First it Was the Shaman. Then Dad. Now It's Everyone. Good Grief.

the anthropological origins of individualism and its current forms

In pre-literate societies, individualism was often the prerogative of a permanently deviant social role, such as the shaman - dramatized here in a scene from the movie Black Robe - photo courtesy of https://hollywoodandhistory.wordpress.com/category/interpreters/

I never understood why, in most textbooks, the history of individualism in the modern world begins with a discussion of moral philosophy, the Enlightenment, a bunch of old white men with bad hair, etc.

Hasn’t Instagram finally taught everyone that individualism, if it means anything useful, is about performing to stand out? About gaining recognition as ‘special’ from a live audience whose validation you crave (consciously or not)?

Individualism is concrete if it has any explanatory value. It’s about behavior, not just ideas.

And individualistic behavior has existed in most human societies from time immemorial. The scope of its public display, in time and place, has changed over time.

In pre-modern times (before the 19th century), behaving to stand out in public was generally a social privilege granted to you by those in authority and supported by the tacit agreement of some public audience of kin. And only some people ever received this privilege, or it was temporally constrained to ceremonial occasions.

You couldn’t show up in public and suddenly be weird like you can today on social media. If you did show up doing weird sh*t, the elders would calmly escort you to the back of the longhouse for an involuntary ‘nap.’ Many pre-literate societies marked the boundary of sanity/insanity based on behavior deviating from everyday norms outside proper ceremonial contexts. Say what? In plain English, pre-modern societies would let you scream and throw sh*t when you’re ritually possessed by an ancestral deity once a year, but not when you’re sitting around the cooking fire with your grandmother. Sorry. Instead, smoke this, and shut up.

And most importantly, you couldn’t defy the public censure of your inappropriate individualistic behavior by yelling, “but you’re denying my authentic self.” Slap. Another involuntary nap for you.

A Wild Human History of Standing Out

The history of standing out is fraught in human societies. Some cultures tightly regulate deviating from social norms and vigorously censure the weird (e.g., pre-modern Japan). Others, like ours, will give you a streaming Netflix series contract and a talent agent if the audience you can attract hits minimum thresholds. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing that attracts the attention (e.g., Logan Paul? WTF?)

Illness has been the primal way in which all humans stand out, briefly, no matter their relative social status—even kids. The sick temporarily leave everyday life because they require isolation, extra care, and support. They temporarily take up resources to heal. It’s not a deliberate performance, sure, but let’s face it, once all that attention starts showing up, few cultures have a great way to keep you from playing up your illness (for many reasons). I can’t believe this is just a modern child phenomenon. Imagined the beleaguered Mayan housewife cooking for 15-20 daily in the 15th century Yucatan. Yeah. Her next illness could be a quiet vacation from those annoying people. Indeed, she could drag it out a day or two on the back end. No? Come on! Sure she did. Culturally sensitive representation is no excuse for being naive.

The performance of illness is natural in most societies, and it is why modern, permissive parents often have to escort/nudge/shove our ‘no-longer-sick-kids’ back to their regular schedule as they try to drag it out—eye roll. The brazen attempt to garner more Mommy time has to end at some point before Mommy loses her sh*t.

The sick feel ‘special’ in a bizarre, unplanned way that strikes them as oddly beneficial, as long as they aren’t dying of the plague. The sick get a pass on normal social obligations until they feel well. Humans are so generous. I doubt a sick dog gets a pass in the wild. They probably just get abandoned. That’s what happens when your breeding process is too efficient and easy. No catering to individuals at all. Ever. 

Some pre-literate societies invented complex shamanistic healing rituals to manage the sick, cure them and re-integrate them into society. Hiring a shaman to come into your house to heal you seems cool. Shamanic ritual is some quality attention. Sounds better than sitting in Urgent Care for three hours in a crappy chair trying to stay awake to utter your mellifluously insightful patient narrative to a supremely bored ARNP.

But, individualism really kicked off in human societies when everyday kinship role structure permitted it. It was specific male kinship roles where early societies would grant an individual male broader scope to declare their preferences for this or that. So much of this has been lost to history unrecorded, but we see it in modern ethnographies of chiefs, shamans, and panchayat elders. Some seem like super fussy divas to me, especially the shamans. Oh my. Just like MDs.

By reserving positions of social authority for themselves, men have historically granted themselves the ability to demand extraordinary things within the scope of performing those everyday roles. We can recognize the signs of individualism in specific ceremonial offerings to the shamanistic healer, which may be customized to this or that shaman’s preferences. By controlling supply, the local shaman can extract all sorts of weird stuff unless you want to walk miles to find the next guy. Go for it. Complaining about the shaman was absolutely a thing.

In modern societies, as in ancient ones, we also see everyday positions of authority consistently used as a bold excuse to deploy purely narcissistic preferences. This used to be a prerogative of a tiny male elite of aristocrats and chiefs. Today, in the most sociopathic cases, the Weinsteins of the world believe their position entitles them to random sexual access with young females brought into their orbit.

Sexual assault, sadly, is an ancient form of role-based individualism because it draws its power from the entitlement of the role itself to bend everyday social norms incumbent on everyone else. This holds for dads who assault their daughters in our tiny, poorly supervised modern dwellings. Try doing that in a Yanomami open circle dwelling.

source: https://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/yanomami

Not likely.

Modern life makes the exercise of abusive individualistic preferences more likely, not less likely, when we step back and think about how we inhabit space and how much we value privacy.

In this way, kings, chiefs, and aristocrats were the earliest practitioners of individualism, demanding that the commoners accommodate their idiosyncratic desires on demand.

“The king likes his soup tepid.”

“Don’t offer the shaman coconut. He prefers plantains.”

Then, something changed. The aristocracy started to weaken during the Renaissance. The mercantile business owner and yeoman farmer/homesteader appeared in Western Europe. These empowered men owned land and capital and began functioning as micro-aristocrats, whose everyday social position meant they could feasibly enforce the rest of the family’s catering to their preferences. They could, if they wanted, cultivate their preferences for this or that meal or treat or special clothing and get those dependent on them to provide it. This included converting families to religious ‘cults’ like Puritanism or Calvinism (and dragging them to American colonies they knew nothing about!).

By simply controlling the means to generate capital, an ocean of relatively ordinary men of varying degrees of education created personal theaters for enhanced preference accommodation (to use a modern hospitality phrase).

Would you like a welcome amenity, yeoman farmer Dad? 

Individualism began by catering to the relatively needless preferences of empowered male individuals within small spheres of their control.

Only a man could develop a hospitality concept like -

- found in practice at every W hotel worldwide. Although, the latest campaign focuses on empowering businesswomen to snap their fingers and make demands! In the 1990s, Whatever, Whenever service led to notorious charades like bathtubs full of champagne and trays of in-room cocaine, causing management to sweat profusely until said ‘individuals’ checked out. Phew. They’re gone—nut jobs.

Today, in America, this prototypical hyper-individualist behavior has exploded to include all sole proprietors of any gender. The most cuckoo examples exist in the startup world. I have no data on which gender demands more catering to their preferences, so I’ll avoid this minefield. All I can say is that I’ve met women who insist that ALL their tastes be catered to in businesses they own; they’re just nicer about it than the entitled businessman. Much nicer. And, deep down, the women who do this realize they’re being asses.

Confession. Some of you know I run a solo business consultancy from home. I’m essentially a shaman to emerging startup CEOs. But I don’t ask my clients to lick my palm after our sessions like that blind Viking creep. What a crass little poser. He doesn’t shower, either. I’m so much more modern than him.

But individualism has spread much farther than the business owner and farmer/tyrant.

In post-WWII America, we saw middle-class Dad individualism transform into a conjoined privilege of a) on-demand self-isolation from the family and b) highly elaborated consumer preferences (with his ‘hard-earned’ money).

1. Dad gets to ignore the kids whenever he wants.

2. Dad gets to buy whatever he wants without discussion with his partner.

Autonomy is modern Dads’ prerogative. The worse the office hierarchy, the more Dad craves this autonomy at home. This is certainly how I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. How else did Mom ‘discover’ a mountain of credit card debt in 1992? Whoops. Dad likes to buy stuff. In his case, piles of nasty-smelling rare books. It could be a lot more humiliating, for sure. Ahem. Eliot Spitzer, anyone?

One of the more bizarre social changes in the last half-century has been the exponential growth in artistic/expressive individualism from all social classes. These are nice folks hell-bent on becoming the ‘next big thing.’ It could be acting, singing, stand-up, painting, writing, professing, etc.

I was one of the Gen X millions caught up in this frenzy of elite individualism. I’m demonstrating the continued addiction right now as I build this Substack following. And I do my individualism thing 24/7 on the internet, auto-disseminating all manner of dubious opinions to various audiences.

I’m not claiming I’m indicative of a norm, but I am indicative of a massive expansion in the permissibility of being hyper-individualistically weird and opinionated in public, to a degree my grandparents would not see as productive or meaningful and might even find offensive. No idea.

Wait. Who’s that at my front door? What? Who? It’s an Abenaki shaman from Maine. He wants to heal me of my weirdness, he says.

Sorry, man, I prefer things as they are.