Dreaming
Our Individuality: It's a Collective Thing
Honor private consciousness, but acknowledge its social foundations.
Posted October 3, 2019 Reviewed by Matt Huston
We Americans pride ourselves on our individuality. Growing up, most of us experienced what anthropologists call “independence training.” That is, our parents expected us to develop our own thoughts and judgments, manage our own feelings, and learn new skills pertinent to a changing world. As we got older, they allowed us to go places and do things. All this with the recognition that one day we would be on our own, living with self-chosen mates away from the families that raised us.
That general credo—that individuals should pursue life, liberty, and happiness on their own terms—is an important feature of this country’s value system. Most of us make our way through school, find jobs, pick places to live, seek friends and intimate partners, and make religious commitments as we see fit. We believe that other people should not tell us how to live. We vote, and otherwise express our opinions, according to personal standards. We treasure that independent spirit or soul that seems deepest within us.
That same value system teaches us to resist collectivism. The most dangerous examples of this, or so we believe, are countries with totalitarian governments. To use twentieth-century examples, that meant places like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China. Countries like that, we learn, supervise and curtail, rob individuals of their rightful expressions and rewards, and ultimately turn their citizens into masses. Even today, dimly understood concepts like “communism” or “socialism” are ideas that one explores at one's peril. The specter of Big Brother, the supervening authority, haunts us.
In much the same way, we learn to mistrust bureaucratic organizations in other social institutions, especially large business “corporations.” Big organizations pursue their own goals and set terms for the involvement of their members. They direct and manage. At worst, they turn persons into “personnel.” Much criticized then was the corporate lifestyle of the twentieth century. We are becoming, or so it was claimed, “organization men” (William White), a “nation of sheep” (David Riesman), and “cheerful robots” (C. Wright Mills). Organizations have grown too big, and too firmly established, for us to challenge their authority. They dazzle us with their advertisements. The other Big Brother, with the soul of an accountant, secures our compliance.
Of course, these are extreme views. But there is a general suspicion of collectivism. We do not care for “crowd” or “mob” psychology, wild aggregates who have lost their independence of judgment. Some people even question the legitimacy of labor unions with their supports of seniority, stable positions, and wage-guarantees. Individuals, or so the thinking has it, should manufacture their own circumstances and reap the rewards that their talents bring to them.
Is it any wonder then that we are adherents of psychology? After all, that discipline focuses on the mental and behavioral qualities of individuals. It teaches us that we must be attentive to the thoughts and feelings that swirl within us.
Who of us is not impressed with the privacy of his or her own consciousness? Powerful is the sense that others cannot read our thoughts. Our pleasures and pains feel deeply our own. We dream our own dreams. We lie awake at night scheming and reminiscing. Each day, we confront the person before us in the mirror and acknowledge our commitment to them.
However, it is also fair to say that the content of those imaginings is not entirely our own. Nor do we live in isolation, splendid or otherwise. The following, then, describes five ways in which our thoughts, hesitations, mannerisms, and outbursts are public as well as private affairs. As we depend on the sustenance of the natural environment, so we exist in a social surround. We belong to groups like families and friends. We live in communities. We work for organizations. We attend gatherings of religious bodies and associations. We observe the laws of governments. We partake, in uncountable ways, of what society offers us.
1) Groups create and maintain the information systems we operate in. However much we prize our independence of thought, we should acknowledge that most of our strongly held principles—beliefs, values, and norms—are held by other people as well. Some of these other people teach us directly; we learn also from books, magazines, and electronic media. To be sure, we filter that information through our life experiences; but even that filtering process is socially influenced as others encourage and reprove our choices. One can say much the same about the material resources we cherish. Even our ability to express ourselves follows social patterns. The toys we want for Christmas, our visions of “the good life,” even our expletives when we hit our thumb with a hammer are predictable enough,
2) Groups provide us with identity and status. Our understandings of who we are and what we can do depend heavily on our placements in relationships. Those comprehensions give us the confidence to act—and to think and feel—in certain ways. We need not be in the physical presence of those other people to experience these effects. Instead, we understand fully that we are spouses, mothers, friends, and the like, and we operate accordingly. We seek to maintain, and ideally advance, the standings we hold with the people we admire. And we harbor animosities toward certain other people and groups; that “negative” stance is also important to who we are.
3) Groups give us emotional support. Psychic life features ceaseless combinations of thought, image, and feeling. Amid all this evanescence, some sense of personal stability is necessary. Erik Erikson argued that quest for coherence features our attempts to resolve existential feelings like mistrust, shame, guilt, inferiority, identity confusion, isolation, self-absorption, and despair. To be sure, social relationships often produce these feelings of uncertainty and incompetence. But other people also help us establish the platforms of stability we need to live confidently. Most of us have the capacity to lurch between Erikson’s extremes (such as trust and mistrust or hopefulness and despair), sometimes with little warning. However, just as other people wound us, so they give us comfort and support. Sometimes, it only takes a brief word or gesture to set us aright.
4) Groups give us direct feedback on our behaviors. Through trial and error, we learn what is effective/ineffective, pleasant/unpleasant, correct/incorrect, ethical/unethical, and so forth. Social interaction is probably the most important setting in which people play out the consequences of their expressions. We act; others react; we react to what they have done. An early social psychologist, George Herbert Mead, even had a theory of mind based on this. Mentality, as he saw it, was an internalized “conversation of gestures” in which we invent certain lines of behavior in our minds and then consider the likely responses of others to these actions. Trying out our schemes publicly, we learn that social existence is a pattern of scolding, praising, teasing, shunning, gossiping, shaming, and the like. Commonly, we resist other people’s attempts to correct us; nevertheless, we learn about the “reality” of public culture and what makes our own commitments different from those of our associates.
5) Groups set agendas for daily behavior. An often-idealized life, at least in this culture, is one in which individuals go and do as they please. In reality, there are jobs to go to, people to meet, groceries to buy. Some of us may wish for a private retreat, perhaps soaking alone luxuriously in a large tub. But our human involvements ground us. Our identities derive in large part from the hard-wrought set of commitments, strategies, and reminiscences that reflect a lifetime of challenges.
How different are we from other people? Clearly, there are times when we self-consciously emulate the people we admire, perhaps taking some of their qualities for our own. Alternately, we oppose and revile. More typically perhaps, we drift along, mostly conforming to the norms and values of those we respect and making little adjustments that suit our circumstances and personal “style.”
Even when we act defiantly (perhaps declaring that we reject our parents’ political or religious beliefs), we sometimes discover that we have not rejected, indeed have embraced, more basic, less easily assailable things (perhaps their dogmatism or love of orderliness). So pervasive and ineluctable are social traces.
Of course, most of us try hard to be our “own person,” to be distinctive and worthy in ways we can embrace. But let us also acknowledge the importance of other people to who we are and the degree to which our life circumstances are shared with countless others. In that light, our personal problems are also social problems. Our wildest dreams are the fantasies of the millions.
