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
>
>
> >
> >
>
>
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>
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