Western individualism versus the Eastern spirit of community
&gt; <i>The salvation of the world depends only on the individual whose world it is. At least, every individual must act as if the whole future of the world, of humanity itself, depends on him. Anything less is a shirking of responsibility and is itself a dehumanizing force, for anything less encourages the individual to look upon himself as a mere actor in a drama written by anonymous agents, as less than a whole person, and that is the beginning of passivity and aimlessness.</i><p>-- Joseph Weizenbaum<p>To me that&#x27;s not putting rights over duties, that&#x27;s <i>actually</i> assuming responsibility. And it doesn&#x27;t have to mean arrogance and shrinking the world to what oneself is:<p>&gt; <i>When you stand before me and look at me, what do you know of the pain in me, and what I do I know of yours. And if I threw myself to the ground before you and cried and told you, what would you know more of me than of hell, if somebody told you that it is hot and terrible. For that reason alone we humans should should face each other so reverend, so thoughtful, so loving as if facing the gates of hell.</i><p>-- Franz Kafka<p>&quot;To live solitary and free like trees, and brotherly like a forest, that is our desire&quot;, as Nazim Hikmet wrote. That doesn&#x27;t mean people stop living in communities, it also doesn&#x27;t mean they&#x27;re just loyal to their friends or family. Someone of &quot;my tribe&quot;, however one might define it, who kicks a dog, is less my brother than that dog, in that moment. Individualism doesn&#x27;t have to mean being selfish, but simply extending compassion to all living beings, as what they are -- not as &quot;examples&quot; of a species or a tribe or a &quot;type of person&quot;.<p>&gt; <i>I often warn people: &quot;Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, &#x27;There is no &quot;I&quot; in team.&#x27; What you should tell them is, &#x27;Maybe not. But there is an &quot;I&quot; in independence, individuality and integrity.</i><p>-- George Carlin<p>To say that only exists in the West as if it was  fluke is silly. Even if it was true: so far as we know so far, as far as what practically matters, intelligent life only exists on Earth -- does that mean we strive to become like something less, because that&#x27;s &quot;more common&quot;? Might doesn&#x27;t make right, numbers don&#x27;t make greatness, and you can find conformists in the west just like you can find strong-willed individuals in the east. And when indiviual judgement was suppressed is when we had our darkest moments.<p>&gt; <i>As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life.</i><p>-- George Orwell<p>I would say individuality is what happens naturally if you give a person the means and the permission to develop it. Yes, it can be suppressed, people can, instead of developing their own identity, identify with tribes and skin colors and professions and programming paradigms and soccer clubs. It&#x27;s like drugs can dock to receptors, that doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s what those receptors are for.<p>&gt; <i>To state it in slightly different terms: in those critical years [roughly from age 17 to 20] I learned how to be alone. This formulation doesn&#x27;t really capture my meaning. I didn&#x27;t, in any literal sense learn to be alone, for the simple reason that this knowledge had never been unlearned during my childhood. [..] By this I mean to say: to reach out in my own way to the things I wished to learn, rather than relying on the notions of the consensus, overt or tacit, coming from a more or less extended clan of which I found myself a member, or which for any other reason laid claim to be taken as an authority. This silent consensus had informed me, both at the lyé and at the university, that one shouldn&#x27;t bother worrying about what was really meant when using a term like &quot;volume&quot;, which was &quot;obviously self-evident&quot;, &quot;generally known&quot;, &quot;unproblematic&quot;, etc. I&#x27;d gone over their heads, almost as a matter of course, even as Lesbesgue himself had, several decades before, gone over their heads. It is in this gesture of &quot;going beyond&quot;, to be something in oneself rather than the pawn of a consensus, the refusal to stay within a rigid circle that others have drawn around one - it is in this solitary act that one finds true creativity. [..] It&#x27;s to that being inside of you who knows how to be alone, it is to this infant that I wish to speak, and no-one else. I&#x27;m well aware that this infant has been considerably estranged. It&#x27;s been through some hard times, and more than once over a long period. It&#x27;s been dropped off Lord knows where, and it can be very difficult to reach. One swears that it died ages ago, or that it never existed - and yet I am certain it&#x27;s always there, and very much alive.</i><p>-- Alexandre Grothendieck<p>Being <i>able</i> to be alone does not mean being unable to be with others any more than being able to drink means being unable to eat.<p>&gt; <i>If the teacher, if anyone, is to be an example of a whole person to others, he must first strive to be a whole person. Without the courage to confront one&#x27;s inner as well as one&#x27;s outer worlds, such wholeness is impossible to achieve. Instrumental reason alone cannot lead to it.</i><p>-- Joseph Weizenbaum<p>People who are afraid of that project a lot onto those who are not.<p>&gt; <i>The type of personal integration we attain – or the effective lack thereof – depends on what possibilities our life situation offers us for the development of autonomy. It is a distorted development that is the root cause of the pathological and, ultimately, evil element in human beings. The struggle for autonomy heightens our aliveness. Insofar as the socialization process blocks autonomy, however, this process engenders the evil it attempts to prevent. If parental love is so distorted that it demands submission and dependence for its self-confirmation, social adjustment turns into a test of obedience and the child’s efforts to comply bring with them the loss of genuine feelings. The human being then becomes the true source of evil.</i><p>-- Arno Gruen