarket shelves empty.

But is individualism really that bad, asked another student?  For example, aren’t there some times where we need to take some self-care, or simply make a choice that is in our personal interest and not the interest of others.  The student gave the example of their younger sibling wanting to play with them but having to say no because it was important that he studied for an exam.  What was wrong with something like that?

Instead of answering the normative question of individualism’s rightness or wrongness, I posed another: is individualism coherent?  Is there actually such a thing as the individual?  Thinking about the work of Onora O’Neill on the inherent connectedness, plurality and finitude of people, and of Judith Butler on selfhood and the conception of violence, I asked if anyone could actually point to an example of a genuinely individual act?  In the example given about denying a sibling to revise for an exam, for instance, the younger sibling couldn’t play without the cooperation of his brother and their brother’s denial would mean the sibling would have to impose on someone else for play. Meanwhile, revising for an exam, our supposedly individual act, is an act which relies on so many interconnected people.  The teachers who taught you, the exam board who set the exam, the publishers who printed and distributed the textbooks, the company that made the pens and paper you use and, of course, the entire society which supports the specific given system of examination and makes sense of the random letter or number you present in a job application or CV that tells them you got an A* or 9 in a particular subject.  Without all of that you are just a person in a room with a book scratching peculiar marks onto a page.  We need others not only to resource our needs, but others to make sense of everything we do.  As Wittgenstein reminds us: we need others with whom we play our language games because, alone, we cannot communicate.

Several attempts were made, and I asked many other people later (my own attempt to think about the issue or write this post impossible to do alone, and requiring the input of many other minds) and in every case proffered there was some connection it was impossible to deny with at least someone else.  Even masturbation, that most personal and individualistic act I was suggested, requires the physical energy which comes from food, farmed by others, perhaps purchased by others, cooked maybe by others too, etc.  When I go to buy my petrol, I need roads built by others, with tax money collected from others, and a vehicle sold to me by others, serviced and maintained by others, engineered and manufactured by others, and that’s before we even get to how the petrol came to be in a handy mechanical pump and not trapped deep underground.  When I go to panic-buy my toilet roll, I am relying not merely on the network of individuals who turned a tree into something soft enough to use on my behind and flush into a sewer system below, but the entire intellectual innovation and plumbing which gave us sanitary hygiene in the first place.  In the middle ages there would be no panic buying of paper used to clean oneself after going to the bathroom (nor would there be a bathroom).  When I choose not to wear a mask, I don’t only put at risk the health of others who might catch COVID from me, but the lives of all those affected by the overwhelming of healthcare services because of the demand of COVID 19.  The cancer patients who miss key treatments, the heart attacks whose ambulance never came, the patients who needed ventilators which were no longer available, the people unable to get the appointment with their GP which might have caught a problem early…  

More than individualism being morally bad (although that may also be true) it is an incoherent doctrine based on a fictional notion of a self which doesn’t actually exist.  There are no individuals.  There are only human beings who, to survive to the point of being identifiably “individual”, have already necessarily relied on being fed by others, clothed by others, taught by others, helped by others, so that they could inherit a world built on the ideas and ingenuity of others, the resources of others, the engineering and hard work of others, the invention of others, so that they could co-operate and collaborate with others and continue that collective enterprise of continued, interconnected existence. Far from there being no such thing as society, I offered, perhaps the opposite was true: there was only society.  It was the individual there was no such thing as?  The moral wrongness of individualism stems from the fact that acting on this misguided notion sabotages this reality and hides our necessary connections with others, condemning many to an untenable severing from which they cannot survive alone.  

And in answer to the first question, maybe if we spoke more about how connected we all are, how no one really can go it alone, then, yes, perhaps we might live in a society where the announcement of a resource-shortage was met with calm instead of chaos. 

If you want to prove me wrong, and make the case for the individual, then please feel free.  Comment on what I have said.  Engage with me.  Collaborate.  And in doing so, recognise that even here you are connecting your thoughts to mine and participating in a collective venture. Without your reading this post, my own words would have simply sat in internet limbo, achieving nothing, just as without my reading and responding to your comments, they too would be meaningless.  Because there is no such thing as the individual, there is only ever the collective delusion that there is.    

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE  and from all good booksellers.