The curse of individualism

Life is a playground. You build sand castles and some get destroyed or they crumble on their own. That’s just the way it is because sand is weak and easily stumped on. A sprinkle of water can melt it down to a puddle. What do you do when your little sand castles melt down for one reason or other? You build another one, and another, and another... because that’s all life is about for the living. You have nothing else to do but keep building sand castles along the path, and if you don’t then you might as well be dead already, because there is nothing else to do in life. Of course now the playground is very crowded. There are a lot of people building castles everywhere you look, and it might be that we’re fast running out of space to build anything at all. Maybe that’s the problem.

Some people have managed to privatize chunks of that playground for themselves, which means that those areas are now off-limit for the rest of us. “The rest of us” are left with whatever space there is out there, and I suppose that space would look more like tiny parking spaces than the stretching beach in the distance. In the very beginning, however, the playground of Life was nothing less than a stretching bout of immensity and if you didn’t like your spot, you picked up your bucket and moved to another corner to start building your castles again.
But now... You can’t go anywhere. Your mind might be freer than it could ever be (education...) yet your body is chained to a certain spot, and to move requires the strength to break those chains.


Are we fast approaching the end of an era? I tend to think so. 2050 would mark the hundred-year benchmark of modern society. The birth and free fall of capitalism. The era when people experimented with a certain aspect of freedom revolving around individuality and ownership. Materialism blossomed like never before, but it always existed. The difference between today and the past centuries is that today most people are allowed to pursue the quest for materiality, whereas before it was reserved for the privileged sections of society.

If you let everyone strive to get what they want (whether they get it or not), then where is the limit? If there is no limit, then how do you prevent excess? And if there is excess, how do you slow it down? By reverting back to more drastic measures.

If history is anything to go by, one could predict that in a few more years there will come a time when we will revert back to something more conservative. The wheels are already in motion. For every loose step we took in society, we will make two steps back in the opposite direction in an attempt to regain a balance. It is a pure physics matter: if the balance tips too far on one side, then the only way to bring it back to its equilibrium would be to add more weight on the other side. Chances are that we will put too much weight at first, making the balance tip all the way down the other side.
So... There it goes as the law of Gravity would have it, the balance of social structure:
In one simplistic schema you have the politics of the world condensed as one. The detail, as always, gets complicated, but the whole picture still remains as basic as ever. No matter how much we like to complicate matters, the whole spectrum remains invariably simple.







Today, we probably stand close enough to the edge of the Freedom side. Hence we would get something of the sort (Heavy side= dominant side):

With a capitalistic structure, the individual is left to strive and the pursuit of wants is quite simply unrestrained. Profit on a personal scale is encouraged and nurtures the materialism boom.
At first glance, I can see the appeal and benefit of such a system. It allows the individual to rise from the ashes if he wishes to, and if he has the strength to do so. It makes what was never possible before a new possibility of modern times: anyone is given a chance (more or less) to better their own lives at least on a material scale.


With this blossoming of personal freedom, minds open up and morals loosen their grip on people. Religion, the barking dog in a corner that used to keep people in line to an extent, is muzzled up to a whiny whisper in the background. money is no longer just the metaphorical ruler of the world and realm of possibilities, it becomes the new God because, let’s face it, money is the only salvation of the living.

As minds open up and boundaries between the wealthy and the poor is blurred - not erradicated but blurred- society, at least in the Western part of the world, becomes more tolerant of personal choices and wants. What was once prohibited might no longer be so today in various areas. Think of same sex partnerships, women working or striving to be treated as equals, education for all, the so-called freedom of expression, etc...

We seem to reach the apogee of what true freedom ought to be and feel like on the clear basis that individuals are for the first time allowed to pursue their wants - as long as those wants don’t infringe on another individual’s right to pursue his own, I suppose.


Now, in theory this system would probably work incredibly well, if - if- we were to implement it on a small-scale population. But this system doesn’t apply to a handful, it applies to a big part of the world and its values are spreading, and not always in the order it ought to be implemented. Values are spreading, yet the structure itself isn’t. The end-goals of such a system (capitalism) are reached all the while skipping the stepping stones needed along the way to reach such end-goals. For instance, let's think of of Third-World countries. Some are still struggling to meet basic needs such as hygiene and food for their population, yet you will find people living in shacks with a television or computer, fed dream-like rag-to-riches stories that make the individual living in basic conditions yearn for more than he has. The individual often begins to strive for “the better lifestyle” regardless of what might be at stake in doing so. How different would his actions be, had the correct order of change be put in place? In other words, what if he had first seen his shack morph into a decent home, or if he had been granted proper food to live on, and only afterwards, set eyes upon that television or computer?

In the end, the system itself is left to unfold almost to its own accord, without much control as to the direction it might take further down the line.


It becomes the snowball rolling down the steep slope, and you could have stopped it or slackened its speed if only - if only!- you had remembered to place breaks on it before setting it loose. Now the snowball is rolling, and rolling, getting bigger and bigger as it rolls down the snowy slope, and it becomes incredibly difficult to control its direction or to merely divert its course from the bumps ahead and whatnot. As it keeps rolling, it can now crash at any given time against a protruding rock. It is, in essence, what is happening now in our era. As people run after that giant ball, they slowly begin to drop, one after the other, panting and exhausted. When the last one drops, that’s when the balance will be struck again. Because we will have gone to one extreme, we will rush to another. We will get to this:
(again, heavier side= dominant side)

As highlighted earlier, with every loose step taken, two shall be taken backward at this stage. Thus, for every lost lost piece of moral, for every given freedom, the opposite result will be sought in a new wave of oppression. The birth of a more open-minded society will be quashed in infancy for having grown too fast and distorted. Religion, the barking dog whose muzzle was shut to a whimpering whisper will be set free to bark louder than ever before. Women will be sent back to the kitchens to resume their baby-making sole role. Education will become once more a privilege, and the so-called freedom of expression will become but a distant memory. The pursuit of wants will still exist, but will revert back to being to the sole reach of the privileged. The "common" man will no longer have a right to set foot on the ladder.
This will happen. Why?

People want things now. They want it now because people, beyond the generality I am making here, think in terms of individualism. They want it for themselves, because they know they won’t be around to see the end result. Their grand-children might, but they wouldn’t. Why should they sacrifice their generation for others to come? because every single generation is reluctant to take a slow pace in shaping social directions, because they cannot stand the likelihood of their individual selves not ripping the rewards, everything must be rushed. Everything has to be done in the fastest time frame. And yet patience is the key. Taking care not to skip steps is paramount to a better chance of making society evolve naturally so that loss of control in any given theory we choose to implement in reality is minimized. But who cares about patience?
That is why we always keep going from one extreme to another. I suppose we could conclude that this must be due to human nature.
The curse of individualism.