Little freedom, a great deal of conformity. Ours is not an age of the individual

What if the society we are accustomed to thinking of as hyper-individualistic is, in fact, entirely losing its sense of individualism? In the political sphere, individualism has always had little appeal, because, after all, it is the most apolitical of concepts. Indeed, ever since mass political parties have existed, they have, by their very structure, been anti-individualistic. Parties are macro-structures under which people end up being categorised as classes, interest groups, etc., and all this is reasonably normal. Whilst it is true that, for a brief period spanning the late 1980s and then for much of the 1990s, individualism had two great political champions in Reagan and Thatcher, and enjoyed a sort of major ideological resurgence thanks to the fall of the Iron Curtain and that state-collectivist regime, such political prominence was short-lived. Today, it appears to have been entirely erased. One need only consider that the only true ‘individualist’ on the global political scene – namely Javier Milei – is essentially regarded as a ‘fascist’, which is about as far removed as one could possibly be from a figure such as the Argentine president.

In short, individualism has never been in vogue politically. The structure of power is, in fact, inherently anti-individualist. The individual is an irreducible point of resistance against which power tends to crash, and which it must therefore somehow crush (in a more or less gentle, subtle or violent manner, depending on the historical era). Today, however, in the West, individualism is undergoing a dramatic phase for another reason, one far more alarming than the political one. The matter could be summarised as follows: for the individual to be an individual, they must be free; otherwise, they are not. And since freedom is a risk – a multifaceted risk that presents itself in different guises each time – and since Western citizens, particularly Europeans, are no longer willing to take any risks at all, the individual loses its centrality entirely. Indeed, since anything that constitutes a risk must be removed from a society that seeks ever greater security, the very idea of the individual is, in itself, a dangerous one.

Covid, which has returned to the fore in recent days with Fauci’s hearings, has been a vivid illustration of this situation. Between accepting a certain degree of risk in exchange for a guarantee of freedom, and absolute security accompanied by the deprivation of the most basic freedoms, the latter path was chosen with overwhelming support and without hesitation. But that is merely the overarching evidence of a general state of the individual’s devaluation, of their ‘fading into the background’, which appears to be an inevitable condition of our societies. Ageing societies, in fact, by their very nature, become gregarious societies; they seek fewer conflicts, greater stability and tranquillity. Those who are ageing value nothing more highly than security, and it is only natural that this should be the case. But these values trickle down the age spectrum, which becomes numbed by such a situation, and which then reveals its most practical and tangible side in the colossal public debt weighing down on these very societies, condemning them to a de facto state of paralysis. People work and govern without any real drive, merely to repay the debt through exorbitant taxation that strips citizens of a large part of the fruits of their own labour. It is impossible to be an individualist ‘simply’ in economic terms!

At the same time, the capitalist system – which has long been the means by which individuals have managed to channelling a significant part of their unique aspirations and to exercise self-determination in freedom through economic activity, and which in turn has grown through the plurality of decisions and desires of increasingly liberated individuals – has a growing need for predictability and substitutability. In other words, no longer a total freedom in which only the individual can be the protagonist, but rather experiential phantoms – those horrendous ‘experiences’ – to be managed and administered within a framework of managed freedom (though always with the possibility of some form of guarantee and assurance at one’s fingertips).

It is also necessary to clarify one point. We are not referring here to that ‘methodological individualism’ which lies at the conceptual heart of every guarantee of political, social and economic freedom. That premise is an ‘epistemological law’ that will always remain valid, as a bulwark against any oppressive, statist or socialist-leaning delusion. What concerns us here is the individual as an ‘existential possibility’ of a single subject. Such individualism calls for ‘heroism’, which obviously does not necessarily have anything to do with the act of war, but with the exceptional act – that is, one that breaks with the norm, that takes one by surprise, that takes a risk not so much for the sake of it, but in an attempt to draw closer to the truth of oneself as an individual, precisely.

The myth of being ‘free to live our lives as we please’ has never been so widespread. And yet never before has all this taken place along such common, such identical paths. Never has the process of imitation amongst people – partly due to the technical structures within which we spend so much of our lives, namely social media in general – been so pervasive and all-encompassing. Never in history have so many people who claim to live their lives as entirely free individuals resembled one another so closely. What room, then, remains for us to be individuals?