How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story
A <i>ton</i> of weird stuff from that time seems to run through Esalen. I will read this or that history of computing&#x2F;hippies&#x2F;etc and boom, Esalen.<p>Strange how influence works.<p>Anyway, beyond that... this is something I&#x27;ve been contemplating for a long time. I would actually agree with the other HN poster that New Thought was a contributing factor. I also locate part of the hyper-individualism at play today in the reaction to the Soviet Union&#x27;s collectivism and Nazi Germany&#x27;s mass movements. There seemed to have been a certain &quot;inoculation&quot; that was put in people&#x27;s heads that &quot;collaborating in large groups was e.v.i.l.&quot;; this later cropped out to Reagan&#x27;s nostrum &quot;government is the problem&quot;, along with the decline of labor, etc. The Me Decade was what, the 70s, and then on into the 80s. I recently read &quot;We were as gods&quot;, a memoir &amp; history about growing up in a Vermont commune in the 70s and how those communes fell apart. The author locates the major root cause (out of many factors) in the inability to form a proper governance mechanism and in the heavy &quot;can&#x27;t tell ME what to do&quot; individualism in the movement.<p>So.... we have selfies, dysfunctional governments, libertarian fascism, and gig economies today. There <i>are</i> links here between all 4. (Although, an astute observer remarked that &quot;self portraits&quot; are an old tradition of painters, so it&#x27;s prudent not to point a finger too, ehm, <i>pointedly</i> at the moderns).<p>Anyway, I view movements such as the DSA as a sign of a more healthy society struggling to come into being - the individual is important - <i>but so is society and the group</i>. N.b., this isn&#x27;t particularly <i>liberal</i> as an idea goes - I seem to remember remarks on this from the Mass. Bay Colony chiefs, and at least one part of that concept goes back to early Christian writings.