One thing I’ve noticed recently is the culture of me. Individualism has taken a nasty turn whereby people now feel that they are at the centre of the universe. Hence, rules created for the benefit of society as a whole no longer seem apply to them. They are special. Equal access, equal opportunity and equal outcome for everyone – regardless of perseverance or talent.
This has been going on for a while but it seems to have become more pronounced in recent years. Worse still is the flip side, where people refuse to tale responsibility for their own stupidity. This is individual power without any kind of individual responsibility. For example, if we trip up over an uneven pavement we look for blame everywhere except where it belongs. We get in touch with as seen on TV lawyers that work on a no won no fee basis to extract as much payment from the pavement as possible via the local council. Anything, in fact, apart from actually looking where we are going in the first place.
Or how about those individuals that are more than happy to take the spoils of capitalism when the financial markets are moving in the right direction but expect society to socialise their losses when it’s not. Not that it’s all their fault. Far from it. Bankers are the scape goats du jour but what about the idiots that borrowed the money? That’s you and me folks.
An idea that appears connected to all this is the thought that we all deserve a big slice of the pie – even if we do absolutely nothing to justify it. Everyone desires a prize. Lazy kids demand A-grades even when they haven’t done the work. Narcissistic teens demand fame even if they have next to no talent. Egotistical politicians upset if they don’t win leadership contests and self-indulgent CEOs get payouts even if their share price has collapsed.
Time to turn things around. Let’s have a commonsense revolution. Let’s get kids doing things that are really difficult once in a while. Let’s make people do things that are potentially painful mentally and physically. Let’s re-introduce school sports days where individuals come second, third and last. Let’s build up mental and physical resilience so that when something really nasty does happen we are prepared. Above all let’s link payouts to performance but recognize that luck pays a part. And when we fail, which we all do, let’s quietly accept it and not try to attribute blame to someone else.
Life, it seems to me, is ultimately about knowing how to deal with disappointment, because for most people that’s exactly what happens in the end.
As long as you’re instigating a commonsense revolution, stand up for radical transparency, and harsh punishments for lies and deception. A few good requirements for plain-spoken labeling would break a number of the connections that added up to create the last financial crisis.
The transparency revolution isn’t working out quite as I was expecting. Perhaps it’s early days or perhaps we’re just lazy/have bad memories. An example might be the whole British MPs expenses scandal. It was big news for a while but people seem to have either forgiven or forgotten. Transparency is meaning that people are getting caught more often but I’m not sure they are getting punished more often. I see no great decline in lying…
Yeah, the Fourth Estate are being seriously corrupted by the need to match eyeballs to adverts.
So in the future two types of media perhaps – free (frivolous news) but supported by ads versus paid for (cover price or subscription and serious analysis) and ad-free perhaps? The first is true already.
I think there’s a continuum, with different organizations trying out different models. Consider Consumer Reports, which avoids ads entirely; The Economist, which accepts ads but requires a subscription and still has serious analysis; Salon.com, where a subscription allows you to avoid the ads. (I think. Maybe it’s just my Adblock plugin.) The rules may vary for text vs. video media, as well; you can read text article by article, but video wants eyeballs glued to sets.
Hi Richard
I love all the resources on your website – am planning a fun morning checking them all out!
But I digress: I was interested to see that you’ve picked up on the trend of individualism. It was something we also wrote about: http://www.3s4.org.uk/drivers/individualism . Because our website is aimed at the voluntary sector, quite a bit of the trend analysis looks at the manifestation of individualism in the movement towards personalisation in provision of public services in England.
Your post is pretty negative, I was wondering if you could find anything positive about this trend?
I think it could start to move in the other direction. I think a mix of the economy and climate change may move people away from pure individualism towards the group once again. The word collectivism is wrong because it sounds very left so perhaps something around community or some of the founding ideas of the US – such as generosity and service to others.