Individualism is the air we breathe. It surrounds us like the water that fish swim in, inescapably. If you have grown up in North America in anything other than abject poverty, being against individualism is like being against breathing.
Like many other demonic inventions, invidiualism offers us the world at the price of our souls. It informs us that we can be truly great as long as we’re willing to sever many of our ties to our own humanity
Individualism is one of the most gripping stories to come along in a long time. If it were a book, it would be a massively successful bestseller. About as credible as a Dan Brown novel, individualism is the fiction we are forcefed from our earliest memory. It is the collective delusion that, as we grow and mature, we should progressively eliminate any and all dependencies on others.
As I started to write these very words on my Apple laptop, the lights in my apartment flickered and then extinguished. The emergency lights in my apartment hallway didn’t even come on, and I pondered the bewildering web of men and women I’m dependent upon to provide me with electricity. I am able to labour under the illusion that I am living a life dependent on nobody other than me until one of the hundreds—if not thousands—of people standing between me and functional electricity make a mistake. Those people are invisible, abstracted from the story I am writing about my life—at least until something goes wrong.
So, individualism is always a fiction, not a real thing in itself. The real world is interdependent, individualism always an ignorance or a lie. Now all we need is a new story that will help us see all of this.
One response to “Swimming in Individualism”
hi matt,
great post. love this topic. could talk about it for hours. i wish this sort of discussion was on the tops of people’s thoughts more and more as we realize that our resources that provide the illusion of independence are depleting faster each day. watch this preview and perhaps we can learn a few things from other people groups!
http://www.powerofcommunity.org/cm/index.php