(i attempted a poem but it kept essaying! better formatted and commentable here)
I have rarely found the idea of “individualist” (versus “collectivist”) useful; it is as sensible to me as most conceptions of agency, which is to say I get confused when I try to use it for detailed work. I’ve wanted other lenses on being an individual for as long as I can remember. Recently inspired by Táíwò’s “autobiographical freedom”, I wandered into something like a history of the Individual: what play or power is there in being recognized as a type of individual by a particular society, place, and time? Consider a Genius, the tip of an iceberg, who seems to direct or anticipate a whole society of practice: the Genius Pianist stretches what is played and how, leaving their mark on shared craft. Until recently I hated the Genius as “individualist”, but through this new lens I see also how it coheres a social practice. It turns out which Individuals have power or play in a society, and to whom they are available as roles, matters much more to me than whether that society is “individualist” or not.
In my life, before my eyes, the USA has lost some of its Individuals. It’s a history worth longer tellings, and I encourage you to ponder your own, but consider two Individuals I was raised with: the Informed Citizen and the Rugged Homesteader. I think I (and many others, this is probably what Neil Postman was on about in 1985) have seen a murder of the former, and a recent photo of the latter near the scene, sunburnt shirtless in red white blue. So let us eulogize: Born of a shotgun wedding between slaveholders and the Enlightenment, our classically liberal Informed Citizen, who loved nothing more than opening the news as his wife served breakfast, died quietly in public and RFK Jr. cut off his left hand for luck. The Democratic Party has been as loud about this as a coop of chickens, and as helpful; lost in a collective fog, they seem to lack the individuals and the Individuals they need to act.
I find this shift in the distribution of power, play, and presence among Individuals a good seat from which to see the present farce. Liberalism is dead in the US of A because it did not protect or replace its vital postwar substrate, but let the Informed Citizen starve for want of elite truths. It is now foreign for a politician to cede a truth to any expert. More prideful than a parade of naked emperors, the Democratic Party bleeds out from this wound it can’t admit. In this fearful era I see many afraid to interact with society but through money and myth, unpracticed or unwilling to trust with strangers. Perhaps this is why our elite cede Trump his comfort plane, his service 747; our commodity culture, ever lobbying the top and advertising to the base, is too blinded by exchanged value to see the bribe in a gift. Those who hope the Consumer will be politicized by tariffs are attending the Informed Citizen’s funeral too, consciously or otherwise.
Of course, new Individuals have been introduced to replace the deceased: Trump sees himself as a Big Dog with piss enough for Greenland, while Fascist Vassals see him as a King who grants stewardship, reducing their ideological infighting to mere jockeying for his favor. And ICE is peddling a new flavor of racialized social death to those they’ve always held too Alien to have inalienable rights. In many ways such Individuals were familiar to our Founding Fathers; the Informed Citizen has pushed out their ghosts as he tripped into the grave.
So where does this leave us? I’ve long tried to build up and out from the Informed Citizen, perhaps naively. So I mourn his death, the way one mourns the landmark of an old ranch house after it's been skeletonized by fire. It is clear we want power to shift to other Individuals and their organs: perhaps the Union Member, the Dialogic Student, or the Potluck Communist can find use for these charred beams and slightly-warm foundation.