Is Individualism Wrong?
Introduction
Today we hear more and more often that being individualistic is wrong, that it is necessary to be more altruistic and that deep down we now live in an age where there is nothing but selfishness. But is this really how we have to go on? Is it that wrong to be an individualist? How does individualism collide with selfishness and altruism? Are they so irreconcilable?
Individualism and egoism
First of all, it is necessary to eliminate what I think is a common prejudice and an error of superficiality: egoism and individualism. Now, at least in Italy, I notice that the term egoism is often used as a synonym for individualism in common parlance. A person is often referred to as egoistic when speaking conversationally, but is rarely referred to as an individualist; the whole is instead reversed in more learned conversations and with a higher language, where the term individualistic is preferred to egoistic. However, we must not be wrong, they are not in fact synonyms.
The term egoistic derives from the Latin word ego, which means I, while individualistic concerns the individual, which we could also consider as an instance of the conscious person. The term egoistic wants to bring the self — therefore the single person is understood as a person defined as selfish and not the single person in general — above others.
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Individualism and altruism
Altruism derives from the word alter, other, therefore it promotes the superiority of the other over the individual. Altruism is then not the opposite of individualism, but of egoism, while it seems that altruism and individualism are compatible, that there are no deep and rooted contradictions in their semantics.
[…] being individualistic does not mean being selfish, egoistic. A true individualist recognizes something that unfortunately seems to be forgotten too often: that another person is another individual, an alter-ego, therefore it too is part of individuals.
Individualism and ideologies
We are now at the nerve center, which may be difficult for some people to digest, but I will try to do as much as possible to make it understandable. From what has emerged, individualism collides with ideologies. Ideology is a cultural function that arises above the physical structures of society, a superstructure, something that is recognized by individuals at the level of cultural significance.
However, ideology arises as a builder of groups, united precisely under the same idea, but then the individual underlying the group is lost, which is not compatible with individualism. As we know, ideologies can have a good function of grouping, of recognition under the same banner, but they must be kept at bay, and it is only possible when the individual comes out of that magmatic and changing chamber of ideological functions.
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How then can we solve these ideological problems? We must place the person, the individual above the group. In this way we maintain ideologies as we cannot do without them, we can do nothing but have unconscious prejudices, but we must also remember that if we continue to judge people for ideologies, we are playing the game of the unconscious; instead by placing the individual above the group, we can at least eliminate those unconscious functions that do nothing but feed prejudices, create factions in conflict with each other, and eliminate the single person in favor of belonging or not to that ideology.
Conclusions
We see well that we cannot remove ideologies as social functions, we cannot eliminate prejudices, we can only appeal to the attempt not to fall into the games of the unconscious and to promote the individual as the focal point of social and personal judgments.
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I hope you enjoyed this short essay, and thank you for reading it up to this point.
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