Individualism and Grief
“To choose love is to go against the prevailing values of the culture” (hooks).
Of the many, one of the more difficult moments of the pandemic for me was when standing in the lobby of a medical facility, I was told that my wife couldn’t go into the doctor’s office with me. It was my first meeting with my new surgeon — who would soon be removing cancer cells from my body — and I panicked on the inside: how could I do this without my wife? I wouldn’t think of all the right questions! I wouldn’t be able to hear and process everything the surgeon was saying! I needed someone there whose body wasn’t going to be scarred and altered! I needed someone to be my advocate!
I wasn’t prepared to go it alone.
In the end, she was there, on speakerphone. It certainly lacked the intimacy of being able to see her face, reminding me that I am loved and strong and that I will get through this. There were many appointments like this one.
Now, over a year later, I think of all the loved ones who have been isolated from their sick and healing family members. I think of all the people whose visits have been canceled due to isolation periods. I think of all the people visiting and grieving on screens, or alone.
You’d think we’d have been more prepared for this, awash as our culture is in individualism. As much as we work many jobs and many hours seeking independence (rather than the stigmatized dependence). But instead, many of us are flailing, struggling along in the ongoing pandemic world feeling fragmented and disconnected. We might fancy ourselves as individuals, but we don’t do well alone.
I often say as a sociologist that there is no such thing as an independent person. While we do have a psychological sense of self — a feeling of separation from others — sociologically, we are all always interconnected. What I eat here, in Chicago, is connected to the labor and intimacies of people in California, in Central America, in East Africa, in Western Europe (and elsewhere). Even when I am physically alone, I am always in a dance of dependency with others: the people who make my electricity possible, the people who made my chair possible, the people who made my peanut butter and jelly sandwich possible. My solitary existence is sustained and supported by an entire web of other people, all connected through a global economy and ecology.
The American culture of individualism hides these connections. We ignore that our uniqueness comes from the machines of mass production, and we purchase our way into feeling like ourselves. Seeking out a unique, individualized sense of self makes us highly profitable, so the true benefits of this system accrue to the capitalist class, while we are left alone to fend for ourselves with our mountains of plastic and our dis/mis-information feeds.
This does not prepare us for isolation or for grief, and especially not for grieving in isolation.
The separation of people from each other in a competitive culture of individualism is tied to the separation of people from each other as a result of white supremacy. The belief that we are different from, and better than, is connected to both of these systems, and both have functioned to fuel the profit motive. But this separation cuts us off from our humanity, and we are left unprepared in the face of the most human of moments: facing and grieving our losses. As Chimamanda Adichie points out, we are so often flailing, unsure of what to say, or how to help someone who is deep in the throes of a loss. She writes, “I back away from condolences. People are kind, people mean well, but knowing this does not make their words rankle less.”
Because we were raised in a bootstraps culture, we don’t know how to show up for each other. So often, we look at others but look past their pain. We ask, “what’s wrong with you?” rather than “what happened to you?”
In White/Capitalist America’s endless pursuit of “better-than,” we cut ourselves off from a true understanding of what we all have in common: our shared mortality. Capitalism offers us all the tools to attempt to evade death — the vitamins, the elixirs, the magical bottled waters, the face creams — but none of the tools to process our emotions and build our communities so that we can come together and tend to one another. James Baldwin wrote that “white people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other.” In the Fire Next Time, he elaborates:
We run towards our groups and ideologies — that give us a false sense of hope and of help — and run away from what heals us: acknowledging our shared humanity, and each other.
Individualism — which emerges from Capitalism as a key feature of social structure — encourages us to see others as competitors, as people to set ourselves apart from, to prove our enhanced worthiness in relation to. As bell hooks wrote, “the absence of a sustained focus on love in progressive circles arises from a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit and an overdetermined emphasis on material concerns.” The power of capitalism is overshadowing our capacities and needs for love.
In the face of rampant individualism and American “freedom” we struggle to find places of agreement. How do we care for the sick? Well, that depends on our individual opinions (horse tranquilizers, anyone?) and how much money you, as an individual, have (in the absence of Medicare-for-all). This culture of individualism cuts us off from each other — literally, we cut each other off and become desensitized to others’ suffering — and makes us feel okay with it because we are “worthy” and they are “undeserving.”
We shouldn’t have to fight over how we care for each other. We should build a culture of care and the social systems to support that care.
The realities of mortality require that we come together, to support each other, and to hold each other with affection. Individualism, in this context, gets in our way. Individualism allows one person to believe that they could be the one, the one who doesn’t suffer, the one who doesn’t get ill, the one who doesn’t die, the one who knows the “right” way to heal. Individualism gives us permission to believe that our Facebook feed is a valid source of medical information. It allows us to believe that we are special, that we will be different from others. James K. Rowe writes that “without cultural resources for transforming it, the fear of death easily feeds a compensatory will to supremacy for all peoples.” He goes on to say that, “any future possibility of building a “beloved community” would require that all people start the process of reckoning with their existential reality.”
Allowing people the space to be individuals — to be human — is a necessity. This is why systems of oppression stifle this humanity. In the United States, this has happened to enslaved Americans, to Native American children sent to boarding schools, to rural LGBTQ kids who dare to come out (as some examples).
But, a society that allows all humans to be themselves is not the same thing as a society organized around a culture of competitive individualism. The former builds community, the latter breaks it down. We need to develop the tools to face our fears together, so that we can build the “beloved community” that we crave, and that we need, to make it through life’s struggles.
“To choose love is to go against the prevailing values of the culture” (hooks).
Let’s choose the love of each other rather than love of self, and learn how to grieve and how to heal as a collective.
