The sheep that weather the storm

Don’t you just hate it when you have a great thought and you lose it after a split-second? Or worse, wonder whether someone has already come up with that thought, making your original conjecture that much less original? Here’s a line of reasoning I came up with in the middle of Thursday night, polished Friday, and am reproducing here. Yes, I am aware it reads like an essay.

Modern society is increasingly individualistic. We see this in our movies, our advertisements… even the product choices we make are aimed at expressing our individuality (or so we are told). In a world where ‘you’re worth it’, and ‘express your inner beauty’ hold primacy, and the focus is increasingly on ‘me, me, me’ and ‘more, more, more’, surely there are political and social ramifications?

Happiness and unhappiness are more often than not experienced through environmental factors, but enduring unhappiness appears to be caused by a feeling of social injustice, or a feeling of being somehow wronged by society, the government, or the system they inhabit. On one level, we are all socialised into the ‘social contract’, where causality and fairness is primary, and initial outlay implies return, not only for due wages for work, but grades for studying, sweets for keeping silent, etc. Injustice therefore, is a violation of the sacrosanct social contract which guides human action.

Social change comes out of social injustice, and requires that a body of persons experiencing said injustice challenge the ‘norm’ of said injustices, normally through social action. Social action, as it were, is only effective when a large body bands together for social change. A single Virginia Tech shooting does not social policy make, despite the body count. An important aspect is the initial response to injustice, which is commonly anger directed at the unfairness within the prevailing system.

Individualism on the other hand, focuses attention on the singular, and hence places responsibility on the self (although many people see their strengths as their own and blame weaknesses or shortcomings on others or the environment, particularly within an Asian context). This entails that if responsibility is one’s own, that injustice is also the province of the immediate perpetrator. For example, segregationist ideology against aboriginal Australians is not an artefact of the government, but is seen as reaction by bigoted racist white Australians.

If responsibility is personal, then directed anger at injustice also functions on a personal level, towards the immediate subject. Therefore, I contend that the culture of individualism is therefore a social control mechanism (whether through deliberate design or chance circumstance), which prevents outrage at social injustices by reframing them as personal injustices. Without a collective anger reaction to perceived injustice, no social action can occur, and hence the status quo and power differentials are maintained.

Of course, would the same ideology apply to collectivistic cultures who are exposed to individualistic cultures due to globalisation? I took a moment to consider the relatively more collectivistic nature of Singaporean society, and realised that Singaporeans feel social injustice keenly, that social injustices are shared, and social injustice blame is attributed to the system, not the person. However, Singaporeans are such docile mindless sheep that they would never consider social action anyway, but rather submit and chafe under a socially acknowledged system. I feel so inspired by those sheep. Baa.