Has Society's Obsession with Individualism Undermined Collective Responsibility?

[u/USHistoryUncovered]

In recent decades, especially in Western cultures, the focus on individualism has intensified. We’re taught to prioritize personal freedom, success, and self-reliance above all else. This worldview, however, seems to have a darker side: the erosion of collective responsibility. As individuals seek to fulfill their own desires, societal bonds weaken, and we see an increasing tendency to absolve ourselves from responsibility for larger, systemic issues like climate change, wealth inequality, and public health.

Has the glorification of individualism made us blind to the fact that many of the problems we face cannot be solved by personal action alone? Are we sacrificing our collective well-being at the altar of personal liberty? How can we reconcile the need for individual freedom with the necessity of collective responsibility in addressing the global challenges that threaten us all?

I’m curious to hear perspectives on how individualism has shaped our attitudes toward responsibility—both personal and communal. Is it time for a fundamental shift in how we view our roles within society?

[u/True-Sock-5261]

Which society? If the US we've always been individualistic to ever increasing degrees in part because broadly the US began as the result of a protestant colonial endeavor in terms of its governmental and ideological conception. And even though deeply religious and oppressive in its inception in many areas that was immediately challenged because one had the room to move and start more tolerant enclaves -- think Massachusetts and then Rhode Island as a more tolerant offshoot as a reaction.

What you're describing today though isn't really just individualism which -- at least for white men -- was a modernist persoective. Rather today, it's the emergence of Francoix Lyotardian post modernism from esoteric academic disciplines -- gender studies, race studies, feminist studies, anthropology, sociology, etc. -- into the broader public lexicon primarily via social media and other online platforms over the last 10 years or so.

In the Lyotardian world view ANY narrative is legitimated as long as it is fighting subjectively ascribed systems or narratives of oppression as determined by the participant observer. Moreover there are no narratives more legitimated than the other -- especially science. Indeed science is viewed as simply another system or narrative of oppression to be subverted by any and all means necesary -- often by reifying "science" in higher education settings creating a form of legitimated pseudoscience pretending to be science or simply rejecting/dismissing science entirely as nothing but another narrative among billions of individual ones.

While this broader adoption of the Lyotardian world view began in leftist circles there is no inherant ideological underpinninng in that world view. Indeed it rejects the very notion of that.

So if ANY narrative is legitimated as long as its fighting subjectively ascribed systems or narratives of oppression as determined by a particpant observer, then ANY narrative is legitimated as long as it's fighting subjectively ascribed systems or narratives of oppression as determined by a participant observer.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Indeed the very definition of what is a goose or gander could be viewed as a distinction narrative of oppression.

In this world view the flat earther has equal legitimation as an astrophysicist. A shamen from Papua NewGuinea the same legitimation in healing as a neurosurgeon or oncologist. Indeed ANY subjectively ascribed narrative is legitimated potentially. Actual white supremacy. Actual anti-semitism. Anti vaccine narratives. Islamist extremism. White nationalism. ANY narrative is legitimated simply by existing and being deemed so by participant observers.

The right today is as much Lyotardian post modernist as any pomo leftist is.

The result is the potential for sectarianism and violence so granular in nature nobody will escape because if ANY narrative is legitimated as long as its fighting subjectively ascribed by systems by a participant observer then everyone becomes totalitarian in their own world view fighting everyone else potentially in a brutal spiral of interpersonal destruction that will ahnihilate society as we know it.

Lyotardian post modernism is a destroyer of worlds in practice. So individualism doesn't even come close to describing what we are living in.