the myth of the individual

9 months ago

at the heart of any modern western enterprise is the presumption of the individual: their vision, their will, their control, their autonomy. it is the drive of the individual to assert control and ownership over their environment, over others, emanating as an manifestation of an internally composed subject.

success and failure are described through the lense of internal control and autonomy; people are praised for being “high-agency”—able to bend their environment to their will, in spite of adversity. we do not question the individual: it is, as it were, a foundational assumption ungirding our contemporary worldview.

we are often asked to respond to larger systemic issues through the lens of individual action. but it is this individual resistance that is futile; the issues we struggle with are of a collective, social nature (we are atomized, our attention fractured; focusing more on the individual only further exacerbates this issue). moreover, the self which we assume to be stable and intrinsic is itself collectively constructed and formed.

it is within this lens that abandoning contemporary technology to “unplug” serves as a noble but ultimately futile gesture. it grants the illusion of control and succeeds in redirecting the onus of responsibility onto the individual rather than the culture and economy of which that particular device was a product.

failure and recidivism to prior habits of phone use and digital consumption are not uncommon, not because of a failure of an individual, but because of the oxymoronic notion that one truly has unhindered agency to exercise one’s will from within modern capitalist structures and pressures.

it is hard to use a flip phone today not because a flip phone is innately harder to use than any other piece of technology, but it is largely impractical to use one within our modern social and cultural practices.

your friends won’t stop using facebook messenger just because you decided to switch to a dumb phone.

monolithic capitalist enterprises extract material wealth from the earth, depleting our reserves of lithium, deforesting swaths of rainforest, so yes—of course, the solution is for you to buy fair trade chocolate.

and therein lies the problem—the abstraction and diffusion of responsibility. none of us are truly accountable to the whole thing.

i throw something into the trash—where does it go? where does it fucking end up? i don’t know.

we remain complicit, and so the work continues.

it is the compartmentalization—the rearing of the ego, the “self”—that lays at the root, as though the self were self-sufficient, as though it did not rely on and relate to every other constituted in relation to it; because we are, materially, hurting ourselves, for our hubris.