The self versus the collective

As a person you mean nothing to those who believed in the greater good; but at the same time, you also mean nothing to those who pursue the cult of the individual to the exclusion of all else. I struggle to detect where individual needs end and collective good begins. So, I could never be a politician.

“The great citizens of a country are not those who bend the knee before authority, but rather those who, against authority if need be, are adamant as to the honour and freedom of that country,” writes Albert Camus in his book Resistance, Rebellion, Death.

In societies which have suffered great collective losses, a rejection of the cult of the self gives way to an often dictatorial regime, which uses desire to restore the losses of the greater good as a tool to impose greater control over society. Look at Adolf Hitler after World War I, using the pain of national loss and disgrace to rally Germans against the rest of the world…

South Africa is replete with individualistic ideas spread across the class spectrum. We now have pro-capitalist parties, who claim to fight for the poor. We also have parties led by wealthy, flashy politicians who are “aspiring communists” and socialists. The call is to advance a collective good and it is only our constitution which fiercely defends the honour of the individual, regardless of colour, class or creed.

The majority of South Africans are addressed as masses by their rulers and never as individuals. And, as long as you need the state to survive, you mean nothing to it. In the Third World, we have killed off the individual. It is clear the collective comes first. A man can attack a woman in a crowd, if that woman is a journalist, a police officer or represents his “oppression”, as he acts to defend the honour of his group.

You cannot convince that man this individual woman is as important as his little group. Even the most advanced societies struggle to marry the concept of the individual with that of the collective.

“We face a choice between a society where people accept modest sacrifices for a common good or a more contentious society where groups selfishly protect their own benefits,” Newsweek columnist Robert J Samuelson wrote on the unravelling of the so-called American Dream upon which the idealisation of free-market capitalism was built into the American psyche.

In this view, the ultimate freedom is to determine your own path in life… although this also means you, an individual, are none of the government’s business. Not your suffering, not your inequality and certainly not your poverty.

Post-World War II, the US dreamed of cookie cutter houses, perfect wives who could finally leave the factory and cook for their husbands. The greater good moved from that of sacrificing life and limb in battle to sacrificing identity.

“The poor would blame the rich and vice versa. Whites would blame blacks and vice versa. The old would blame the young and vice versa. We all might blame Japan.”

In South Africa, we all blame each other and apartheid may be our Japan. But shrouded by the collective, the individual is safe from accountability, so long as the collective is safe from the self-reflection required to act and think as an individual.

Simnikiwe Hlatshaneni.

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