COLLECTIVIST INDIVIDUALISM: A CYCLE
You must now speak, Sir John Falstaff fair, which swims against your stream.
Crime and Punishment is truly one of my favorite novels.
It has less to do with the fact that Dostoyevsky is a great writer, and more to do with his ability to capture the image of a paranoid mind — like that of an adolescent. Crime and Punishment, while about the murder of a pawnbroker, could be about anything: withholding from your parents an alternative lifestyle, going steady with someone of a conflicting sect of religion, making up in their minds that they are going to college for something that’s not medicine. It is a novel, we find, not so much about the crime itself, but the principle of the crime: transgression. Habitually, cyclically, there is a system in place among societies whereby, individuals find themselves in a circumstance whereupon they are no longer satisfied with their lives, soon becoming cynical, alienated, and disillusioned. As a result, they become sick, restless, and with an abundance of time to think, they think much. Every society has, at one time or another, sometimes more often than others, had to deal with their own Raskolnikov.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche creates the character Zarathustra, who is the ideal human, the perfect being, who has all the answers to the problem of man, after coming down from his high place in the mountains — he is, essentially, a troglodyte — and observing men in strife. Nietzsche had arrived at the idea that, religion is so prominent within a culture because, we have a tendency, as humans to be quite self-loathing, a as a result of our particular brand of being. We are aimless, we have no objective other than to survive, but, as time passes, we begin to develop new institutions which try to add more meaning to such a verb. We create Gods and myths in order to explain our own place in the universe, and at some point, we confuse these myths and Gods with living, we transform them into icons by which we should strive after — Zeus, Yaweh, Buddah. We believe we are wicked, that we must achieve “goodness.” Without saying it aloud, we admit that we are all horrible people, sometimes monsters, sometimes cowards. Humans are self-loathing creatures who like to drag their heads across the ground, because it’s he one thing we know how to do without being taught to do it.
Dostoyevsky analyzes this in Crime. Looking at his own society, and the major changes which were occurring within, he formulated this argument:
Men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But the extraordinary men, they have the right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary.
While Raskolnikov tries to refute Porfiry’s cross-examination of his position, it is a pretty good description of what is meant. If the object of civilization is to move forward, then there must be those who turn the world, not quite backwards as our modern superman, but forward like Napoleon or Newton, people who, outraged by their times, rallied and moved the world forward even then they were most reluctant about it.
This is where the conflict between collectivism and individualism begins, even if moderate on both sides.
Where this comes from is the greater conflict between one generation and the last one, particularly the new start-up generation (the children of the Baby Boomers) and the millennial generation. The Start-Up generation, are those aging people who are finally beginning to start their own business, sticking it to the man, no longer pinned to whatever job it was that they were before. Most of the time, these people, they have families, children, who they turn into employees. It is in the spirit of the days in which, everyone worked on the farm, and using your children as laborers was without question.
The problem is, they are immediately doing exactly what they were breaking way from before — a sort of tyranny, a sort of pressing of the thumb into submission, to create figures who they believe will carry on their legacy and their dreams. It is the fantastic notion of the family business, everyone in the family does what the previous generation did, because, why wouldn’t you? You have a great foundation, you have access to easy money, and you’ll not even have to go through the hardships of the founding generation — but why do we, the children of these businessmen, still rebel?
It is because, like Raskolnikov, we feel that we are individuals. We believe that, our lives should not be so readily defined by someone before us, even if that person is our parents — because, much like Raskolnikov’s day, we are undergoing incredible changes, changes to a system which seem to grow greater every day we wake up. Particularly, for us, it is a violent change, a revolution of sorts, which has not yet gathered the correct unity in order to be identified by history as such. Right now, it’s just a lot of civil uprising, lots of protesting, dissent.
Yet, our parents — with good intentions, most of them always have good intentions — they press, they want to provide, they feel that the only security in their lives can be knowing that they have done as much: provided.
I have never been a parent, had a family, understand the many struggles that come with being a mother or a father — I cannot lay claim to these sorts of things. If I ever do have a family, maybe I will experience the excruciating sacrifice of having to care for a child, and feeling the ticking need to provide for them — and maybe I want.
Given the recent trends within our culture, with marriage becoming less and less the norm, with more people giving up want to bear offspring, a population of homosexuals and transgendered peoples, it would almost seem out of place to start a family, in the traditional sense.
I’m young, an adolescent, and there are times when, while looking into the future, I see myself married and doing well enough to have a child; and there are other times where I see the same scenario, only without a child, and happily. You see, the place I’m in, a child is not something I can really be “bothered” with. There are big changes happening, and so long as I am apart of those great changes, having a child would not just be an injustice to the great change, the Revolution, but to the child themselves — for their lives would be strikingly ordinary, and they would be swept up in a world that was far too large for their eyes, and find themselves stricken with a terminal sickness, believing, nihilistically, that they were insignificant, only insignificant in the way that, they felt they would never be able to do anything at all, because all forces are much to against them.
They conform.
They are crushed.
They submit.
The cycle of collectivism — parents whose only pain is to provide for their family, their kin, because it is their contribution to the world where they feel so alone, so dejected, as though they are themselves strangers amongst each other — that begets individualism — children, who pressed by their parents to do exactly what they once did, rebel, fight, attempt to convince their elders that their path is appropriate for them, and that, their lives are much different — continues in this way, changing every generation, tug and pull.
