The Crisis: Individuality in the Age of Nihilism (Part 1)

The first task of a democracy is the acknowledgement of the political sanctity and efficacity of the individual. In a political culture particularly like our own, conceived as a mass democracy in which each individual has an equally valuable and valid vote, the individual especially is the keystone. The proper individuality, consciously autonomous and responsible, is required to legitimize the political culture. Such is the ideal. The reality in America is a far and horrific cry from this ideal.

With respect to Joe Mesi, the subject of my last few posts, I hope his professional career better nurtured his sense of self than we see other professional sporting systems nurture the individuality of their pro athletes. All too often we have seen professional athletes leave the limelight and crumble in the cold, dry air of everyday adult reality. Pro athletes are in effect coddled and cared for without concern for the day they walk out the back door of the locker room. In short sports on the whole does not nurture individuality in our culture, let alone professional sports. Of course and obviously there are exceptions. Yet those athletes who shine as individuals making a new mark after the cheering stops would have done so regardless. Let’s hope Joe is the latter, especially if he wins the Senate seat. If not the latter, and if he wins, lets hope at least for his sake, his Albany handlers manage his functionality as well as his father’s management team.

But this is not about Joe Mesi. It is about the social, educational and political deficit of concern for the democratic individual. Surely the possibility of such a being begins in the family. This is so even though the family is not essentially a democratic institution. But what better way for a child to observe problem solving, cooperation and decision-making than to experience his/her parents dealing with family life and its relation to the community. But given that life in the family, assuming the child has one as such, is equaled by time spent in school, the schools must equally contribute to the formation and cultivation of such an individual.

Individuality is first and foremost a social relatedness. The integral personality is integrated socially and yet always in integrity with itself. The democratic individual is one who can think and act in the interest and good of the whole or wholes to which he belongs. Given that individuality is a product of sociality, the unfolding and fulfillment of the individual self is the conscious production of a community and by a community in which autonomy and responsibility are the dimensions or horizons of social relatedness. The democratic individual is not the narcissistic exploiter nor creator of that community. He does not use it for the masturbatory satisfaction of involuted desire nor the aggrandizement of an infantilized ego seeking self-serving power over that community. He does not seek that power which characterizes relations of domination but seeks that dialogical diplomacy of the communal cooperation of equals.

In a world in which the (a) corporation is conceived as having the legal right of a person, (b)education trains first for functionality as employability, and (c)political candidates are measured according to electability rather than political desireability, the meaning and purpose of the individual person or human being is (a)annhiliated in incorporated interests, (b)functionalized in technically useable learning and experience and (c)instrumentalized as a mechanism of externally constituted power. The wisdom of the world of commodification and consumption requires that you be made over such that (a)business will invest in you and your community; (b)such that you are interesting to the functional world seeking to ‘place’ you; and, (c)such that you are a non-resistant energy source for power as it exists.

T.W. Adorno, German philosopher and Critical Social Theorist, puts it this way:
“In a world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option remains but to accept it on its own terms, such naivete reproduces itself incessantly and disastrously. What people have forced upon them by a boundless apparatus, which they themselves constitute and which they are locked into, virtually eliminates all natural elements and becomes ‘nature’ to them.” (Critical Models, p.12, CUP, 2005)

The consciousness of the individual is reified as the mere reflection of the way things are. Such consciousness is thoroughly naive, yet when rejected, is judged to be the paragon of foolishness and folly. The consciousness of the individual no longer lives and judges ethically but calculates pragmatically in order to successfully conform with the given and all it promises. It can no longer think but only manipulates and maneuvers to the benefit of its perceived, privatized advantage.

So the reason that there is no individual as such today, let alone individuals in government, is that we in fact are “governed” by the things we presume to govern.
The mechanized structures of human construction, material and symbolic, have expropriated the capacity for that very “human measure” which gave rise to but lost control of those structures. Thus the film, The Matrix. If Protagoras is right, that man is the measure of all things, then possibly it is the state of being of individuality which can “smash through” such constructions and within which such capacity for “human measure” can again be sensed, fully experienced and reappropiated.

The socially fragmented and alienated individual must be returned to itself from the ends of the rainbow to which it has been spirited away: returned from the empty irrelevance of its own pseudo-soulfulness and returned from the mechanized animality of purposeless, unending desire, that is, the living death of an irreconcilable comfortable safety, security and equanimity on the one hand, and, on the other, the agitated excitement of thrilling yet unimaginable expectations.

The beginning of this restitution may be in the an-nihilation of bureaucratically centralized institutions such as the Catholic Church and the New International Political Class and the "theme park consciousness" promising bigger and better escapes from reality. False care, on the one hand, and vitiated, vicarious pseudo-experience on the other. False self-control in the first and faux freedom in the latter.

The decompensated individual begins to return to integratd personality and ethical integrity in the political action of reconstituting organic community as political community and democratic culture.