One thing that bothers me about people, and that is the defining trait that alienates me from them, is their absolute need/desire/hunger/instinct to belong to something “bigger.”
People need to feel that they are part of grand social and cultural groups that shadow their existence, and they use this singularly to define their own character and personality.
Most of the crap people fixate on involves exactly this tendency. People spend time and money, emotional and intellectual exertion, just to be a part of something bigger and more powerful that they can tout as an externally imbued identity.
This human trait is a primary building block of conformity.
This bothers me about people. It bothers me that they are not willing individualists. They are only fulfilled when they can ingratiate themselves into the bowels of a large, faceless glob of mass identity by which to be defined to themselves and others.
They join churches, they wear the identity of their employers or sports clubs or schools. They wear letterman jackets or plaster “‘fill-in-the-school name’ Alumni” license frames on their tasteful imports.
Most people are rudderless in the absence of a supreme all-encompassing identity they can call their own. It’s as if their intrinsic value is defined by that potpourri of societal detritus they can affiliate with. It doesn’t matter that my name is Joe Blow and that I am a unique human being with original thoughts. The only thing that matters is that I went to UCLA and I work for Xerox and I own a house with 3 bedrooms. This is who I am and how I demand to be defined. I have no identity. I am a harmless, useless interjection in the capitalist flow. I don’t define or stand for anything other than what I represent as a statistic and a consumer base.
This is what bothers me about people.
People are not individuals.
They do not have the strength nor power to stand alone as monuments of uniqueness and self-definition. They must continually borrow identities and assume the facade of a larger entity that is merely an assemblage of faceless humanity that coalesces to proclaim a common heritage.
A man of vision must seek kinship with nothing and no one but himself.
A true man of vision should create a definition of himself. He must proclaim with pride that he is the unprecendented kernel that owes no allegiance nor generational legacy to anything.
I wish people would be true individualists. But they are all sheep.
Human nature is a herd. In fact, I always hear about how social interactions define our chances for success and prosperity. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps this explains me. I can’t fathom defining myself by a school or team or political party. I’ve chosen the path less chosen, and thus declining to join the herd, have damned myself to anonymous mediocrity.
In fact, blogdom is unique in that there is only one URL in existence, and you are using it. To a lesser degree, your blog name is unique but not necessarily so.
Ah, it doesn’t matter.
We mock the robotic sheep, but we are no better. We merely fancy it up in cloudy notions.
Keep wishing, others have wished it in the past. I think Carl Jung found something of an answer to the problem. Individuation is hard and comes between the age of 40 and 50, when you integrate the common, the social, you see through the masks and you undergo a painful and mysterious process.
The solution he found, and that others have found, is that man owes to his legacy, but also makes it his own. That way, you also transform the herd, print yourself onto it. And it’s a stable thing. Not necessarily bad. Trying to be totally your own person means you may not gain traction with the world, never print yourself onto it.
Because cutting yourself off and proclaiming yourself is easy. But some people have a bigger fish to fry. They do not cut themselves off, yet somehow manage to imprint their face on all that precede them and all that will come after. An amazing feat. Nikos Kazantzakis tried and did it, others did it too.
Those that cut themselves off, Fountainhead style, may look glitzy, but they put themselves into a dead end. It’s a big question. Defining yourself is one thing, gaining traction in the world a whole other thing.
And even if you break free from the most visible identities, you are still just the peak of a reality running deep and wide. Yes, there is a faceless mass- so the bigger game is to give your face to it.
Well, to some extent I get what you mean. I think that as some people get older, the need for connection to others is greater. I do not know why that is. But I think that this calls for an even larger discussion.
Education.
Or the lact therof in the most important area.
Thinking. Any kind of real thinking.
Because schools, especially government schools, are basically warehouses for children in which they will hopefully learn about things, they will never be taught to think about such things. And the reality is for so many people, it is the path of least resistance to be a sheeple.
One of the reasons I believe that homeschooling is great is the time that one can and should take with a child to teach him or her to think and not just learn.
With thinking in one’s hip pocket, one can be much more individualist than not.
I think that as people get older, especially in Western culture, they become less relevant, and in some way, become less alive. Seeking community is merely seeking other like-wise miserable company.
The more individualistic I realize I’ve become, the more I see in fact I think like my grandmothers and great-grandmothers. They were not free-standing statues, they were human beings with a whole world around them, but to each element of their world they added a touch of uniqueness. The grandfathers, too, but they seem a bit more distant to me.
Modern education seems to be like taking aquatic animals and putting them in an aquarium. They are almost the same, yet they cannot have an effect on the ecosystem. As far as I’ve read about marine biology, some critters will turn into “aquarium variety”, changing their look so much as to be almost unrecognizable from their wild brethren, at least to a layman.
So, education will take away your natural ecosystem, where you can give and take, and give you another ecosystem, in which you will struggle, you will mutate into something less robust, and weird.
I like that analogy.
“Civilized” and “mannerly” culture is our aquarium, replete with fake props to lend the appearance of reality. I wonder who’s watching us and smirking.
“Why can’t everyone else be like me, dammit?!?” :)
That would not be good, for the sake of mankind…
Not to mention distant ethnic backgrounds, contemporary subcultures, and bogus mental disorders, people are all too happy to emulate others pre determined definitions of them.