By LUIZ MARQUES*
Americanism is responsible for reducing individualism to the principle of property and consumption habits in the illuminated windows of shopping centers
“Individualism” points to the overcoming of standards and the progressive (conflictive) acceleration of the affirmation of individuation mechanisms in the West. The designation comes after the appearance of the phenomenon. As is often the case, practice precedes the best theory. The lived reality and the analytical category of individualism emerge in the 17th and 18th centuries, at the turn of the page of feudal communitarianism. They spread in the 19th century. They established themselves as the support of the so-called democratic society in the middle of the 20th century. The demands for recognition of autonomy are midwives of an open horizon. Thus, for better and worse, the mentality of moderns is born.
Individualism is not to be confused with asocial behavior or vulgar selfishness, portrayed in common sense. On the scale of history, excesses do not speak against your dedication. The dividends of confronting holism and organicism are worth it. The terrible children nor do they disappear in the age of crowds, which brings with it other intellectual challenges: removing the stones from the path, activating the imagination and awakening indignation to reinvent hope. The eclipse that clouds the future with violence, despair and death, within the framework of Guernica, dissipates sublimated by enchantment.
Singularity produces fabulous works of art in painting, music, literature, theater, sculpture, and the areas of science and philosophy. The loss of subversive vitality is due to the abduction by commercial advertising of individual freedom, associated with worn pants in the repertoire of morals and customs. Ditto, with regard to possessive narcissism, anarcho-capitalist libertarianism, religious fundamentalism for denying women the right to their bodies – and also the distancing of collective values.
Em Histoire de l'individualism, Alain Laurent adds to the unseemly index “ecologicalism, which preaches the authoritarian return to an austere life by restricting what to consume”. The prohibitive addendum reveals an obviously precarious ecological awareness at the time of the book's publication by University Presses of France, back in 1993. Then the matter did not receive due attention from scholars.
Americanism is responsible for reducing individualism to the principle of property and consumption habits in the illuminated shop windows of shopping malls, that date back to the Benjaminian arcades of Paris. The offer for consumerism and abysmal inequalities make their debut in the economy and extend their tentacles to the “new reason for the world”. After colonizing sociability, neoliberalism completes the work of cannibalization by penetrating the very subjectivity of social subjects in the 21st century.
The spell and the sorcerer
Individualism comes from the conviction that our species is made up of individuals, as opposed to totalities (nations, social classes, genders, races). The indivisible personas make up the singular and non-numb units of the ego, in the formation of peoples. In the benign version, they are the paradigm of Western civilization, the epicenter of the spiritual configuration of modernity and the modality of being in time. Culture precedes the bifurcation of political ideologies and metabolizes their antinomies.
Behind the apparent general acceptance of the term, controversies of meanings and judgments persist. There is no consensus regarding the word polysemic. In Margaret Thatcher's formula, for example, individualism is opposed to the welfare state: “Society does not exist, the only things that exist are individuals and families”. In such a petty perspective, collectivity is a fable that is alien to the human condition and solidarity is a cunning device to intervene in the marketing dynamics.
Many people subscribe to the thesis that empathy is limited to blood ties. Beyond, the “state of nature” reigns – the werewolf of man (homo homini lupus). Athletes always thank their parents for their sacrifices, never their public school teachers. The rule is the pride of the victors and the contempt of those who prepare the banquet. In a television sketch about indifference, the actor simulates fainting by falling onto the sidewalk. Passersby pass by, look, but don't help him on the ground. They move on, with the invoices in arrears. They are not gravediggers and they hate losers. It is understood.
The perception of the street as an arena of competition increases acts hostile to otherness and diversity, which reinforces aporophobia (according to etymology, aporos, poor; phobeo, to hate). In the stone jungle, the weak have no place and the strong cheat on vaccination receipts. The Hollywood industry is full of scenes of criminals who transgress order (Joker) and the hero who defends it (Batman). At great cost, institutions normalize the “war of all against all”. The intrinsic contradiction between the individual and society expands intolerance and pride for fascist cells. “Like a bullet in every no / like a gun in every hand”, in that poem by Ferreira Gullar, in Into the fast night.
The far right makes self-determination the guide of the free market. Entrepreneurs appear with the aura of anti-systemic sovereigns, violating environmental legislation and city master plans. The process of individualization is diverted towards neoliberal totalitarianism. The choices are controlled by artificial intelligence algorithms and mystified in the nominal vote. The only thing that matters is the financialization of public debt, with the aim of maximizing rentier accumulation. Everything is quantified with the porn interest rates of the Central Bank – deindustrialization, unemployment and even media support.
Civil disobedience
Individualism is expressed through discrepant and paradoxical signs. The powerful cultural wave, however, transcends hypocrisy. It reflects the polydimensionality of tension in the binomial of domination and emancipation from shackles, from surplus value. It is certainly not a club with unanimously accepted regulations. The class struggle influences your wisdom or intemperance. Postulating a collectivist doctrine does not exclude enjoying an individualist and nonconformist existence, hippies. Reiterating the model of voluntary servitude can be reconciled with the hyper-individualist batteries of yuppies. Left and right, virtuous and scoundrels lodge give me the same spirit du temps. Hence the confusion.
Unionists, activists, feminists, anti-racists and the LGBTQIA+ movement know that alienation lives in the privatization of individual trajectories and crucifies Spartacus. The agglutination of equals is a work of continuous deconstruction to achieve autonomy. Isolationism and solipsism remain far from mobilizations for the “right to have rights”. The system would not be able to handle the transition from the private to the public sphere if it were easy to break through apathy. Capitalism's immunization capacity consists of absorbing attacks and disguising them as commodities, such as Amazon when selling Che Guevara prints. Methodical criticism can return the spell to the sorcerer.
“For every thousand men dedicated to cutting the leaves of evil, there is only one attacking the roots”, writes the author of Walden: Life in the Woods. The libertarian heritage of Henry Thoreau, the solitary formulator of the concept of “civil disobedience”, is responsible for utopias against despotism, arbitrariness and lies. The dialectic between the ideal and the real (the social) is evident in the attitudes assumed by revolutionaries. In an era marked by post-truth and cognitive denialism, it is an ethical-ideological duty to denounce the Lampedusian illusionism that wants to change everything so that everything remains the same.
Walnice Nogueira Galvao, in article on website the earth is round, highlights the “robust tradition of civil disobedience” by evoking Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden about the Pentagon’s roles, the founding of the Wikileaks and the crimes of the State and security agencies. The radical triad, in the sense of “going to the root”, challenges imperialist power with freedom of expression to give transparency to the excesses, arrogance and shamelessness of the global North. Who is interested in journalistic censorship, the small or the big?
Contemporary Prometheans value the vocation of independence and the will to think and act for themselves. But they do not provide a naive faith in Logos exercised in a neutral and universal field, under the current legal-political contractual matrix, nor do they feed prejudices against political organizations. Like the student who stands in front of the tank, in Celestial Square, they refuse to eternalize the burden of being a passive product of the context. The heart of rebellion beats for structural changes, hand in hand with comrades. That, after leaving the labyrinth of oppression and exploitation, they find social participation. Only democratic socialism allows the full potential of individuals to be developed. Let's go together.
* Luiz Marques is a professor of political science at UFRGS. He was Rio Grande do Sul's state secretary of culture in the Olívio Dutra government.
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