Out of the abyss of individualism

If you live in a world where everything encourages you to struggle for your own individual interest and success, you are encouraged to ignore the reality of other points of view – ultimately, to ignore the cost, or the pain of others.

The result may be a world where people are articulate about their own feelings and pretty illiterate about those of others. An economic climate based on nothing but calculations of self-interest, fed by a distorted version of Darwinism, doesn't build a habitat for human beings; at best it builds a sort of fortified box room for paranoiacs ...

Davai
21 Feb 2010, 10:44AM

Materialism is a cult which demands that firstly we don't co-operate with our neighbours - we compete with them.

Secondly, it demands that we never be happy with our lot - we always have to be 'aspiring'.

Thirdly, it demands that we constantly spend beyond our means and live our lives permanently dealing with the stress of self-induced debt slavery.

Our real human needs have been subordinated to the needs of 'the markets'.

How do we rectify that? I'm afraid we don't.

The forces that coerce our children and form them into 'consumers' before they have the facility for rational thought are all-pervading.

Lack of impulse control and absence of restraint is something we see in a lot of our young, and those traits I'm convinced are a result of the marketing man's influence. 'Don't think - just consume' easily morphs into 'don't think - just lash out'.

I'd like to think we could wake up from our consumerist torpor and collectively say "I've got enough stuff, thanks" but I'm afraid the future is just more of the same - leading to future booms and busts, greater polarisation of wealth and greater social fracture.

FalseConsciousness
21 Feb 2010, 10:51AM

Individualism is the ideal of the ruling class. We all have much more in common that many would like to admit. We all have all the same basic needs and these basic human needs outweigh any differences in nationality, or race which is simply a social construct.

While most religions share core values, religion ultimately serves the State and the ruling classes, not the faithful. We should move beyond the poison of individualism and realize that the vast majority of us are working people with common interests whether we live in Britain or Saudi Arabia.

The fate of working people in Europe and the US is intimately bound up with the fate of working people in China and Pakistan, Egypt and Israel, and every other country.The international working class should not let the ruling elites of the world keep us divided through their perpetuation of bigotry,fear, and communal violence.

Guardian  21 Feb 2010    Autonomous Individualism    Mechanistic Modelling

Employers need to pay more attention to the levels of stress and anxiety in the workplace, key NHS advisers say.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence said the cost of work related mental illness was £28bn - a quarter of the UK's total sick bill.

Bad managers were the single biggest cause of problems, the group claimed.

But it said simple steps such as giving positive feedback, allowing flexible working and giving extra days off as a reward could cut the impact by a third.

As well as taking measures like these, NICE urged employers to invest in training for managers and mentoring for staff to help career development.

THE TOLL OF STRESS
Yasmin, 37, from Wokingham in Berkshire, used to be employed by a large financial company as a tax accountant.
Despite having had no previous problems, stress led to her taking nearly four years off work.
Yasmin was prescribed around 30 different anti-depressants before a combination was found that worked for her.
She said: "I lost all sense of self-worth and self-confidence. I felt useless, hopeless and a waste of space."
More than 13 million working days a year are lost because of work related stress, anxiety and depression.

Once the pay of staff, lost productivity and replacing ill employees are taken into account, the cost to employers hits £28.3bn a year.

To convince employers to act, NICE has designed a calculator to show the potential savings of supporting staff more.

It suggests that for the average firm of 1,000 staff, £250,000 a year could be saved.

Professor Cary Cooper, an expert in workplace psychology from Lancaster University who helped draw up the recommendations, said:

"You cannot overestimate the importance of saying 'Well done' to staff, but so often it does not happen.

"Managers will tell you when you are doing something wrong, but not when you are doing it right."

But he said the problem was not just to do with staff taking time off.

"Presenteeism, where people come to work but add no value, is if anything more of a problem, especially during a recession.

"People are so scared that they go to work when they are not fit to," said Prof Cooper.

His remarks are supported by a recent survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development which revealed a quarter of UK workers describe their mental health as moderate or poor, yet nearly all continued to work regularly ...

BBC NEWS  05 November 2009

Of the 12 states where joblessness grew most rapidly, eight reduced or kept constant the number of people receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the main cash welfare program for families with children. Nationally, for the 12 months ending October 2008, the rolls inched up a fraction of 1 percent.

The deepening recession offers a fresh challenge to the program, which was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 amid bitter protest and became one of the most closely watched social experiments in modern memory.

The program, which mostly serves single mothers, ended a 60-year-old entitlement to cash aid, replacing it with time limits and work requirements, and giving states latitude to discourage people from joining the welfare rolls. While it was widely praised in the boom years that followed, skeptics warned it would fail the needy when times turned tough ...

“When we started this, Democratic and Republican governors alike said, ‘We know what’s best for our state; we’re not going to let people starve,’ ” said Mr. Haskins, who is now a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “And now that the chips are down, and unemployment is going up, most states are not doing enough to help families get back on the rolls.”

The program’s structure — fixed federal financing, despite caseload size — may discourage states from helping more people because the states bear all of the increased costs. By contrast, the federal government pays virtually all food-stamp costs, and last year every state expanded its food-stamp rolls; nationally, the food program grew 12 percent.

The clashing trends in some states — more food stamps, but less cash aid — suggest a safety net at odds with itself. Georgia shrank the cash welfare rolls by nearly 11 percent and expanded food stamps by 17 percent.

New York Times 01 February 2009

Slumping Economy Tests Aid System

Mentality of rule

A mentality of rule is any relatively systematic way of thinking about government.

It delineates a discursive field in which the exercise of power is ‘rationalised’ [Lemke, 2001:191].

Thus Neo-liberalism is a mentality of rule because it represents a method of rationalising the exercise of government, a rationalisation that obeys the internal rule of maximum economy [Foucault, 1997:74].

Fukuyama [in Rose, 1999: 63] writes “a liberal State is ultimately a limited State, with governmental activity strictly bounded by the sphere of individual liberty”.

However, only a certain type of liberty, a certain way of understanding and exercising freedom is compatible with Neo-liberalism.

If Neo-liberalist government is to fully realize its goals, individuals must come to recognize and act upon themselves as both free and responsible [Rose, 1999:68].

Thus Neo-liberalism must work to create the social reality that it proposes already exists. For as Lemke states, a mentality of government “is not pure, neutral knowledge that simply re-presents the governing reality” [Lemke, 2001:191] instead, Neo-liberalism constitutes an attempt to link a reduction in state welfare services and security systems to the increasing call for subjects to become free, enterprising, autonomous individuals.

It can then begin to govern its subjects, not through intrusive state bureaucracies backed with legal powers, the imposition of moral standards under a religious mandate, but through structuring the possible field of action in which they govern themselves, to govern them through their freedom.

Through the transformation of subjects with duties and obligations, into individuals, with rights and freedoms, modern individuals are not merely ‘free to choose’ but obliged to be free, “to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice” [Rose, 1999:87].

This freedom is a different freedom to that offered in the past. It is a freedom to realize our potential and our dreams through reshaping the way in which we conduct our lives.

Wikipedia

"Rational Self-Interest"

Ayn Rand's "Objectivism" offers greater understanding of the nature of the "autonomous individual":

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

... Rand identified morality as principles needed in all contexts, whether one is alone or with others, reserving the term "ethics" for relationships with others. She summarized ... that man properly lives "with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life."

According to Objectivist epistemology, states of mind, such as happiness, are not primary; they are the consequence of specific facts of existence.

Therefore man needs an objective standard, grounded in the facts of reality, to achieve happiness.

The human faculty of happiness is a biologically evolved measuring instrument (a "barometer") that measures how well one is doing in the pursuit of life.

Therefore the standard by which one can judge whether or not some action will lead to greater or lesser happiness is whether or not it promotes one's life. But, as Rand writes,

"To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem."

The morality of Objectivism is based on the observation that one's own choices and actions are instrumental in maintaining and enhancing one's life, and therefore one's happiness. Rand wrote:

"Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice — and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man — by choice; he has to hold his life as a value — by choice; he has to learn to sustain it — by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues — by choice.

"A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality."

There is a difference, therefore, between rational self-interest as pursuit of one's own life and happiness in reality, and what Ayn Rand called "selfishness without a self" - a range-of-the-moment pseudo-"selfish" whim-worship or "hedonism."

A whim-worshipper or "hedonist," according to Rand, is not motivated by a desire to live his own human life, but by a wish to live on a sub-human level.

Instead of using "that which promotes my (human) life" as his standard of value, he mistakes "that which I (mindlessly happen to) value" for a standard of value, in contradiction of the fact that, existentially, he is a human and therefore rational organism.

The "I value" in whim-worship or hedonism can be replaced with "we value," "he values," "they value," or "God values," and still it would remain dissociated from reality.

Rand repudiated the equation of rational selfishness with hedonistic or whim-worshipping "selfishness-without-a-self."

She held that the former is good, and the latter evil, and that there is a fundamental difference between them.

A corollary to Rand's endorsement of self-interest is her rejection of the ethical doctrine of altruism — which she defined in the sense of August Comte's altruism (he coined the term), as a moral obligation to live for the sake of others ...

Objectivism

Gordon Brown's Dichotomy

To compare the theory of neoliberal government as creator of Ayn Rand's "rational selfishness" with New Labour's top-down centralisation perhaps illustrates the failure of the Blair-Brown administrations to think-through the relationship between their acceptance of neoliberal economics, and their day-to-day mode of governance.

For example, Brown told the Scottish CBI:

The government would not let down hard-working families on modest and middle income families: "We will ensure that no one who is prepared to work hard and adapt to change will lose out as a result of global forces."   [Gdn]

Continuing the pretence of administering a social democracy via, for example tax credits, illustrates the dichotomy.

A 'heroic' neoliberal society would have no place for tax credits, no place for policies that continued people's reliance on the state, and intriguingly, no place for the current hedonism.    [SJ]

Just as for the Marxist, the perfect society was to be one without "the bourgoisie" - Pinochet's "proprietors" - so the perfect neoliberal state will need to be without "whim-worshippers", those who show "selfishness without a self".

(Quite how growth-addicted corporations will cope without "whim-worshippers" we are not told.)

Humanity, however, resists being categorized in these simplistic ways, and we return to the same question: in a society of "winners" what happens to the "losers": the people who don't make it to become "autonomous individuals"?

The answers offered by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union do not inspire confidence in utopian solutions.

At What Price Individualism?

Autonomous Individualism

Autonomous Individuality v. Rugged Individualism

Ayn Rand

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

David J. Rothkopf

Gertrude Himmelfarb

Governmentality

John Forbes Nash, Jr

Methodological individualism

Objectivism (Ayn Rand)

Objectivist ethics

Political Neoliberals

The Idea of Society

"The Lonely Robot"