PSST!! Hey! Click the like or share button or leave a comment, will you please? The more interaction the more eyes at the Stack end up on the newsletter, which helps this project grow. Thanks!
Last week I wrote something that keeps rolling around in my mind. Why? Because it’s true, but there’s more to it than what I wrote and I thought we should discuss it.
What I wrote was:
What [integrity] asks of us, the way it restructures our priorities, flies in the face of some of the most essential aspects of our modern social reality— individualism, capitalism, political tribalism, and our seemingly unending tendency to create hierarchical systems of human value.
The piece that keeps rolling around in my mind is about individualism and how integrity contradicts the tenets of this philosophy. So, what is individualism, exactly?
According to Merriam-Webster, individualism is “a doctrine that the interests of the individual are or ought to be ethically paramount”. Further, individualism is “a theory maintaining the political and economic independence of the individual and stressing individual initiative, action, and interests.” Interestingly, individualism as a concept emerged in the 19th century and started out meaning slightly different things in different countries, ranging from Romantic notions of individuality and genius in Germany to religious non-conformity in England, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. But the particular meaning of individualism that has came to dominate all the others, the one Merriam-Webster is alluding to, originated with Herbert Hoover and his 1928 campaign for president of the the United States of America.
Good, old Herbert first introduced the now very American notion of “rugged individualism”, and associated it with personal freedom, capitalism, and limited government. Since then, this American individualism concept has come to exist in contrast to collectivism, interdependence, and community obligation. And that, my friends, is where we need to talk about integrity.
I also wrote last week, “Your personal integrity work is ultimately for the good of your community and the world.” We don’t just put in all this effort— to meditate deeply on what we believe and who we are, to be forthright and authentic, to honor our commitments and responsibilities, to fight for what matters— simply for our own good (though it undoubtedly makes our lives better in the long run). We do all this work because it changes the world around us. It ripples out and affects our families, our friendships, our neighborhoods, and our communities.
I’ve said it before and will say it again, resources may not trickle down, but integrity trickles up. Our families, communities, nations, and the world will never be any better than we, ourselves, are. The world needs us to practice our integrity so all that individual work adds up. Your work added to my work, to his work, and to their work over there. Drop by drop, our work becomes a deluge that washes away all manner of toxicity. Can anyone, in this day and age of climate catastrophe and rising sea levels, argue against the collective power of water?
We can be that water.
In a recent podcast interview, former First Lady Michelle Obama was asked, “[Y]ou talk about the importance and the dignity of tending to the small, what you call what is good, simple and accomplishable. What makes the good, simple and accomplishable so important and so dignified for us to do?” In response, she replied:
Because in my view, that’s how change happens. The real lasting change, when we look over the course of human history, yes, there’s the big wars, there’s the depression, there’s big stuff, the invention of the telephone and all of that stuff, that’s all big and we write about it. But the way the world works is that we live, we love, we bring life in. We teach from that life. It goes on and it does better than us. Small things. I was First Lady of the United States of America, but the biggest job I’ve ever had, will ever have, is raising two human beings that I’m putting out into the world, more empathetic, more compassionate. Is it glamorous? It should be more glamorous than what we make of it in this society because it’s really pretty profound what we do to raise another human being. How we interact with other human beings in the world.
She reminds us, by advocating that we tend to the small, where the power of the individual really lies. We are a social species. Meaning, we are by nature interconnected and interdependent. Individualism, certainly as Herbert Hoover conceived of it, doesn’t even make sense from a biological point of view, not to mention the havoc it has wrought on us economically and morally since his time.
But let us not swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, though, with all of this talk of interdependence and collectivism. Any student of history can point to examples, large and small, where entirely subordinating the individual to the collective went very, very wrong. Stalinism comes to mind, as well as the imprisonment of dissidents in Cuba, North Korea, and China.
The collective is where we practice our integrity, but our individual selves, in all of their mess and contradiction and complexity, are our instrument.
The trouble isn’t the collective, though, or the individual in and of themselves. It’s the very idea of ranking them, of constructing a social hierarchy in which one is always subordinate to the other. We need our collectives, be they family, community, neighborhood, or nation. They give us values to believe in or to push against (equally important). Through them, ideally, we are sheltered and experience belonging.
However, the individual is also essential. Why? Because that’s our sphere of influence. That’s “the thing we can control”, as Mrs. Obama says. Our individual selves are the gift we’ve been given, the raw material we have at our disposal to make something gorgeous, true, and authentic to share with the world.
The collective is where we practice our integrity, but our individual selves, in all of their mess and contradiction and complexity, are our instrument. Will we wield our individual instruments in harmony with each other? Can we approach dissonance purposefully and artistically?
We are entering a period where we are going to have to reconfigure this notion of collectivism versus individualism and realize that the two are inextricably entangled, as they should be. Their conversation is constant. They need each other. Just like teams and players need each other, or musicians and the orchestra. Each individual tending to their small part combines and elevates the collective to make something triumphant, something beautiful. Every other species on the planet innately understands this. It is only we humans, with a self-consciousness that allows us to imagine we are separate from each other, who misunderstand this essential fact of life.
Great essay today. Thanks!
As I read it, I thought about how evolution works. Evolution only works in the context of the collective of all of nature; however, it also only works as individuals adapt, usually in seemingly small and insignificant ways, to changing circumstances.