Heightened Individualism Is Destroying Our Sense of Togetherness and the Search for Meaning
I’m publishing this series of articles to share and discuss my ruminations on coping with a troubled and messy world. You can “follow” me to never miss an article.
In an Op-Ed, David Brooks rightly calls out the Failures of Individualism in securing the Common Good, and undermining Civility[i].
In Brooks’ words:
“Over the past few generations, the celebration of individual freedom has overspilled its banks and begun to erode the underlying set of civic obligations. Especially after World War II and then into the 1960’s, we saw the privatization of morality — the rise of what came to be known as the ethos of moral freedom. Americans were less likely to assume that people learn values by living in coherent moral communities. They were more likely to adopt the belief that each person has to come up with his or her own personal sense of right and wrong.”
For one, the esteemed Columnist Walter Lippman saw that an extreme focus on Individualism led to loss of common civility. When there are no shared moral values, Social Trust not only plummets, but becomes an undesirable.
Most of all, along with great Austrian Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, Brooks shares the belief that “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life”. And, Meaning is not something that one finds entirely by oneself. It’s an integral part of being in loving Moral Communities.
When people are not part of such communities and share little if any common values, people not only suffer from loneliness but thereby become extremely prone to following under the sway Authoritarian Leaders.
In a chilling note, Republican Representative Ralph Norman said recently that he was opposed to the Federal Government spending money to rebuild the bridge that was destroyed in Baltimore, Maryland. And this from a man whose State not only accepted, but benefited from Federal money to rebuild many of its bridges.
If this isn’t a classic case of being solely for oneself and oneself alone, then I don’t know what is. Sadly, I know that readers can come up with endless examples of their own.
States dissolve when they no longer share a Common Social Contract. Tragically, every day sees more of the same.
[i] David Brooks, “The Great Struggle for Liberalism,” The New York Times, Friday, March 29, 2024, P A23.
Ian I. Mitroff is credited as being one of the principal founders of the modern field of Crisis Management. He has a BS, MS, and a PhD in Engineering and the Philosophy of Social Systems Science from UC Berkeley. He Is Professor Emeritus from the Marshall School of Business and the Annenberg School of Communication at USC. Currently, he is a Senior Research Affiliate in the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, UC Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Management. He has published 41 books. His latest is: The Socially Responsible Organization: Lessons from Covid, Springer, New York, 2022.
Photo by eldhose kuriyan on Unsplash
