There Is a Cycle That Never Stops Cycling
And now for something completely different. There has been this thought kicking around in my head for some time that keeps getting reinforced over and over again. I’d love to call it a hypothesis, but in reality it's more a matter of perspective or framing than anything else. And here’s the gist: What if your whole life is a series of naturally occurring case studies in collectivist versus individualist thinking, all being conducted within your own mind? Just bear with me, assuming that you're still reading. It's less pseudo-intellectual burnout than it sounds.
When I go back over the course of my own life, there are countless examples that bring this framing to mind. In school it’s happened every time that I've been the new kid added to a class some ways into the semester. And it's happened again and again at jobs where I've joined an existing staff of people that already know each other. And then some more, being in several bands over the years that were trying to break into established music scenes. More or less, it's been happening to me for my entire life.
And the story arc is always the same. You enter into an existing group assuming that there is some kind of collective perspective or cohesion (the word assume on its own implies something too strong here, though. It's more like an unconscious default that you become aware of only after getting to know people on an individual basis), and you are always correct to a certain degree. It's inevitable that there would be an amount of shared perspective between a group of people that have had a shared experience. But beyond this, it becomes less consistent on the cohesion point. I did have one job awhile back where there was a sort of culty vibe in the air. Most of the staff had been there for years by the time I started, so they had a strong shorthand and list of inside jokes in place, as well as a creepy, borderline worship of the boss. In other words, a relatively cohesive group. But regarding every other workplace, or classroom, or music scene that I've been a part of, anything resembling consensus has only extended as far as the fact that it's people sharing the same physical space, sometimes with similar ends in mind. At best.
But back to the story. We were just getting to the part where your unconscious collectivist framing of things starts to crack, and the realization kicks in that some level of group dysfunction might be the norm. This epiphany always comes when the people in said group start to individuate themselves and you begin actually getting to know them. And to be clear, I only mean dysfunction here relative to an ideal of cohesion where everyone perfectly serves the will of whomever is at the top. An ideal which of course you come to realize is just that, considering the fact that everyone is merely an individual thrown into a group of other individuals. Not a robot. Duh. And so you have the full cycle of the case study, or the story, or whatever you like: you go in viewing the group in collectivist terms by default, and you leave viewing them as a dysfunctional group of individuals.
I think that part of the initial default to collectivist thinking not only has to do with assuming a shared perspective, but also with the pesky influence of certain perception or categorization issues. For example, if you walk into a large enough group of people - say an annoyingly crowded music festival - where you literally cannot view every individual person from any given vantage point, it's pretty hard not to consider the group as a collective whole. Nonetheless, that group is still composed entirely of individuals, regardless of anything, including how differently they might behave as a collective. There is still the dirtbag who just came to get laid, or the bright-eyed, genuine fan, or the people-pleasing friend who got dragged along for the ride, or the opportunistic dealer who’s hoping to make a couple hundred selling acid that weekend. You get the picture.
Or if you are talking about some large demographic of people in statistical terms, an understandable leap is sometimes made of directly applying these findings to individuals within that population. But you can't assume anything definitive about any random individual based on a broad statistic. If 50% of people named Carl like Boyz II Men and 50% don't, you can't pull two random Carls off the street and know that one is a fan and one isn't. And I think these distinctions between group and individual often get blurred and confuse the way that we perceive each other, more often in the direction of favoring a collectivist perspective, for whatever reason.
Much of these points seem obvious as I'm writing them down, but I get the impression that plenty of people, including myself, don't have a clean way of thinking about this subject. Or even worse, they are very convinced that they do, and have some extreme, prescriptive ideas about what to do with those convictions on a societal level. Personally, I have exactly zero designs on anything approaching social engineering, so my bias is only towards finding something that feels true based on my own experience.
Which is why what I'm left with after cycling through this same study again and again is a sort of pragmatic (not political) individualism that rings true only because it's been the endpoint of the story every single time. And this isn't to detract from the necessity or value of thinking in collective terms - I think it's possibly the only way that you can initially perceive a group, and also oftentimes the only useful tool for thinking about broad demographics of people. It's just the constant reminder that any collective is literally just a group of individuals - a stupid-simple observation that everyone knows, but not everyone values in the same way.
The more universal takeaway is that a person can and maybe has to be able to hold both of these perceptions in their head at the same time in order to make sense of the world. And if you pull the concepts out of the partisan context that they are usually presented in, it's obvious that there is no binary there, just complicated nuance that is harder to fit into a snappy speech. And let's not forget that we all contain multitudes, after all. Until next time.