Renaissance of the Individual: A Critique of Modern Collectivism

A Philistine Chorus Profaning the Sacred

Once again, the swinish multitude has revealed the full extent of its banality and mediocrity, drooling over the detritus slopped into the public trough by the unseen swine-herds of social media. What raptures of delight emanate from their twitter-pated hymns to the inanities of the moment! #Phil provokes their ardor for some pedagogical palaver, #Cheaters inflames their porcine passions with crude moralizing and confessions of matrimonial treachery, and the recrudescence of some justly forgotten boy-band (#EXOISNINE) has them squealing with uncomplicated glee.

Bah! One is tempted to hang a pork chop around one’s neck in hopes of being eaten last by this most unpalatable, sub-literate herd of gastropods. But buried amongst the indigestible slop, the offal, and the orts being so enthusiastically masticated, there may—just may—lie a kernel of sense, a solitary nutrition-pill of potential enlightenment.

The Cult’s Kernel of Sense

These lowing masses, it seems, have managed by accident to put their sweaty, callused digits upon a genuine idea. Deeply buried beneath their bellowings about #Phil’s skill at pedagogical pandering, we detect a dim awareness that adapting to the individual case is preferable to crude one-size-fits-all generalization. From the #Cheaters gibberish about infidelity and gaming perfidy emerges an inchoate recognition that circumstances alter cases—that individuals face personal contexts demanding personal solutions. And even in their boosting of the revived #EXOISNINE pop cult, there smolders a glimmer of the principle that band members are discrete individuals whose idiosyncratic talents and trajectories deserve distinct accommodation.

In short, from this vast cesspool of cretinous blathering, a weak but discernible respect for the individual—the anti-collectivist, anti-herd ethos—has been unaccountably upchucked. A coherent stance emerges, embracing what might be called “progressive particularization.” The rallying cry is: individual situations demand individual solutions. Emancipate policy and perception from dogmatic universals! Bust the straitjackets of one-true-wayism! Attend to, and make provision for, the diversity of the singular case!

The Dawn of Non-Idiocy?

My, my—such a clarion call from the muddy trough’s mire! Naturally, the swine who stumbled into sounding this distant reveille were far from intending anything of the kind. Their motives were base and dull—clicks and celebrity-stalking banalities. But in their endless rooting for trivia and schlock, they have churned up a philosophically promising truffle.

Could it be that we are witnessing the first faint twinges of a new social and political self-awareness? A dawning consciousness that individual human beings are not mere interchangeable units, but unique particulars with discrete identities, talents, and needs? That the individual should be attended to, accommodated, made provision for—rather than sacrificed to abstract dogmas of universality? That society’s institutions and guiding norms must become more plural, contextualized, and tailored if they are to properly serve the individualized citizen?

Perhaps it’s wishful thinking to hope the poor ape has at last caught a glimmer of how impoverished is his condition, enslaved as he is by the oafish herd-mind and the stultifying rule of cramping universals. But the hint of such a self-uncovering has undeniably sounded amidst the customary bellowing and grunting. Who knew that seeds of profundity might take root in the very wallow itself?

Roots of a Renaissance?

Were this faint spark to catch fire, it could portend a renaissance of human culture and politics. A broad renewal of individualist philosophies, displacing the grey, spirit-battering collectivism and uniformitism that has reigned too long as orthodoxy. A golden age of customization and empowerment of the sovereign self, wresting power from the crude herders of the state and repatriating it to the level of the granular and the personal. An end to being drilled and stamped into cohorts, an escape from the factory-lining of souls into anonymous, disposable units.

Imagine: A body politic where institutional frameworks, policies, incentives, and regulations are not shoddily universalized, but sensitively contoured to the singularities of individual circumstance, background, talent, aspiration. An authentically representative democracy where the citizen’s vote weighs their specific, lived reality—not some illusory “general will” of the herd. Schools structured around a bespoke pedagogy for the particular pupil, their unique gifts and goals, rather than inflexible regimens of lockstep standardization. An end to the stupefactions of mass entertainment, replaced by a flourishing of niches and autonomies of personal taste and expression.

This proliferating, variegated, blossoming world of human idiosyncrasy emancipated—could it begin germinating in the stinking furrows of twitter-pap and hashtag garbage? Could the seeds of this new renaissance be sown amidst the detritus and leavings of the tabloid’s slaughter-pen?

The Law of Individuation

If so, it would represent a revolution as profound as the dawn of individualism itself in the 15th century Renaissance. For it, too, was sparked by the recovery of ancient texts preaching an anti-collectivist, anti-corporate humanism. A philosophy that the singular human being is no mere chess-piece or numbered instance, but an autonomous subject with a dignity, consciousness, and destiny all its own. Recovering these stifled voices from antiquity shattered the prison of medieval thought, where humanity was enslaved to dogmas of herd-collectivism, mass-subjection to unitary principles, and denial of mankind’s diversity of individual cases.

Perhaps once again the moribund seed of individualism has been buried in the mulch of banality, only to stir back to life in the fetid minds of the mob. Perhaps the very worst among us may become the midwives of a revolution in thought and culture as profound as the original Renaissance itself. We may stand at the brink of a new golden age of the sovereign individual—an age where personal idiosyncrasy and talent, family tradition and origin, and richly-textured individual circumstance all become the substrates for society’s institutional and normative fabric.

The old gods and dogmas of desiccated, monocultural universalism were already crumbling before this onslaught of individuation. Here is the chance for a thoroughgoing demolition—a blasting of every last cell of their stony, oppressive creed and a raising of new proliferant temples where each human soul is the solitary celebrant.

Out of the muck, mire, and slops we have scraped together the seedlings of a new individualist revolution. Here are the faint stirrings of a world reborn in the prismatic light of the idiosyncratic, the singular, the ineffably unique. The long night of soul-maceration in the charnel houses of collectivist conformity may yet break into a new personalized dawn.

Away, then, with the swine, the oafs, the lowing herd! Their very idiocy has been pressed into the midwifery of genius. We go now to cultivate a new and more fertile ground—the emancipated soil of the inviolable human individual.