Post by RS Davis on May 13, 2004 20:07:00 GMT -5
[glow=red,2,300]Butler Shaffer Wrote:[/glow]
Those familiar with my writings know of my eternal hostility to collective thinking. The key to living well – materially, psychologically, and spiritually – is to recognize that we are social beings who need the cooperation of others while, at the same time, retaining our individual sense of understanding and direction. We need to maintain an energized awareness that never allows our social needs to preempt our individual judgments about the propriety of our actions.
There is nothing so destructive to decent society as the tendency to relax our psychic energies and let our thinking dissolve into mass-mindedness. Wars have long been the vehicle for transforming peaceful, principled individuals into brutish automatons whose standards of conduct become whatever collective authority defines for them. Wars are destructive enough, in terms of lives, property, and foregone opportunities. But there is a hidden cost not only to wars, but to all forms of collective behavior, that is rarely examined: the diminution of the qualities that make for a free, creative, and humane civilization.
It is to the interplay between the individual and the group that I focus my attention. Let me emphasize, again, that I am not setting the values of individualism apart from our needs for social organization. Without some form of society – if only the family – none of us would have survived to become individuals. As long as these needs reinforce one another – as they do in the marketplace, for example – there is no necessary conflict between the two. It is when the interests and purposes of a group are seen as predominant over those of the individuals who comprise it – when the group becomes an institution, in other words – that this balance is lost and conflict emerges. When our individual autonomy, uniqueness, and principles are squeezed out of us and extruded into a collective mindset, our personal and social needs are placed in opposition.
Those familiar with my writings know of my eternal hostility to collective thinking. The key to living well – materially, psychologically, and spiritually – is to recognize that we are social beings who need the cooperation of others while, at the same time, retaining our individual sense of understanding and direction. We need to maintain an energized awareness that never allows our social needs to preempt our individual judgments about the propriety of our actions.
There is nothing so destructive to decent society as the tendency to relax our psychic energies and let our thinking dissolve into mass-mindedness. Wars have long been the vehicle for transforming peaceful, principled individuals into brutish automatons whose standards of conduct become whatever collective authority defines for them. Wars are destructive enough, in terms of lives, property, and foregone opportunities. But there is a hidden cost not only to wars, but to all forms of collective behavior, that is rarely examined: the diminution of the qualities that make for a free, creative, and humane civilization.
It is to the interplay between the individual and the group that I focus my attention. Let me emphasize, again, that I am not setting the values of individualism apart from our needs for social organization. Without some form of society – if only the family – none of us would have survived to become individuals. As long as these needs reinforce one another – as they do in the marketplace, for example – there is no necessary conflict between the two. It is when the interests and purposes of a group are seen as predominant over those of the individuals who comprise it – when the group becomes an institution, in other words – that this balance is lost and conflict emerges. When our individual autonomy, uniqueness, and principles are squeezed out of us and extruded into a collective mindset, our personal and social needs are placed in opposition.
