Beyond Individualism: Rethinking Labels, Lines, and Ourselves
American individualism draws rigid lines around each of us, boxing us in as individuals. Let's explore how these lines limit our understanding of who we are and what we can become.
Democracy in America is becoming increasingly untenable (discussed in my last post). And much of our support for democracy stems from individualism. We Americans emphasize individual rights: freedom of speech, bodily autonomy, the right to bear arms, and most importantly, the right to vote and make one’s voice heard. These individual rights all have some utility in preventing government and collective overreach.
But they are also arbitrary, and there are many examples of when these rights should be (and already have been) limited. This is because individual rights are not God-given. They do not objectively exist.
Even further: the individual does not objectively exist. Not in the cleanly delineated way we typically imagine. Each of us is constantly exchanging materials with the surrounding universe, oxygen and information and culture flowing into and out from the pulsating terminals of our bodies.
Yet individualism relies on its conception of people as entirely separate from the universe. It emphasizes the whims of the individual—who has evolved to care about short-term, self-centered concerns—making it difficult to solve issues like wealth inequality and climate change. Individualism approximates the radiant, complexly porous human into an overly simple individual, putting us each into boxes and organizing society as if we are an Amazon warehouse.
To change our system for the better, we need to challenge belief in this foundational pillar of American democracy. So today, let’s look at why individualism is so deeply rooted, how to weaken its hold, and why attacking this one pillar of American thought might be effective in helping us change many other areas.
The problematic appeal of individualism
Having grown up in America, it’s easy to see why individualism is so pervasive. In the individualistic ideal, one can “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” One need not bow to authority. It feels good to imagine oneself as a hero against the harsh world, protecting everything they care for with the force of their internal strength and determination. How inspiring! No wonder cowboy Westerns dominated film and TV for decades. No wonder superheroes and Chosen One stories are rampant in literature and Netflix. Doesn’t the image of a hero standing against the wild, corrupt world feel like truth?
Well, it’s not truth, even if it feels like it. Let’s examine the falsity of this ideal.
First (and most pedantically), the word “individual” literally means “one who is indivisible,” but we know a person is not indivisible. Brains can be split apart, leaving two separate lobes who don’t speak well to one another. Neurons themselves are complex, each having synaptic connections that survive or perish in a Darwinian way. And of course all of these structures are in principle divisible into smaller components. So at the most basic level, the idea of individuals is definitionally untrue.
Second (and most importantly), individualism solidifies in American minds the false ideal of an individual as the most important unit of society. Under individualism, we Americans protect individual rights at the cost of collective good. (You’re an individual! You! We protect your rights!) We Americans may view the poor and downtrodden as failed individuals, rather than the result of structural problems. We may see taxation as the government taking what we alone earned—as self-made men/women—rather than as contributions back into the system that allowed us to earn our money in the first place. We prioritize “freedom,” a murky term which belies the fact that we are never free from cultural and bioevolutionary coercion. The borders of American “freedom” are then arbitrarily drawn around freedom from specific types of influence.
So at its core, individualism propagates the Christianity-rooted falsehood that we are indivisible souls, each independently fighting against chaos and evil. It propagates the Enlightenment-rooted (and still Christianity-rooted) falsehood that we are independent rational agents operating in free markets with natural rights. It solidifies Isaac Newton’s conception of the universe as mechanistic, with natural laws calculable by reducing an individual to a point of mass and position. I’m being a little loose with the historical connections, but bear with me.
These historical views are seductively simple. Simple explanations were highly beneficial in evolutionary times (because they were usually good solutions to the simple problems of those eras), so we evolved to be emotionally attracted to such simplicity.
But we don’t live in simple times. The more we look, the more we see complexity. It no longer makes sense to use methodologically individualistic models that assume the world consists of frictionless billiard balls and rational agents. These simplistic models are far from the truth. Unfortunately, they still feel true to many people.
This feeling of truth comes from the confidence one gets by carving up reality into easily graspable chunks. So people draw neat, rigid lines around messy, fuzzy objects. They draw these lines and view the world as simpler, less complex, more intuitively understandable than it really is. They draw lines around each individual and build moral, economic, and political systems around this approximate understanding.
I believe this process of delineation is at the core of individualism. And since individualism is at the core of democracy, changing democracy means we need to change how people draw lines.
Blurring the lines
William James called the conscious experience of an infant a “buzzing, blooming confusion.” The world to a newborn is initially bizarre, abound with unknown shapes and sounds and smells. As the child develops, it begins to apply cognitive labels to the world. That big soft thing with the milk is mama. The bigger smelly thing is dada. It is cognitively useful, especially for computational efficiency, to apply labels to the objects it sees (Piaget termed this assimilation into schemas). So the child continues applying labels until everything is conceptually mapped. Add in language and culture, and by the time we grow into adulthood, we are very attached to labels.
Evolutionarily, labeling is extremely useful. It helps us decide what is scary and what is tasty. Notice how emotions become attached to the labels. Emotions and labels are heuristics—”good-enough” approximations that enable quick and efficient judgments. We might label a person a ‘criminal’ to approximate them as an individual who deserves punishment, obscuring their often complex circumstances and potential for rehabilitation. We might label someone ‘successful,’ reinforcing the approximate belief in a just world where individual effort is rewarded, and separating them from the network of contributions required for success.
We need to recognize that these labels are approximations. When adults see a spoon, they see a “spoon.” That is, they see an object meant to spoon soup into one’s mouth. They have approximated the object into its shape and function. But this is not the exact truth. It is more true to see a spoon as an object which can be used to spoon soup into one’s mouth. Children are actually closer to seeing this truth since they are not as strongly committed to the label. They can pick up a spoon and see a catapult, or an object to be thrown. They see more possibilities than an adult because they have not delineated the world so rigidly.
There are already attempts to undo this labeling and return to the child-like view. In Zen, the concept is called shoshin. One scholar writes of Eastern philosophies, “To think like a child is to have a mind that is open and untainted and neither overly complicated nor distanced from existence by a systematic view of life.” Child-like views are often experienced on psychedelics: “Similar to the brain of an infant, the psychedelic-altered brain is plastic, free, and unconstrained, and this has been connected to child-like states of openness and wonder.” These two unusual states of mind (Enlightened and psychedelic) are noteworthy because they undo some of the biological and cultural programming that makes adults overly attached to their labels.
Challenging such labels is useful in critiquing power structures like individualism, so academics also attempt to undo labeling. Deconstruction is a movement in academic philosophy, which critically analyzes concepts, language, and structures to reveal hidden assumptions and contradictions. “Queering” is a term from queer theory that originally meant challenging heteronormativity, but which now can be applied more broadly to queering other delineations.
Academics, psychedelic users, and Eastern philosophers have all recognized the value of seeing the world more clearly, with fewer attachments to labels. Many Westerners remain overly attached to these labels without realizing their limitations. That’s where you and I come in.
Toward a more mature, child-like future
There are many possible benefits to spreading awareness of the inadequacy of labels. We are all trying to decide what to type into our Terminals, and it is much easier to decide rationally when we see the world for what it really is in all its porous and complex glory.
If we Americans can melt our rigid attachments to labels, then so much more would become suddenly possible. Suddenly we would be aware that understanding the world is a never-ending process. Suddenly we would be more intellectually humble and open to redefining our terms. Suddenly we would see ourselves as a complex interwoven network, rather than as separate indivisible entities. Suddenly we would see the world not as a rigid structure to defend, but as an amorphous ball of clay to shape. We would see the future not with fatalistic resignation, but with child-like wonder.
You’re probably skeptical that such a melting can be done, especially in the minds of enough Americans to matter. But there are a couple of reasons for optimism. First, the change doesn’t need to be absolute. People don’t need to be Enlightened or have psychedelically plastic brains in order to understand the limitations of language and labels. Basic awareness is enough and would enable political conversations to go past arguments about definitions, toward the deeper questions of who we are as a species and what we are all trying to do.
Second, the movement to melt our labels is new. Eastern philosophies only recently began spreading in the West in the 19th century, Derrida’s deconstruction was introduced in 1967, and queer theory emerged in the early 1990s. These are up against centuries and millennia of programming, all the way back to the Enlightenment, Christianity, and evolutionary history. Those old influences have a head start, but together we can plant the seeds for a more fluid and adaptable future.
How can you contribute to this?
The first step is to think about your own labels. Where do you draw lines in the world? Do your political beliefs assume we are rigid individuals? How often do you critically consider your worldview’s ontology (i.e. what you believe exists)?
The second step is to notice and point out the lines other people use. This is easiest when you disagree with them. Often when two people disagree, they don’t agree on delineating labels. For example, pro-life advocates have their definitions of a human life, which draws a rigid approximate boundary around the messy, nuanced biological reality. Pro-choice advocates may draw their lines around viability and bodily autonomy, simplifying the ethical landscape by minimizing the moral worth of non-viable fetuses. To both sides, their lines feel intuitively true and help to reduce the cognitive dissonance of acknowledging trade-offs. Pointing out differences in lines helps get to the heart of disagreements because one’s oughts are almost always built on top of what one thinks is. Plus, discussions go smoother when we aren’t calling each other murderers and bigots.
You can stop there at step two, as that is already very helpful. Or you can go further and think strategically about how to produce change. You can participate in academic deconstruction. You can make art that induces psychedelia in the audience, or else blurs the lines of their deeply held beliefs. You can look at past social movements and study, for example, how well-dressed civil rights leaders marched non-violently on TV to counter the label of blacks as less civilized than whites, or how gay rights activists encouraged closeted folks to come out across the world, disproving the popular label of homosexuality as a choice. Change can be made, especially if we can identify the historical-rooted, emotionally-tinged lines that stand in our way.
Individualism is one of those lines. And delineation itself is a deeper one. Let’s brainstorm more of these together. Do you see other important boundaries that prevent change, be they emotional or ontological? Let me know in the comments so we can begin thinking strategically about their foundations and how to challenge them.
A final possible step toward the kind of change I’m advocating is bringing more people to the conversation. If you know anyone who might be interested in these topics, please share this Substack with them. Just by having these discussions, I believe we can make the world a more rational place, especially if we reach more people. Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you in two weeks.