The dichotomy of our lives is easily understood…
good vs evil, mind vs body, real vs imaginary, male vs female…
that list can be extended……………….
We have another dichotomy that has been plaguing human beings
since time began…… that of the individual vs the collective………
the one, the individual and the many, the collective…….
Depending on the civilization, the emphasis has been either the
one or the many…Greece fell in part because of its emphasis
on the one, the individual…and Greece fell to Rome who emphasized
the many, the group……
We have had many champions of the one over the many…
The Greek play “Antigone” is one such play…
Of course in modern times we have Kierkegaard and Ibsen
and Nietzsche……….
and the list of those who have championed the many over the one is
a long and lengthy list…from the declaration of independence
to Marx to the French revolution……
Religious founders tend to favor individuals, Jesus and Mohammed and the Buddha
speak to the needs of the individual, not the collective…
But Confucius speaks to the many, the collective…
It has been an ongoing question of the one vs the many…
It even has been referenced in movies like the Star Trek movies…….
“the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one”
America has been the home of the individual, the philosophy
of the “rugged individualism” has been present in all of American
history… and even today, conservatives has advocated the one
over the many… the individual over the collective…
whereas liberals argue for the many over the one…….
the group over the individual…….
and who is right?
Well that depends upon when we are talking about?
For example, when the America was young and there was
a lot of land to be colonized, it was the movement of
the single person, the one that moved west and colonized the west…
But today, this philosophy of the “individual” no longer can
work…… We no longer have the time or space to allow individual
actions that were the norm a century ago………The larger and more
complex a system is, the less able it is to enable a single individual action,
as we grow larger and more complex, we cannot have random, single individual
actions within that system…… everyone has to move in the same direction
in a large complex system or the system gets bogged down……
Think of the solar system, it works as long as all the moving parts
are moving the same way in a circle, if Mars were to escape its orbit
and wander freely across the solar system, massive chaos would
occur in our solar system… large and complex systems must have
all the parts going in the right direction or the system risks failure,
risk coming apart……
and that is true of our very complex, moving system we call the modern world……
everyone has to be moving the right direction or the system risks failure…
there is certainly a time and place for individualism and a time and place
for collectivism and today, in the here and now, the system requires,
demands that we engage in the system as a collective because of
our large and complex system that we have in place………random actions
of the individual threatens the complexity of our modern system which
demands that we all play our role in the specific way we are supposed to…
but that conflicts with the goal and aspirations of the individual…
me included… for I too chafe under the modern world need for collective
action…for I stand with the individual, but I also recognize the need for
collective action… how do I successfully integrate the individual needs with
the society, collective needs?
and that becomes the question of the day…….we must allow the individual
the scope and freedom to become who they are and yet we must protect
the integrity of the group, the collective, society……
This clash between the individual and the group has been the basis
of much of human history, see the clash between Socrates and Athens,
where the individual lost and that individual had to commit suicide,
Socrates drank the hemlock and society was saved or was it?
We have Jesus’s clash with the state and we have
Spinoza clash with the Jews…
History is replete with examples of the ongoing clash
between the individual and the state/collective……….
My natural instinct is with the individual, recall I was an anarchist
for many years… and yet, yet I can see the need for collective
actions and responsibility…hence the communist part of me…
Within my soul lies the battle, the ago old battle between the needs
of the individual and the needs of the collective/state…
and we can see this ago old battle being fought out today between our society
and the individuals within that society…
I wish I had some answers, but I don’t… I do not see any answers between
the needs of the one and the needs of the society/collective…
Kropotkin