Lionel Mandrake wrote:
>Our culture isn't hyperindividualist.
>
It's rhetoric certainly is.
>It's atomized.
>There's a difference. Modern capitalism is largely
>fueled by individuals' sense of inadequacy in relation
>to others and faith in work and consumption as means
>to resolving this inadequacy.
>
Absolutely true.
> People with a strong,
>independent sense of self and a coherent, relatively
>inflexible set of ethics, predicated for the most part
>on empathy, are less easily manipulated into jumping
>through capitalism's hoops.
>
I'm uneasy with that "inflexible set of ethics." After all these people
you describe do not develop as individuals but injected with a
concentrated solution of empathy. Rather, they develop in a social
context that least distorts the reciprocity of their relation to one
another. Which is to say that (paradoxically) a very supportive social
system gives rise to the strongest individuals. Extreme deprivation
(whether in the family or in society) may, once in a while, produce a
strong individual, but 99% of the time it destroys any chance of
meaningful presonal development.
Joanna
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