Individualism

Love it and hate it!

Individualism

Since reading James Richardson’s book, I’ve become hyper-aware of the pitfalls of America’s extreme individualism. Richardson argues that we hesitate to reach out for help when something goes wrong because we expect to be scolded for not being more careful. That reaction is unusual and it is cultural. And for people who have survived trauma, the last thing they need to hear is, “You got yourself into this mess.”

Yet that is exactly what most of us have been taught, which is to assume the individual is always the primary cause of their own misfortune. In a proud, urban, self-help driven culture, we require ourselves to solve problems alone. Over time you may even come to believe that you are the sole author of both your failures and your successes, which as Richardson notes is an illusion bordering on the absurd.

This was the first of many posts that I have made about this James Richardson book:

Book Links

Richardson asks, “Is it reasonable to expect every individual to understand what could go wrong in any given social context they are freely allowed to enter with zero preparation?” This is question exposes a contradiction at the heart of individualism. It promises freedom of movement, but in practice, it limits mobility by placing total responsibility for every transition on the individual.”

No wonder people stay in struggling regions. Leaving often means abandoning whatever community they have and stepping into an unfamiliar environment where every choice, risk, or misstep is assumed to be their personal burden to bear. You can almost hear the chorus: “You should have done your homework.” But is that a fair expectation in a rapidly shifting society where many people move far beyond their family’s knowledge base, entering worlds their parents or grandparents could never have prepared them for? Politically, the same thing is happening.

Only in the most extreme events like natural disasters and mass shootings, do we instinctively look at systemic failures and social context rather than at individual shortcomings. But nothing happens in a vacuum. Richardson asks, “What perversion of neo-Puritanical moral reasoning accounts for this latent tendency to blame individuals for most of their problems and not a broken system? Survivors of trauma often retreat behind a self-imposed wall of privacy, burying what they went through for years or even forever, convinced that revealing their experience will invite judgment rather than care.”

For me, the main takeaway from the book is that as we rebuild civic institutions, we must do better. Humans do not inherently trust strangers, especially when we are forced to evaluate them solely as individuals. This is one reason Edward Snowden cited when he blew the whistle. He worried that an NSA analyst, acting alone and under stress or influence, could misinterpret information with enormous consequences. A society that relies too heavily on individual judgment is taking an unpredictable risk.

Ironically, Richardson cites the U.S. Army’s definition of codependent behavior, which includes things like feeling pity when others suffer and feeling compelled to help. These are traits that many cultures would consider virtues. It’s a reminder that our moral vocabulary is culturally specific. We want bureaucracies like the FAA, NASA, or the regulatory arms of nuclear plants to be precise, rule-bound, and predictable. Yet modern American culture simultaneously glorifies unrestrained personal autonomy.

It’s a strange contradiction. We demand reliable bureaucracies, but we also resist the constraints that make them reliable. Bureaucratic systems naturally resist innovation and they guard the status quo. But American individualism sometimes goes further, encouraging us to undermine or subvert those systems in the name of personal freedom.

Since I always like to bring these grand concepts back to our own lives, please take a few moments and consider some of the reading-group questions that are posed at the end of his book:

• Think about a time in your life when you felt overwhelmed by choices.

• What other groups of Americans might not fit the pattern of hyper-individualism described in this book?

• Does your extended family resemble the pattern described? Why or why not?

• Do you want more close friends than you currently have?

• Think of a time when autonomy actually led you to make a worse choice.

Let’s tie together what we covered the last two months. Montaigne’s friend, Etienne La Boétie suggested that people submit to domination when they feel alone and uncertain. Corey Robin said that people defend hierarchy when it offers identity and status. James Richardson adds a third insight. When individualism becomes extreme, people lose the social structures that make freedom livable. They become isolated, anxious, and overloaded with choices.

These are the conditions that make them more vulnerable to both domination and hierarchy. If the future we want to build, has a central question, it may be this one. How far can a liberal society push individualism before it begins to erode the very foundations of cooperation, trust, and shared meaning that liberalism depends on? Excessive individualism dissolves the social glue that makes freedom sustainable.