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It is all too easy to look at the current state of the world and turn away from it. This turning away may take on various forms, or statements of judgment: "This world can't be saved." "We are too late, the damage dealt to the world is too much to undo." "We are too powerless to save it." "This world doesn't deserve redemption."
Indeed, the pressing weight of the world's wounds can be too much to bear. You're only one person, after all. But who said you should be the only one to do so? Who said we are alone?
The spirit of the times can be accurately summed up in a phrase: "the cult of the individual." The promise of this intensified focus on the individual is the burial of the collective and the twentieth-century horrors associated with it. But what we never anticipated is that this image of the individual will be the prison that slowly whittles away everything that makes us human. This emphasis on the individual is the myopia of our age or, to borrow a term from a famous philosopher, its opium.
In our time, being an individual shields (and thus separates) us from the world, thereby preventing us immersing ourselves in it. And, in turn, friendship and camaraderie fosters the hope, the hammer that will awaken us from our sleep, the axe that will crack open the ice that has kept us in place all this time.
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The end of the collective is not so much individuality's fault, but rather how the inertia post cold-war regarding taking action on global problems having evaporated due to a lack of interest, confidence and motivation in any particular entity. (ideology, country or religion etc.)
...which is caused by a paradigm shift, the overturning of collectivism's predominance to individualism's. Granted, upon further analysis, this is the superstructural effects of neoliberalism. Neither optimism nor cynicism is the proper stance to take in order for direct action to become a significant force in politics.
by Red Monaca; ; Report