Individuals are Expendable

The cost of individualism is individual expendability.

There are things that are hard to talk about and write about because they’re abstract. I apologize in advance for the incoherence. But I’m fixed on the human carnage I’ve met recently. A man, not yet 60, who moves in and out of the hospital because his body is failing due to alcoholism and other untreated physical and mental issues. He weeps for his mother who just died and the unreconciled grief between them. He has no home, no one is glad to see him. I’m thinking about a woman who came into the church looking for gas money, manic, talking a mile a minute, laughing, joking. After a few minutes in conversation, she, too, taking an abrupt turn, weeps. Something I can’t decipher about her boys. Her boys, she wants me to visit her boys. She can’t. But she wants them to know she loves them. Where? DeKalb County Jail. Her sons, 20 and 21, await trial for carjacking and murdering a DoorDash driver this summer.

These two people are at the end. There is nowhere else to go. No one wants them. No one else can hold their pain or fix it. Their suffering receives no consolation. I tend to believe that everyone should have a place to go for help. Everyone deserves care and love. But I meet so many people with no where to go. Long before they came to me, the collective “us” had abandoned them.

The larger framework I want to interrogate here is “individualism,” which I think about as a social norm that assumes the basic unit of morality, meaning, agency, and responsibility is the individual. “I/me/mine” feels like the only important and inviolable frame for thinking about American life. We are a nation of individuals. We made this bed, in a sense, through our nation’s evolution as a liberal democracy with a free market economic system. Both democracy and capitalism elevate the autonomy of the individual over any collective identity. We elevate the individual; and we let individuals wither, suffer, die.

There’s a weird phenomenon buried within American individualism. Individualism depends on collective actions to preserve and protect it. We don’t have a “state of nature” individualism. Ours is a highly structured individualism. Individual rights depend on a government that is committed to protecting rights by the application of the rule of law. Individual profit-seeking and taking is dependent on collective actions that create markets and police who are deployed to defend private property. Our individualism is by corporate agreement.

So, our “system” is an agreement. But increasingly, I feel the power imbalances. The agreement feels engineered by those who succeed. Those who, because of genes or, more likely, family wealth, can embrace the brutality of individualism. I’ve met so many wealthy families who buffet the failures of individuals in their family system by their wealth and power. These stories become family secrets. But in poor families, there’s nothing to buffet the inevitable failures. There’s lots of pain, there’s wounded people wounding one another, and finally, for so many people, the family itself goes away. There’s nothing.

What I’ve been thinking about and feeling lately is exactly how much this system of ours allows individuals to be expendable. What does it mean to live in a system that says it prioritizes individual flourishing, and asserts individual dignity, but only guarantees those fundamental rights to individuals with enough wealth to buffet their inevitable failures?

That is a rigged game, this “individualism.” It’s a moral offense. Our “us” has no room for the outcast, the failure, the disgraced.