Individualism, especially as the “rugged individualist” point of view, tends to get presented as some sort of triumph over limitations. As the story often goes, a person is dealing with circumstances beyond their control that range from difficult to traumatizing. Rather than back down, the person goes through some kind of experience of toughening up, if they are not already built of grit and steel, and they power through the trying circumstances, coming out stronger and more capable.

This romanticizing of struggle glosses over those who suffer and come out weaker. It glosses over those who suffer and are annihilated by it. And importantly, it ignores the push and pull of being a part of an ecosystem and a society of some kind; an experience that every human being shares.

Individualism, then, is not describing reality, but is denying it. Worse still, it is in some societies not a fringe view hardly known by anyone. Ironically, individualim is in some societies a view collectively shared by millions of people. So then you get the archetypes like the “independent thinker” in western society, who acts extremely similar to the next “independent thinker”, with both of them thinking they are uniquely different from one another.

This is why I call individualism a shared hallucination. Certain basic principles of reality and humanity are not being fundamentally changed by people believing in individualism. No matter how hard you believe in individual will, you still have a physical body that is limited by its existence in a particular ecosystem, which has basic needs like food, water, and oxygen. No matter how hard you believe in individual will, you still are influenced by other human beings from birth and influence the world around you, in a back and forth that both shapes you and shapes the world in small or big ways. And no matter how hard you believe in individual will, the whole of the rest of the environment and every other being and society in it, is having more or less the same basic relationship of push and pull. Individualism gets caught up in focusing on the push and neglects the pull. More specifically, it gets caught up in your push in isolation and ignores the push that everyone else and every system else is doing, whether consciously carried out or through sheer inertia.

Opposing individualism is not a denial of will, which would be in its own way a delusion, but is opposing the delusion of supremacy of individual will and opposing the denial of collective influences. The example of the “independent thinker” is important because it shows how fundamentally people are pulled toward similarities, no matter how much they cling to a belief of being unique or “elite”. Whether you have some things that are technically unique about you because of no one experiencing 100% the same things in all ways is sort of beside the point. The point is that you aren’t escaping the shared experience of the push and pull with the ecosystem, with other beings, with society. If you believe in life after this one, that’s another matter, but no amount of believing will escape the fundamental push and pull in this world.

The good news of this is that you are far more alike than you are different and that no matter who you are interacting with, if not a single other similarity, you will still share the same experience of existing as a being in that push and pull. Not as supremacy of individual, but as an inescapable part of some kind of collective sphere of similarities, whether it is concretely defined in language or more vague and transitory.

Author’s Note: Wanted to write up something on individualism. Not married to the exact specifics and presentation, but want to encourage more thought about how individualism impacts people.