One long, heavy sigh.

squashed:

Whakahekeheke has written an elegant bit of nonsense on consumerism. Here’s the highlight:

I believe this is a beautiful and useful phenomenon. I see two ideologies among my fellow humans: (1) collectivism and (2) individualism. Collectivism is manifested as nationalism, tribalism, sectarianism, sectarian religion, statism… and more severely as state communism, fascism, theocracy, totalitarianism, and mass cults. Individualism is manifested as voluntary individual action and interaction, as individual ambition, as individual rebellion, as markets… and more severely as consumerism. 

You can extrapolate the rest from that. Collectivism is bad. Individualism is good. Bad things are collective. Good things that arise from collective action, like culture, collaboration, and community, don’t count. And any debt individual triumphs owe to collective stability is conveniently forgotten. Or, when they can’t be forgotten, they’re reduced to a tautology. For example:

The first is that these collective expressions are emergent from individuals and not vice versa. The second is that we only understand these collective expressions in terms of individuals and thus cannot have direct knowledge of them other than through revealed individual expression.

See how that works? Take something that seems collective. We’ll use the angry lynch mob feeding off its own energy and collective prejudice. But that prejudice lives in the hearts of individuals. And somebody had to light the first torch. And an individual tied the noose. And the experience of the lynch mob—for better or worse—is experienced by individuals. So, as Whakahekeheke explains, mob violence should properly be attributed to the individualism. (Did I do that right? I might have screwed up and chosen something bad about collective action rather than something good.) Or we could use Whakahekeheke’s state of nature example example.

A child is born and set in a large nature dome with no other sentient life, just plants and food. She never has interaction with other humans or materials of human communication. She lives, as it were, in the wild. No doubt, she would develop some form of articulating her conscious thought to herself (language), some norms of behavior (culture), etc.  Would she be human? Of course. Now imagine multiple individuals were introduced into the dome. They would, upon interaction, develop some shared forms of communication (language), norms of behavior (culture), and so on. This is where culture, language, society, etc. come from. They are emergent from individual action and interaction, not the other way around.

Q.E.D., right? Well, except for the part about how the child would starve to death because it can’t feed itself. Or that unarticulated thought patterns aren’t language. Or that behavioral patterns aren’t really culture. My dog generally craps on the same side of the yard. That doesn’t make him cultured. And, as soon as you put multiple people in the Dome of Bad Parenting you’ve screwed up your thought experiment by allowing collective action. And you still have that problem with a dumbed-down definition of culture. All the neighborhood dogs pee on the same trees. Have they developed a secret doggy culture?

Whakahekeheke concludes that we can never truly know the values and desires of somebody else—so collective actions and collective values are somehow inherently impossible. This is going to come as a real shock and disappointment to a lot of philosophers who have been laboring for thousands of years to have all their work dispatched so quickly. And, if collectivism is impossible,  Whakahekeheke attributes a lot of bad things to it. He writes,

 

From sociology to philosophy to international theory to politics to popular discourse, collectivism is rampant. Yet those who engage in such analysis do so on entirely on logically untenable ground.What is the result of this strong collectivism? Is indicated previously, the manifestations of collectivism include communism, fascism, sectarian theocracy, and statism in general. The difference between these manifestations is entirely a matter of degree and development. They are functionally the same: a few individuals claim to be representative of the collective and are popularly recognized as such.

Representative democracy? It’s just baby fascism.

But the part that baffles me is that Whakahekeheke somehow considers consumerism to be an individual activity.

[N]owhere is individualism better and more clearly expressed than in modern consumer pop culture. Some people call it “trash” culture. I see it simply as the inevitable evolution of human society away from atavistic collectivism and toward individualism. 

Really? You think you bought that Kei$sha album because you invented your own musical tastes? You don’t think somebody in marketing figured out that not only would you buy the album but a million people like you would buy it? Are you the target audience of those car ads that say, “Don’t do anything the advertisers tell you. Buy this car instead”?

Or is it the values in the pop lyrics that appeal to you? Get rich or famous so people will love you and then you won’t have to be alone anymore. Be beautiful so you can be accepted by others. Take risks because all the cool kids are doing it and you wouldn’t want anybody to think you weren’t cool. This is seriously the last bastion of individualism? If so, the war’s over, man. We won. All of us. Collectively.

But don’t worry. Collectivism isn’t all bad. It means paying attention to relationships. It means community. It means striving to understand others rather than assuming they are all either identical to us or intrinsically unknowable. It means communities attempt to give individuals the support they need to flourish—even when that flourishing means pretending they’re not part of a community.

Squashed wins this one.