The Liberty of Individuality Can Only Come Through Thinking Like an Individual
When you talk to most people, it is not common to find someone who resists the concept of being an individual, unless the conversation is about group activities and endeavors in which groups of people are working together as a team or as a unit with a common goal. When you ask a person about themselves, however, you will most often find that they like to talk about their uniqueness, such as past experiences, what they like, and what they don’t like. When we are functioning as a member of a group, for example, then, obviously, people generally like to think as a team player. For example, when talking to players on a basketball team, they will undoubtedly promote the concept of team and how they work together. As human beings, we naturally think about ourselves as both individuals and as parts of a whole to varying degrees when we think about different circumstance. The ways in switch we switch gears in our thinking are quite important. When one is at work, one needs to think about working with others and staying coordinated with one another, because they have a common purpose. After work it isn’t too difficult to switch gears and start thinking about what one wants to do for dinner, for example, with an individual frame of mind, unless one is planning to eat with others, then the mind should be open about what others’ taste might be.
When one is working on a team project, the gear-switching that takes place is obvious, and we do so without thinking. We simply think of our individual performance as a way in which we can function effectively within the framework that our contribution tot he team requires us to. We think of the rest of the team as essential to the project and work on ways to coordinate with them. Team projects are best entered into when one feels the desire to actually work on that project with that team, yet sometimes, in the real world, we have to work on projects with team members that we do not wish to work with. While this is something that we have to deal with from time to time, we usually do so for some reason that overrides the lack of desire to work on a certain project or to work with certain people. We should take special note of when we make these decisions, but it is usually fairly obvious to us when we choose to make a sacrifice for some overriding need. It does go without saying, though, that we have to be mindful of sacrificing our individual needs too often or in circumstances that are not worth it to ourselves. We need to balance our needs with the needs of others. When this balance becomes unbalanced, in either direction, selfishness or servitude can arise.
Philosophizing on how to maintain a balance can be wordy without end, and it usually falls to the individual in finding that balance for himself or herself. Those who do not respect the existence or the need for such a balance are more often than note, seeking or hoping to gain from some sort of servitude on your part. Many people consider “service” to be the ultimate good in life, and it can be very rewarding for the server and the served, but only when balance is maintained. One must be mindful that many who wish to take advantage of one’s service will use guilt as a primary tool to drain your energy and get you to comply. One should always question the sincerity of those who use guilt to as a technique to achieve their goals. While their goals may or may not be positive, the technique of using guilt to influence one’s feeling of service is a very low one. Those who are willing to use such a technique should be treated with caution.
One of the most important things to look for is when someone or some group is trying to switch your gears from the perspective of the individual to the perspective of a collectivist or group mentality. Among the many techniques that people use to do this, and with many purpose for doing this, it is probably most common in the world of politics. The practice of manufacturing group-think is one of the most evil practices within politics. When a politician tried to encourage people to support his or her ideas on an issue, it is not an evil act on the surface at all. Yet, when a politician tries to manufacture group-think on an issue due to categorizing individuals, is becomes a very dubious one. When said politician uses the manufacturing of group-think as a technique to sway public opinion by categorizing individuals based on their race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and other types of categories, it becomes downright evil. What is truly awful about this practice is that it is constantly practiced by those on the political left-wing and their cohorts in the media. It is as if the politicians give rise to the members of a given ethnicity, race, or sex being concerned about all of the same few things and those few things alone, and then the media stands up and declares them to be correct. This two-fold approach helps to reinforce the group-think and serves to ridicule or quiet down those who disagree.
For instance, I one time observed a girl say to an African American classmate, “You know you’re not black” with regard to his musical tastes. The light-skinned Latina felt very comfortable saying this, because, in many ways, society, through indoctrination from the media has pretty much defined what kinds of music are “black” and what kinds of music are not. I held my tongue, but felt like saying that she had no right to take this young man’s race from him and that he had every right to listen to whatever music he wanted to with the knowledge that his race is self-evident and could not be taken from him. In such a situation, in this day and age, I would have been observed as the odd ball, or the one who was not thinking “politically correctly.” Fortunately, there were no apparent ill feelings from their interaction and I got a sense that the guy had been kind of used to it by then anyway since such thinking is pretty acceptable to pop culture these days. It goes without saying that we constantly have to look to our pop culture, the media, or leftists in general for the approval of what is ok. That was the whole aim of political correctness in the first place.
This is one pretty tame example that is not going to stir up too much outrage on a blog, but there are many others that also come to mind from both personal experience and experience of the daily narrative that comes from what the media selects as our “daily stories.” It seems most appropriate, however, to switch back to the general heart of the matter, because the desire is for people to think about this more and try to recognize it more when it happens. One of the most useful ways in which this evil act gets employed is in trying to reduce people down into “single issue” voting. One can find the media using this term a lot when election season rolls around. they actually speak about people as “single issue” voters quite frequently, hoping to get anyone who cares about one of these single issues to adapt the thinking of being a single issue voter. When a politician or political party (guess which one) can sway entire groups of people to vote a certain way based on one position on one issue, then one is confronted with massive electoral power. The thought that any one of us, as individuals, can be reduced to just caring about one thing is absurd, but it is every power-hungry politician’s wet dream.
Every election season, you hear of the buffet table getting spread out. The media will start talking in single issue terms, such as “help with tuition for college students,” “free contraceptives for women,” “illegal immigration for Latinos,” and so on. I remember a day in the past when the contraceptives were the responsibility of both partners in a sexual relationship. Well, the masterminds of what is correct thinking have now decided that it is the woman’s responsibility and that they should be paid for by the rest of society so that they can be free for her. It also seems insulting for he left’s single issue for women to be defined as free contraceptives, as if that is their primary concern in life. This is the issue that started the whole “war on women” mantra as Conservatives said that anyone who buys contraceptives should pay for it themselves rather than forcing others to do it. That got turned into “they want to ban contraceptives.” Additionally, may, if not most of the ethnically Latinos int he country are actually U.S. citizens or are legal immigrants following the legal practice. Are we to think that even these people are supposed to be only concerned about other Latin Americans that they don’t even know and have very little else in common with to be rewarded for coming tot he country illegally? Apparently, we are supposed to think that way. The media is even quite comfortable to say that the single issue that African Americans are concerned about is simply voting one way, for that one and only party that any of us need ever to vote for. Apparently, African Americans are not allowed to be concerned about the skyrocketing national debt, a fat, bloated, all-consuming federal government, Social Security going broke, Medicare going broke, skyrocketing health care costs, or any of the other things that, according to the left-wing masters of knowledge that only crazy right-wing kooks should be concerned about.
What is truly sad about this, is that so many people don’t even think about it, but just listen tot he media and join the herd on their way to single issue collectivism. So long as they do, the powers that be will be very happy and continue to call people like me crazy. It’s not easy being an individual sometimes, but when it comes down to being one’s self, it’s nice to know that one has a self to begin with.