It is the instinct of our time to “make something ours”, to make it your own, to particularize things to yourself. We do not seek to belong to something greater than ourselves. Our love of the individual means there is nothing greater, and we make them worthwhile by bringing them into us, not us into them. Even in Christianity, the trend is not toward making us a little Christ, but toward making Christ a little us.
This is not to give judgment, exactly, so much as warning. Life is always a struggle and a balance between individualism and collectivism, the one and the group, the principle and the specific case. Different societies and different people focus on and craft their strategy around one or the other. How well they balance the value of their opposite is often the measure of how effective or how pathological they become. We are both individual and social. We are both particular and participate in the archetypal, the class, the type. We have a shared nature and an individual story. We are both determined and determining. We are what we were born and what we make of ourselves.
To assume that either half of us can lose the other, or to assume that one is of unquestionable authority or the other of unredeemable illigitimacy, is to court our own ruin. And such opposition and failure to integrate the tension within ourselves and within our society will breed discontent and conflict, and eventually opposition and rebellion. Because both are necessary parts of life, and it cannot be long confined without provoking a response. There is a tension there that must be acknowledged, there are claims that both have upon us.
In the present time, in America, we are in the position of being able to be the most individualistic nation that has ever existed, thanks to the power and protection afforded by our wealth and technology. We are afforded options that other people in other times and places have scarcely dreamt of. We each enjoy the kind of luxury of choice and freedom and knowledge and entertainment and pleasure that only the greatest rulers and wealthiest of society enjoyed.
But it is worth remembering the endless cautions that societies have passed down across time about the corrosive danger of people getting exactly what they want. Of our powerful desires and capabilities being matched with a world that, rather than resisting us, caters to us in every way it can. Of the qualities that once drove us in persistence against the headwinds of challenge growing into distorted monstrosities through the glut of ease and abundance. Have we not seen what spoiled children are, and are we so confident in our own wisdom and worthiness that we do not imagine ourselves to have the same weakness and propensity in similar circumstances?
Making Nobody Happy 