Thanks… a fine thinker of an article, well worth the read from any of several perspectives.
Having read the article and considered what it says the point I’d like to put forward involves the dynamic between two words seen many times in the text: the word “we” and the word “individualism.”
I’ll throw my nickel down on the square that says the word “we” becomes meaningless, dangerously meaningless in the context of democratic self rule, if it is not being used to describe a consensus of opinion held by a group of people where individualism is the rule rather than the exception.
Reasoning? The strength and stability of that consensus is quite proportionate to number of different reasons a person might come to share that opinion, the footprint of that consensus if you will.
A wide footprint, many reasons quite different from each other drawn from regions of life not impacted by the application of said consensus, and “we” is an incredibly powerful thought, powerful enough to move mankind out of poverty and need into wealth and security.
A narrow footprint on the other hand is one where there is a very limited range of reasons for being a member of the consensus (as is found in a population of conformist rather than individualistic people) and often that footprint does not extend beyond the impact of the consensus. Such situations have a terrible habit of creating self justifying circular reasoning such as American Exceptionalism attempting to stabilize what is in fact totally unweildy and massively top heavy, prone to breaking itself falling over on flat land, much less a hill or a cliff.
(All of which explains why I curse Empire Academia’s Kingdom of Psychology attempting to forcibly homogenize the population to better serve their agenda of replacing Religion as the prime vendor of certifying socially accepted morality)
July 12, 2024 @ 11:42 am
Thanks… a fine thinker of an article, well worth the read from any of several perspectives.
Having read the article and considered what it says the point I’d like to put forward involves the dynamic between two words seen many times in the text: the word “we” and the word “individualism.”
I’ll throw my nickel down on the square that says the word “we” becomes meaningless, dangerously meaningless in the context of democratic self rule, if it is not being used to describe a consensus of opinion held by a group of people where individualism is the rule rather than the exception.
Reasoning? The strength and stability of that consensus is quite proportionate to number of different reasons a person might come to share that opinion, the footprint of that consensus if you will.
A wide footprint, many reasons quite different from each other drawn from regions of life not impacted by the application of said consensus, and “we” is an incredibly powerful thought, powerful enough to move mankind out of poverty and need into wealth and security.
A narrow footprint on the other hand is one where there is a very limited range of reasons for being a member of the consensus (as is found in a population of conformist rather than individualistic people) and often that footprint does not extend beyond the impact of the consensus. Such situations have a terrible habit of creating self justifying circular reasoning such as American Exceptionalism attempting to stabilize what is in fact totally unweildy and massively top heavy, prone to breaking itself falling over on flat land, much less a hill or a cliff.
(All of which explains why I curse Empire Academia’s Kingdom of Psychology attempting to forcibly homogenize the population to better serve their agenda of replacing Religion as the prime vendor of certifying socially accepted morality)