they don’t interfere with other people’s rights to live as they please. The ideal society is one in which people live unencumbered but together, each doing their own thing.
The God within. The goal of life is to climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and achieve self-actualization and self-fulfillment. As you make your own personal journey, you learn to better express your own unique self. You learn to get in touch with yourself, find yourself, and live in a way that is authentic to who you really are. The ultimate source of authority is found inside, in listening to the authentic voice of the Hidden Oracle within, in staying true to your feelings and by not conforming to the standards of the corrupt society outside.
The privatization of meaning. It’s a mistake to simply accept the received ideas of the world around you. You have to come up with your own values, your own worldview. As Justice Anthony Kennedy put it in a famous Supreme Court decision, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
It’s not the job of schools or neighborhoods or even parents to create a shared moral order. It’s something you do on your own, and who are you to judge if another person’s moral order is better or worse than any others?
The dream of total freedom. In other cultures, people are formed by and flourish within institutions that precede individual choice—family, ethnic heritage, faith, nation. But these are precisely the sorts of institutions that the culture of individualism eats away at, because they are unchosen and therefore seen as not quite legitimate. In an individualistic culture, the best life is the freest life. Spiritual formation happens in freedom, not within obligation.
The centrality of accomplishment. In a hyper-individualistic society, people are not measured by how they conform to a shared moral code. They are not measured by how fully they have submerged themselves in thick relationships. They are measured by what they have individually achieved. Status, admiration, and being loved follow personal achievement. Selfishness is accepted, because taking care of and promoting the self is the prime mission. It’s okay to be self-oriented because in a properly structured society, private selfishness can be harnessed to produce public goods, such as economic growth. Researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education recently asked ten thousand middle and high school students if their parents cared more about personal achievements or whether they were kind. Eighty percent said their parents cared more about achievements—individual success over relational bonds.
You could add other ideas to my list of things that characterize the culture of a hyper-individualistic society: consumerism, a therapeutic mindset, the preference for technology over intimacy. The big fact is that these ideas, spreading for half a century, have made it harder to live bonded, communal lives.
Hyper-individualism is not a new problem. It comes and goes. A few years ago, I was reading Sebastian Junger’s book Tribe. I came across a phenomenon that has haunted me ever since. In eighteenth-century America, Colonial society and Native American society sat, unhappily, side by side. As time went by, settlers from Europe began defecting to live with the natives. No natives defected to live with the colonials. This bothered the Europeans. They had, they assumed, the superior civilization, and yet people were voting with their feet to live in the other way. The colonials occasionally persuaded natives to come with them, and taught them English, but very quickly the natives returned home. During the wars with the Indians, many European settlers were taken prisoner and held within Indian tribes. They had plenty of chances to escape and return, but did not. When Europeans came to “rescue” them, they fled into the woods to hide from their “rescuers.”
The difference was that people in Indian villages had a communal culture and close attachments. They lived in a spiritual culture that saw all creation as a single unity. The Europeans had an individualistic culture and were more separable. When actually given the choice, a lot of people preferred community over self. The story made me think that it’s possible for a whole society to get itself into a place where it’s fundamentally misordered.
There’s always a tension between self and society. If things are too tightly bound, then the urge to rebel is strong. But we’ve got the opposite problem. In a culture of “I’m Free to Be Myself,”