WESTERN WORLD & THE INDIVIDUAL
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The conscious - and commercial - reaction to our experienced loss of individual worth is hysterical individualism. Cellphones are marketed by their vast array of tunes expressing your individuality, banks promise to tailor their packages to suit your individual needs, cigarettes are advertised as badges of unconventionality (a naked girl in the men’s showers - "Do I look shy?" - for Winston; a handsome man abandoning his trousers to the annoying dog and taking tea with his girlfriend’s parents in his boxers, for Gauloises) - exclusive, unique, personalised, individually tailored, for all the woman you are, express yourself - the list goes on. Every item of mass-production promises to single you out from the masses.
In fact, without this belief in the importance of the individual, rather than the collective, capitalism becomes morally indefensible. Terry Eagleton suggests how the ‘importance of the individual’ rapidly becomes the importance of certain individuals over others:
The ‘unique individual’ is indeed important when it comes to defending the business entrepeneur’s right to make profit while throwing men and women out of work; the individual must at all costs have the ‘right to choose’, provided this means the right to buy one’s child an expensive private school education while other children are deprived of their school meals... (Eagleton, 200)
Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is a classic example of the flawed privileging of the individual. A mother has had three sons killed in the war; one son remains alive; he must be saved at all costs. The film’s unexamined nationalism aside (the appeals to Great American Heroes, the opening and closing shots of the Stars & Stripes, the way US soldiers die horribly while Germans are picked off from a distance, and so on), this cult of the individual underwrites US capitalism more insidiously. In the guise of compassion for one mother’s breaking heart, the film allows Private Ryan’s survival to outweigh the deaths of thousands of others. This is not about the sanctity of life so much as the sanctity of one US life. Before celebrating ‘the individual’, we must carefully consider the ideology behind which individual, and how many other individuals are being sacrificed along the way.
compensated global economies religious feeling economic units unique individuals www seems postmodernism
Postmodernism
Jung's Alchemy
Western World & The Individual
Hypertext Fiction
Process of Transformation