[lbo-talk] Jerry Lewis as worst-case scenario

Lionel Mandrake brotherlyshove at yahoo.com
Sun Sep 11 02:37:37 PDT 2005


I'm not sure I completely get your meaning though your remarks are intriguing.

My point was simply that the kind of individualism associated with Emerson and the kind that fuels capitalism are very different and that genuine individualism - the kind that resists the mob in deference to principle and fellow-feeling - is not necessarily incompatible with more communal types of social arrangements.

LM

--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:


>
>
> 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
>
>
> >
> >
>
>
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

______________________________________________________ Yahoo! for Good Watch the Hurricane Katrina Shelter From The Storm concert http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/shelter



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list