Modern Individualism is Networked and Oversold

what works for type A white males may not work for all

Photo by Verne Ho on Unsplash

In pre-modern societies, honoring individuals for all their eccentricities was not a practice aimed at everyone. We honored the eccentricities of a) leaders and b) healers - individuals with exceptional, socially sanctioned powers. Moreover, the average person did not focus on gaming the system to qualify for either position. Placing people into these vaunted roles was a social process, often ritualized and not subject to Instagram growth-hacking on one’s couch.

This non-catering to the individual continued as agricultural civilization overtook the tribal social structures in the West and Asia. John Stuart Mill did not invent the concept of the individual. Nor did Martin Luther. Nor did the ancient Greek philosophers. It has always been around but with highly restricted applications. This is because, historically, humans don’t believe in democracy or equality. They believe in hierarchy. Aged-based hierarchy. Class-based hierarchy. Spiritual hierarchy. So many well-documented forms. The individual = a leader of some kind.

Following this ancient definition, a society composed entirely of leaders makes no intrinsic sense, even today.

In Tamil culture, the concept of the periyal or “big man” still operates. It signifies the charisma-generating dynamics of Tamil politicians who model their relationship with followers on the behavior of religious saints, minstrels, and mystics. Tamil “big men” are local power brokers who establish authority through disciplined public gift-giving cycles. The most basic public performance of big-man status is to stand on a stage and receive a shawl from a fan. The big man then reciprocates immediately with flowers or some kind of gift (or else he will be subject to random reciprocation requests later). It is an old-world, transactional form of individualism I opened this essay discussing.

Historically, the Tamil “big man” can expect to have all their personal snowflake idiosyncrasies highlighted, discussed, and honored as important. We are familiar with this process in America because it is how we treat celebrities. Ooh, Brad Pitt only wears Ray-Bans?

The “big man” is found across cultures because these individuals are rare power brokers who help you bridge into other social networks of influence beyond your family. The ambitious father has always ‘gamed’ big men on behalf of their families. One could argue that most small-business owners function this way in front of their employees. Oooh, the boss never has hot tea, only cold. Don’t screw up it up.

The difference for American “big people” is that they don’t use ritualized gift-giving to generate their status; they hire you as a W-2 employee. Fear of being fired encourages you to honor the boss’ many eccentricities as an individual snowflake while suppressing your own desires in her presence (watch the Devil Wears Prada to see how this works at the extreme). Every small-to-medium business in America harbors a person at the top likely to function like an Old World big man or even as a petty tyrant.

Following the lead of early Protestant preachers and rebels, Enlightenment philosophers like Mill introduced the concept of the civic individual. This is an adult (male) who votes and has the rights of the citizenry (e.g., influencing state policy). The underlying motive of these democratic ‘rebels’ was envisioning a post-feudal social order where we did not depend on aristocratic “big men” to access power and resources beyond our families. These new civic individuals desired a more equitable power source - cash accrued by autonomous individuals through business (i.e. not inherited wealth). The Irish potato famine, starvation, and mass exodus showed the modern limits of relying on ‘big men’ in a system of global trade.

In the West, especially, we embraced the idea that “every man is a big man.” And yes, it was sexist at first. America attracted millions of brave, risk-taking immigrants and settlers ready to become their own big men on cheap land.

The settling of the West, as violent and racist as it was, remains a rare mass experiment in individual-centered empire-building within a matter of decades. I live in a state epitomizing this time. White settlers carved up Arizona into vast cattle ranching operations and orchards. The Western concept of the “homestead” itself displays the micro-economy of a hyper-individualist society to come. This social order would eventually birth history's largest, leisure-heavy, affluent social class. Every settler homestead was a patriarchal business venture in a society where owning land allowed you to become a local ‘big-man’ along with your male, land-owning neighbors. Without the cheap, stolen land of the West, I’m not sure that American individualism would have spread as an ideological birthright in the same way to such a broad swath of the U.S. population. Historians may disagree.

German sociologist Norbert Elias was an early proponent of a vision of social evolution in which the globe would slowly transition to a globally integrated set of modern individuals. At least, this is the logical outcome of breaking down traditional forms of community that prevent integration (family, clan, ethnic group, etc.). Later in his life, Elias recognized that abandoning traditional forms of community creates a sense of loss and insecurity that is not easily replaced by functioning as an autonomous individual.¹ This is partly why this transition has not occurred at all or not occurred very smoothly in many parts of the developing world, where access to autonomy-sustaining cash and credit is rare.

While the American nation-state looks at us all as individuals, and we have perfectly unique social security numbers to prove it, most of us find interpersonal trust primarily in our most intimate and local face-to-face relationships. There is no bureaucratic state that can replace this intense bonding experience. These bonds are where we desire to exist as human beings. We do not crave abstract placement in a nation-state or global world order. No one wakes up wanting this except policymakers and Gwen Eifel.

Georg Simmel preceded Elias with the first sociological vision of modern urban life as ego-centered social networks. Urban people worldwide curate networks of personal advantage, in which we depend entirely on strangers to provide our income. We also extend this flexible networking attitude into recreation, friendship, and love. We are so committed to noncommittal affiliative networks we mistake them for groups and communities. It’s all we know today, not a world of 100% committed, mutually obligated group membership. In their modern definition of networked individualism, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellmann mention one trait that is incredibly revealing - one-to-one contact.² I’m old-fashioned and call this dyadic social interaction. And it’s all we do in our networked lives. How many times in the last year have you stood in a casual group of five or more people who were all listening to one person?

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And now, back to our regularly scheduled post!

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If we are the CEO of our social worlds, we can quickly fire anyone in our networks at will. Right? To quote the late Robert Bellah,

“… if the entire social world is made up of individuals, each endowed with the right to be free of others’ demands, it becomes hard to forge bonds of attachment to, or cooperation with, other people, since such bonds would imply obligations that necessarily impinge on one’s freedom.”³

The problem with American-style individualism as a way of life, not just a guiding philosophy, is that it makes us emotionally insecure as it empowers us. Sometimes, it is hard to distinguish adulthood from early childhood in a culture like ours. Five-year-olds are also not accountable to social obligations because we deem them incapable of observing them.

As American adults, we preach this childhood incapability as an adult civil ‘right'’’ The right to refuse being obligated to you, fellow adult citizen.

The horror, the horror of social obligation. God forbid. Don’t cramp my style, dude.

Our shrinking social lives reveal that we can forget social obligation in an affluent society with well-intended systems delivering reliable goods and services and with government bureaucracies ‘protecting’ us…until those bureaucracies become dysfunctional or corrupt. Then, citizens get nervous. Really nervous.

I’ve lived in such a place. India in the 1990s. It was like hopping into a Marvel multi-verse alternative to America. So much was trying to be like American capitalism. Entrepreneurial small businesses everywhere I looked, even on the sidewalk. Everyone was talking about cash and consuming things. Yet, stuff was not working quite right to a Western eye.

Then, if you make local connections, you discover what’s really happening. Your retail store owner friend is bribing the sales tax agent to reduce his reported sales and resulting tax obligation and then laughing awkwardly about this with you in English. Your neighbor paid 10,000 rupees to install his phone line in two weeks, not a year. And on and on.

The more rupees you can physically muster, the faster you can obtain anything in India - a telephone line, a propane tank account, a job as a bus driver, a government job of any kind. Bags of rupees plus influential connections means you can become a demi-god in a country like India, even if you only have a 10th-grade education.

“We Indians are very clannish,” one well-educated Tamil professional told me in his lovely, modern home. He meant that Tamil people are fiercely intent on seeking their family’s greatest benefit in the public sphere. They are NOT interested in intrinsically motivated relationships with strangers. They are interested in highly transactional, pragmatic relationships with strangers, including the state and the public sphere. Intrinsic relations are for family. This strikes most Americans as crass, shallow, or even medieval. We link also this family-before-the-public mentality to nepotism.

Tamil adults I met, for example, would not likely understand why Ted Kaczynski’s brother outed him to the FBI after reading his published manifesto in the Washington Post. How could he do this to his brother? Family matters should be solved within the family to protect its honor and integrity as a unit. In the big Indian cities, this ethos has broken down among educated social climbers because they have had to dislocate from their families to move up the social ladder.

How nice that we Americans can condescend to a civilization that still values tangible, reciprocal relationships in which we do material things for another person by respecting what they need from us. We’re privileged to have escaped daily obligations to more than one or two people. We’re free!

American individualism is an obviously superior way of living for most educated white men. The idea of favoring maximum autonomy to build your social network of friends and weak ties has few clear downsides for folks like me. You don’t get trapped in time-consuming family obligations that reduce your ability to achieve at work or build your own business. Your friends don’t bug you too much. It’s hard to get my upper-middle-class peers to critique anything about individualism, whether Democratic, Republican, or Libertarian. These privileged Americans also generate the least suspicion, doubt, or disrespect as strangers in public settings. They have the best access to money and opportunities our ‘networked individualism’ permits us to tap. They don’t get pulled over without cause by the police. They have above-average odds of getting a bank loan or a venture capital investment.

Folks like me never ask ourselves, who does this highly autonomous, networked individualism disfavor?

A lot of Americans. In the language of personality theory, anyone without a dominant/aggressive personality structure. That’s most of us (but not me, naturally). Your friends and colleagues with natural leadership abilities are the ones who do just fine in the American individualism landscape.

I have done pretty well recently once I fully accepted that no one could solve my career problems with me, let alone for me (which I never expected). And no community was interested in working with me on the issue—only books and websites dripping with advice. I realized late in life that I would have to fight to build what I needed from the world of work. I would have to get very aggressive.

Asking every adult to be a socially skilled, ever-adapting autonomous CEO of a curated social network sounds ‘modern,’ but it is absurdly unrealistic for most people. Without a lot of professional coaching and training.

Networked individualism is also absurd for those with noted neurological tendencies:

1. The introverted

2. The autistic

3. The shy

4. Those with anxiety disorders

5. The clinically depressed

6. Those stigmatized by specific ethnic or racial tags

These millions of Americans I just listed need thoughtful, empathetic communities to live within. They need supervision and help navigating the broader world of strangers. They are unlikely to just ‘figure it out’ without at least professional intervention (like I even received).

Who does American individualism favor?

1. The affluent, who can take risks due to financial safety nets

2. Men who are used to getting a positive response when networking

3. The neurotypical and socially hyper-skilled

4. The arrogant, hyper-confident, even sociopathic (Anna Sorokin) and narcissistic (Donald Trump)

5. hyper-ambitious, over-achievers, Type A personalities (me!)

6. Childless households and older people (minimal social obligations compared to parents)

Networked individualism teaches us to be the CEO of our social worlds.

But what if we just want to serve our communities?

We become losers in America.

1. Norbert Elias, The Society of Individuals, (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 224-225.

2. Lee Rainie and Barry Wellmann, Networked: the new social operating system, (Cambridge: MIT Press: 2012), p. 38, Table 2.2

3. Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart, updated Kindle edition, (Berkeley: UC Press, 1996) updated edition, location 922.