Independence Blues
We Americans pride ourselves on our independence. Our national holiday is even named after this grand concept.While no one wants to be dependent on alcohol or drugs, or codependent on another person, we too often see those who depend on government-sponsored social services as failing to meet the moral imperative of self-sufficiency. Family members are labeled “dependents” on our tax forms, presumably only until they mature enough to be self-supporting independents. We espouse “pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps” and idolize “self-made” men. Entrepreneurs are heros; company employees bowing to corporate culture, somehow lacking.
But how self-sustaining are we really? And is dependence really a bad thing?
Just like the endless debate about whether humans are innately good or evil, altruistic or selfish, discussions around how independent we should be or want to be as part of a social species produce no obvious answers.
Yet it matters. How autonomous or dependent we feel shapes how we think and act. It’s worth looking at the ways our simultaneous need for each other and desire to individuate play out in our daily lives and on the broader sociopolitical stage. And since American culture slants way toward independence, the risks of “every person for themselves” deserve scrutiny as well.
Sociologist divide cultures into “individualist” and “collectivist.” While we in the States operate under a high y Individualist mindset, collectivist cultures accept dependence on others as a basic condition of human survival.
They see individuals not as isolated atoms but as part of a web of interdependence. America and Western democracies focus on individual rights and opportunities, while collectivist cultures like China, other parts of Asia, and the Middle East value roles and responsibilities. To sum it up: Western individualists want to know, “What’s in it for me?”Collectivists ask, “Am I doing my part?”
While I now know there is a whole body of scholarship around these two poles, I intuitively grasped the concept years ago. I found myself alternately reading the Confucius Analects and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: two opposing views of human life. Confucius valued tradition, respect for elders, conformity, and sociopolitical continuity. Thoreau set out to live for a year by his own labor and wits in the woods away from the confines of his New England town.
Let’s look at how each of these four terms plays out.
A mere four years after the signing of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights appeared to guarantee freedom from government overreach into individual life. Americans have long been protective of their rights. Kids rebelling against their parents proclaim, “It’s a free country!” The United Nations created an expanded Universal Declaration of Human Rights, beginning with a right to life, to liberty, and to security and including the right to food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.
The varying protection of these around the globe reveals that such “human” rights are not universally acknowledged. Perhaps a more realistic term would be “socially contracted rights,” as they depend on governmental protection and societal conformity/participation.
The whole westward expansion of the United States was fueled by pioneers out to make better livings for themselves. After the Civil War, the government provided some freed slaves with “40 acres and a mule”: the resources required to build an independent livelihood. A century later, the Federal Housing Administration engineered a system in which every family could have its own home. The government laid down a massive interstate highway system to connect sprawling suburban communities, requiring that each family also have a car.
Single-family houses supplanted urban apartment buildings, cars replaced railroads and other modes of public transportation. The nuclear family, now dispersed across the landscape, dissolved both multigenerational households and dense urban neighbor hoods. We were on our own.
Geography is destiny, and this manmade landscape cemented American individualism. Those who lacked the resources, or were “redlined” out of whole swaths of suburbia, became an underclass relegated to cities abandoned by anyone who could make it out. Stuck in dysfunctional wastelands, these individuals became dependent on public housing, welfare, Medicaid, SNAP, Head Start, and aid from various NGOs. Individualism served those in the economic middle and top; the bottom became involuntary dependents. Opportunities vary widely depending on your origins; rights are too often the precious luxury of those with the means to enjoy them. Our forefathers intuited that money would drive all: Modified, or window-dressed, the signers softened the original phrase ensuring [Constitution“The right to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” originally read, “ . . . the pursuit of wealth.”
And yet, even the most individualist societies require basic levels of compliance. Law-abiding behaviors like stopping at traffic lights and forming lines for service. Neighborhoods, churches and temples and mosques have their own codes of behavior. It’s not really a “free” country anywhere we exist with other humans. Our freedom depends on our collectively agreed rules of conduct. Individualism’s outer reach is Libertarianism; it’s perilous, asocial endpoint is anarchy.
Elsewhere across the globe, collectivist societies drill down on roles and responsibilities. Individuals are valued as cogs in the great social mechanism; from each according to his/her/their abilities. Rather than asking children what they want to be when they grow up, state-sponsored school systems track kids early on according to their perceived aptitudes. Even democracies like France persist in funneling young children into academic or vocational paths based on early evidence of their projected ability to play specific roles as adults. Score high in early testing, and you’re on the path to university and a white-collar job; score low, and you’re bound for vocational school to train as a plumber, electrician, baker, or mechanic. Japan’s hyper-collectivized culture relies on the tacit agreement that the welfare of the whole comes before that of the individual. Long before Covid, city dwellers with colds donned masks to protect other people from infection. India’s caste system striated its population according to ancestral lineage: Brahmins bred brahmins; untouchables, more of their own kind. China’s historically collectivist culture (cf. Confucius above), which for centuries favored continuity and stability via respect for tradition, devolved into the radical and forcibly controlled conformity of Maoist communism.
During the Cultural Revolution, anyone infected by too much education–which leads to free thinking—was sent to work farms to be broken down to the level of submissive government servant.
So who wins—the individualists or the collectivists? Who thrives?
The upside of celebrating the individual is that each of us theoretically has the power of choice: of where we live, whom we marry, and what kind of work we do to earn a living. The downside lies in the pressure that puts on us to be “somebody,” to chase fame and fortune: from People magazine to Instagram followers, MacArthur “genius” awards to Pulitzer prizes. While Thoreau pitied those who conformed to “lives of quiet desperation,” rising to visible success has led far too many celebrities to flame out and self-destruct: Elvis, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Ernest Hemingway. The anonymous ones who die trying bear testament to the dark side of a society that deems the non-famous among us as failures.
Collective cultures, on the other hand, impose blind conformity. Forcing square pegs into uniform round holes crushes inspiration, dampens motivation, and saps productivity—not to mention wreaking psycho-spiritual havoc on all. Japan is suffering a rash of suicides among young professionals who feel increasingly isolated they struggle to meet capitalist expectations of achievement without the traditional support of active extended families.
Communist China set up five-family “communes” whose primary function was to have members spy on and report nonconformity to the authorities. When enforced by military action, collectivism morphs into totalitarianism, fostering the bloodbaths of Tianamen Square and the Stalinist purges.
Today these two poles are arcing toward each other in bizarre and disturbing ways. President Trump illustrates individualism gone rogue: complete disregard for social conventions, historical precedent, and the law. Yet while permitting himself license to do whatever he chooses, he seems hellbent on prohibiting anyone else from doing the same: immigrants are locked up or exiled without due process; trans people are stripped of their rights; universities relinquish control of what they teach; any of his cronies (who have mushroomed to include the entire Republican Party) who dares to disagree with him is cancelled. Trump’s nihilistic rejection of other people’s rights to exist defy even the label of collectivist. His purely self-interested behavior defies the common respect that upholds successful individualist cultures. The guardrails that kept our democracy looking out for the greater good have proved surprisingly flimsy.
Meanwhile, leaders of collectivist cultures like Russia and North Korea continue to act in predictable ways: they follow no rule books yet demand total submission from their peoples.
In short, we’re seeing the worst of both models: self-seeking tyrants crushing dissent; leaders willfully imposing obedience on people too disheartened, fearful, or disempowered to resist.
Of course, the question is, at least for those of living in a “free country”: How did we get here? Trump did not assume power via divine right. Whether we choose to admit it or not, “we” elected him. Perhaps he won the popular vote fair and square; perhaps our skewed electoral college favored red states with lower populations. Perhaps we took for granted that mainstream media would ensure that we all received the same facts and accepted the same truths—which would likely have led to a completely different electoral outcome.
Most likely, we allowed ourselves, in the Attention Economy, to be so distracted by Instagram reels and TikTok videos that we stopped paying attention to the deepening fissures in our social fabric. And perhaps, until it was far too late and an insidious network of power brokers had rallied in service of Trump Inc., we all took for granted the validity and stability of our legislative scaffolding and the autonomy of the judicial machinery.
Whatever the cause(s) of our current plight, we’ve lost touch with the best of both individualism and collectivism. Each of us will have to pause the scrolling and examine our own consciences. Ask uncomfortable questions like: What am I doing to uphold my values on the sociopolitical stage? Remove our earplugs and really listen to the other side. Tune in to the surprising ways in which our “opponents” may agree with us on fundamental values, even if our strategies for upholding them differ. Who doesn’t want individual freedom? Who truly thinks it’s okay to harm another person? Who wants to endure civil unrest or civil war?
We’ll have to step out of our silos to collaborate on collective actions that can move the needle. We’ll have to seek out and support leaders who have the courage to stand up to abuses of power. Who fight for the rights of all members of society.
Post-Note: I began this essay in July and finished it before the November 4 elections ushered in Zoran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, Democrats as governors of New Jersey and Virginia, and California’s Proposition 50, redistricting the state to skew Democratic in response to Texas’ remapping to favor Republicans. I hope these victories reflect more than the typical pendulum swing between right and left, Republican and Democrat. I hope they signal clear opposition to this administration’s unfettered domination of national and local politics. I desperately want to believe we are stepping back from free fall into an unprecedented mashup of rogue individualism and collectivism’s dark side: totalitarianism. But even if that is so, there’s still massive work to be done.
I stand by the belief that individualist societies require each of us to stay tuned and stay nimble, as willing to admit our own blind spots and prejudices as we would wish our apparent opponents to see theirs. That we be okay with inhabiting the “lonely places” where we may disagree with our closest allies.
That we be willing to speak up for minority opinions. That we be willing to shut up long enough to hear from others and honestly consider their premises and positions. That we not believe everything we think without question. That our internal debates be as rigorous as any happening on the
public stage. And finally, as recipients of the Western individualist paradigm, we remember that we are a social species, and that none of us can truly go it alone.