What American thinkers once wrote about the individual
The individual under attack
by Jon Rappoport
November 6, 2017
“It’s instructive to read what authors wrote about core values a hundred or two hundred years ago, because then you can appreciate what has happened to the culture of a nation. You can grasp the enormous influence of planned propaganda, which changes minds, builds new consensus, and exiles certain disruptive thinkers to the margins of society. You can see what has been painted over, with great intent, in order to promote tyranny that proclaims a greater good for all.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
Here I present several statements about the individual, written in 19th century America. The authors, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and James Fenimore Cooper were prominent figures. Emerson, in his time, was the most famous.
“All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity.” James Fenimore Cooper
“The less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of [by] formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The former generations…sacrificed uniformly the citizen to the State. The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Henry David Thoreau
“They [conformists] think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world…Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members….Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist…. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can you imagine, today, any of these statements gaining traction in the public mind, much less the mainstream media?
Immediately, there would be virulent pushback, on the grounds that unfettered individualism equals brutal greed, equals (hated) capitalism, equals inhumane indifference to the plight of the less fortunate, equals callous disregard for the needs of the group.
The 19th-century men who wrote those assertions would be viewed with hostile suspicion, as potential criminals, as potential “anti-government” outliers who should go on a list. They might have terrorist tendencies.
Contemporary analysis of the individual goes much further than this.
Case in point: Peter Collero, of the department of sociology, Western Oregon University, has written a book titled: The Myth of Individualism: How Social Forces Shape Our Lives:
“Most people today believe that an individual is a person with an independent and distinct identification. This, however, is a myth.”
Callero is claiming there aren’t individuals to begin with. They’re a group.
This downgrading of the individual human spirit is remarkable, but it is not the exception. There are many, many people today who would agree (without comprehending what they are talking about) that the individual does not exist. They would agree because, to take the opposite position would set them on a path toward admitting that each individual has independent power—and thus they would violate a sacred proscription of political correctness.
These are the extreme conformists Emerson was referring to a century and a half ago.
Unable to partake in anything resembling clear thought, such people salute the flag of the Collective, blithely assuming it means “whatever is best for everyone.” Such questions as “who defines ‘best’” and “who engineers this outcome” are beyond their capacity to consider. They rest their proud case in vagueness.
Without realizing it, they are tools of a program. They’re foot soldiers in a ceaseless campaign to promote collectivism (dictatorship from the top) under the guise of equality.
Let me repeat one of Emerson’s statements: “The antidote to this abuse of [by] formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.” The corollary: If there is no widespread growth of individuals and their independent thoughts, actions, and moral consciousness, if they don’t widen their horizons and spheres of influence, then in the long run what check is there on government?
Demeaning the individual is, in fact, an intentional operation designed to keep government power intact and expand its range.
Consider this question: If all opposition to overbearing, intrusive, and illegitimate government were contained in organized groups, and if there were no independent “Emersonian” individuals, what would be the outcome?
In the long term, those groups would stagnate and fail in their missions. They would be co-opted by government. Eventually, all such groups would be viewed as “special needs” cases, requiring “intervention” to “help them.”
That is a future without promise, without reason, without imagination, without life-force.
That is why the individual remains vital; above, beyond, and through any blizzard of propaganda.
“Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.” Oscar Wilde. The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
Individual is born into and grows out from a group – first family, then caste/clan, then neighboring community/society in whatever form it might be and gradually finds and develops his individuality and grows beyond it. Individual cannot be thought of from apart the group or society but then society also cannot prosper without full development of the individual. Here Marx is more relevant who stresses on the free development of an individual as the ultimate goal which can be possible only in a society in which all people own all things together and direct all processes together in amity and unity, etc. Private property and more so the rapacious capitalist system pits individual against individual in cut-throat competition, rivalry and downright plunder, rape and killing campaigns even.
Mallikarjuna Sharma:
You confuse individual with nodes from the collective plant, significant as a clone of ideology and idea. An entangling complication.
What is spoken here is the purest sense of that word; individual.
A single organism capable of independent existence. Distinguished by special; singular and/or markedly personal and extremely important characteristics; exhibiting unique or unusual qualities.
A single human being, as absolutely distinguished from a group.
Separate and distinct from others of the same kind. Having similarity to another only in the physical realm. And as distinct as this whole Universe in mind, and spirit and soul and especially, imagination.
Individuality is the state or quality of being an individual; particularly of being a person separate from all other persons and possessing his or her; and lets not get confused here there ‘are’ only two kinds.
This unique individual has his/her own needs or goals, rights and responsibilities. The exact definition of an individual is of extreme importance within the fields of biology, law, and philosophy, to say the least.
An individual is a sovereign entity, who possesses an inalienable right to his or her own life, a right derived from his or her nature as a rational being. Individualism and Objectivism.
Individual rights are not subject or parley to a public vote; not that the individual is an enemy of the state or a government. But free to think, feel, love and thrive outside of it.
Since only an individual man or woman can possess rights, and that is absolute; the expression “individual rights” is a redundancy really, as they are not given, earned through privilege, but are a birth right.
Collective rights is a contradiction in terms actually, as the rights of an individual are always superlative to any such notion.
The principle of individual rights is rightly the only moral base of all groups; in reality, it is an unbreakable law of nature and the Universe.
“Here Marx is more relevant who stresses on the free development of an individual as the ultimate goal which can be possible only in a society in which all people own all things together and direct all processes together in amity and unity, etc.” -MS
This is fallacious, illogical, and I am sensing purposely misrepresentative of Marx, you are seeking to deceive; or, are you totally ignorant of his deception? Karl Marx cared little of the individual, let alone individual rights, unless they were his. I would suggest you re-read his manifesto. It’s about totalitarianism. It’s about globalism, saturated in Zionism.
Marx is a fine student of Engels and Hegelianism; influenced by the eugenics of Darwin and his ilk; the Zionist and globalist Moses Hess; Spinoza; and the king killer Robespierre.
Karl Marx an atheist, more religious than neutral in that faith, who was born and raised a jew, His paternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, and so he was contaminated from the beginning with that erudite understanding of the world, and in his being one of the chosen people.
Sickly and in poor health his whole life, he was plagued by the diseases that such a faith can bring. Turning inside his real faith, in ‘the wretchedness of existence”. In a reconstruction of the details of his physical disorders, his illnesses and unwell life. Marx more than likely suffered from hidradenitis suppurativa, as stated and researched by Professor Sam Shuster.
Dermatologist, Professor Sam Shuster of Newcastle University, in 2007 made a re-diagnosis of Marx affliction, and through thorough examination, of his communications and books, letters. Concluded, that Marx did not suffer from liver problems, as is commonly stated from academia and the socialist following.
Shuster states…
“[…] hidradenitis suppurativa, a recurring infective condition arising from blockage of apocrine ducts opening into hair follicles.”
A painful and aggravating, miserable condition. Professor Shuster goes on to state that…
“The illness [ hidradenitis suppurativa] emphasised certain traits in his character. He argued cuttingly, his biting satire did not shrink at insults, and his expressions could be rude and cruel. Though in general Marx had a blind faith in his closest friends, nevertheless he himself complained that he was sometimes too mistrustful and unjust even to them. His verdicts, not only about enemies but even about friends, were sometimes so harsh that even less sensitive people would take offence… There must have been few whom he did not criticize like this… not even Engels was an exception.”
And Engels on more than one occasion called him a ‘Dictator’.
“Shuster went on to consider the potential psychosocial effects of the disease, noting that the skin is an organ of communication and that hidradenitis suppurativa produces much psychological distress, including loathing and disgust and depression of self-image, mood and well-being, feelings for which Shuster found “much evidence” in the Marx correspondence. Professor Shuster went on to ask himself whether the mental effects of the disease affected Marx’s work and even helped him to develop his theory of alienation.”
In the end Mallikarjuna, Marx hatred of private property was not based on some altruist notion of equality for all, but in the wretchedness of his own life and the desperate poverty and physical suffering that he and his family experienced in Paris. Without Engels, he would not have survived it, and we would not be talking now.
Physical illness plagued him for the rest of his life. He hated society and he hated himself.
Reblogged this on Right Wing Conservative News, Conservative Politics News Site and commented:
“Without realizing it, they are tools of a program. They’re foot soldiers in a ceaseless campaign to promote collectivism (dictatorship from the top) under the guise of equality.”
These 19th century writers will be reviled but a 19th century German bum will be hailed as a great philosopher and economic genius.
Nevermind the mountain of dead bodies thanks to Marxism, the right people and the right amount of money haven’t been used. It will work this time…my basket weaving professor told me so.
Ahhhhh – so refreshing to read such clear thinking. Emerson was a giant. Thoreau was my teen-age idol, before I was ready to read Emerson. Thoreau inspired me to move out to the country and build my own house. It was a great experience. For seven years, my noisiest neighbors were the 4-legged variety, coyotes and cows.
I have been re-reading E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. The oppression and misery of the working poor is quite something. Pressed, forced, beaten, jailed and executed by an oppressive state. Yet, it is a riot of the most amazing individuals, people who just would not conform, who had spirit, who asserted themselves yet were part of a community of resistance. As opposed the beaten down drones, accessories during the fact as to be found in the U.S.
Here is an article about the Magna Carta regarding the rights of individuals.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/06/the_uniqueness_of_the_magna_carta_in_human_history.html
Have you ever wondered why it is, that in a world of 7 billion peoples, that no two faces are the same?
Imagine that for a second. A face has eyebrows, eyes, a nose, a mouth, lips, chin, cheek bone. etc.. Still, every one of these faces is different. Amazing is it not, that with so few components, trillion of new faces are created,
Same thing for voices. You can recognize somebody just by their voices.
Is it not fascinating?
It is also the same for animals, flowers and even snowflakes and drops of water.
I conclude that life loves individuality, We were born as distinct individuals, and we should remain individuals
So why are some people trying to pretend that individuals do not exist or that it has no power?
Beautiful thoughts From Quebec!
Jon, you have written this before in some shape or form, I think…..excellent!!
The most [sorely overlooked and] important quote is:
““They [conformists] think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world…Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members….Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist…. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson”
NOTHING has changed. Indeed “conditions” have quite probably eroded further. Does modern day society know what a “MAN” is?
Best
OT
Hi Oz…I’m afraid real men have gone. Maybe for good…me and you are the last ones kid. I got your back.
The latest models of men, merit themselves on how much testosterone is running through them, and if there is not enough for their liking, well then. Toys are important things to the survivalist modern male and prescription drugs…I think the term in the end is arrested development.
Synthetic body with big tires and the mind of a child; sees himself through the wonder of his narcissism and many mirrors. And the real world, becomes a fear Oz.
Video games and action heroes sculpt the male psyche. Bread and circus immerses him in delusions of grandeur and aggrandizing. Spirit has abandoned him, and he is a soulless piece of plastic. He believes in nothing but own nihilism. He can not seek his individuality, for there is no one to show him how to do it.
A severe lack of mirror neurons has permanently damaged his abilities; his empathy is replaced with apathy and disclosed it and love; amongst other difficult emotions as a weakness to be feared.
A promiscuous and under dressed female population has taught him to seek the physical only, she does not ask that he be a man, for even she can not define it; and any sign of commitment is a signal for both, to run and duck for cover.
The initiatory are gone, Ozzie from Australia, they have been quieted, broken or assassinated;the breeding line has been retarded; great men at one time stood in the White House and other bastions of political power. Now, we have reality TV actors/mafia frontmen, who buckle under the pressure of office and wring their small hands and suck their thumbs and fucking Tweet stupidity all day. Allowing the puppet masters well-greased hand to reach right up their ass and control their very movement. Fear of assassination has stilled the voice that was never sincere anyway; a man must be willing to sacrifice himself for truth. With initiators like that, the call of manhood is war, war, war now…
And we must remember now Oz, constant war really isn’t war is it, therefor “War is peace”.
Real men are not listened too, for they ask that you stand up as an individual, regardless of the weather of oppression and actually do the right thing. They ask you to develop your own thoughts and critically think, they ask that you develop your own imaginative solutions to your own problems, and when you gain them, have the fucking courage to stand alone with them, and if your wrong…have the courage to admit it that…but then I’m just babbling. Oh..did I just smell french perfume.
Michael, as always, you see things very well. Keep an eye out for my next and “most controversial’ article on https://ozziethinker.wordpress.com. I think it emphasises many of your points.
The individual is to a large extent the product of European culture :
“There are a number of strange features of traditional Malundi society. Strange to western thought at least. If I ask you ‘Who you are you?’ You will say ’I am Matt.’ You see yourself as an individual, autonomous and independent of the general mass of humanity.
If I ask an Arab, he will say ‘ I am Hassan, son of Jaffar, son of Ali’, he sees himself as a continuation of a line from father to son all the way back to Abraham, and many or most Arabs can recite their lineage to Abraham. If I ask a Scot, he will say ‘I am Angus McConnor of the clan McConnor’, his membership of a clan being important to him. If I ask a traditional Burmese person, they will say their name is ‘Suu’ or ‘Aung’ the practise of having family names, 1,000 years old in Europe, has only very recently been introduced in Burma.
When you ask a Malundi ‘Who are you?’ he will respond ‘Lundi’.
If you ask ‘What do people call you?’ and he may say ‘Msifo’, but that is what he is called, not who he is.
It is as if an Englishman was asked ‘Who are you?’ responding, ‘English’. You would say, ‘No, not what are you, who are you?’ Msifo doesn’t understand what you are getting at. Who he is, is Ulundi, the name Msifo is merely a means of getting his attention and could be changed a number of times throughout his life. No more important than clicking your fingers or clapping your hands to get his attention.
Traditionally we see our society as the westerners view Bees or Ants. You do not think of opening a beehive and asking a bee what is his name. For all we know, every bee in the hive may consider themselves autonomous independent individuals, or like Malundians, consider their identity as part of a greater whole. For us, it is the Lundi nation. The bees do not consider themselves part of the hive, they are the hive, for us we are not a part of the nation, we are not a member of the nation, someone within the nation, each individual ‘is’ the nation. If you see a hundred thousand Finches swooping and rolling over the plain, do you think of each having individual consciousness, and if so, how on earth can they miss each other and instantaneously all turn left when only inches apart. A shoal of two million Sardines, only millimetres apart and yet never seemingly touching or bumping each other. That is how Malundians see themselves. ”
Saddam’s Sister
PJ Lang
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This difference is very basic and the cause of great misunderstanding.
As a European it is very strange NOT to think of myself as an individual, nor do I ever want to.
Realise that the last thing a farmer wants is autonomous sheep or chickens, each following their own independent destiny. Ruins the profit.
People may not realize it yet but the world is brand new. No more gravity, planets, temples, gods, all of the old stuff is retreating under a barrage of new proven facts. Half a million stone tablets, ancient constructions, what telescopes really do see and on a local level, the criminality of the Federal Reserve is astounding.
A new day is coming if we can just hang in there long enough.
The Collective is much more easily controllable than the dangerous sovereign individual. Corporatists/Statists/Fascists live in mortal fear of an outspoken sovereign individuals. Truth is really what they fear and for good reason.
We see this rapidly accelerating with the attempts of Google/F-Book/Twitter and more to delete even the most innocuous of Truths. It scares the hell out of them. They’re caught and they know it. They fear a purge of the like we are witnessing in Saudi Arabia and Hollywood and soon D.C. and Langley. It’s headed their way and it was sovereign individuals who outed them and will continue to do so. A collective is incapable of doing so.
Off topic Jon but I’d sure like to know what Bill Ayers and his lovely wife Bernadine Dohrn have been up to for the last 10 years. I’m sure up to no good and I’d assume they are behind much of this current chaos albeit quietly with Giorgio Schwartz funding much of their shenanigans. I am well aware of the goals of SDS and later Weather Underground.
Excellent comments by the way. Jesus Christ also focused on The Individual and they hated him for that, among many other things.
If I may recommend a video—–Norman Dodd interview and “Foundations”–G. Edward Griffen conducts the interview.
https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=c5eHdTk5hjw
“Historically, the European conflict between the State and the individual frequently was solved at the expense of individual freedom. This fact was taken by Americans as proof of the sacrifice of human liberties to the State. By Europeans, on the other hand, the situation was viewed in terms of a conflict between State and society, so that the individual, even if his liberties were violated by the government, could always find a relatively safe refuge in his social and private life. Totalitarian domination, but no other government, not even absolute despotism or modern dictatorships, has succeeded in destroying this private social sphere, this refuge of individual liberty. Europe’s fear with respect to American circumstances has always been that such a refuge in society could not
exist here, precisely because they felt the distinction between government and society did not exist. The European nightmare was that under conditions of majority rule society itself would be the oppressor, with no room left for individual freedom.
In Tocqueville’s words, ‘whenever social conditions are equal, public opinion presses with [such] enormous weight upon the mind of each individual’ that ‘the majority do not need to force him, they convince him’; the non-violent coercion of public disapproval is so strong that the dissenter has nowhere to turn in his loneliness and impotence, and in the end will be driven either to conformity or to despair.” Hannah Arendt, The Threat of Conformism
“Terror is needed in order to make the world consistent and keep it that way; to dominate human beings to the point where they lose, with their spontaneity, the specifically human unpredictability of thought and action.”
“Loneliness, as the concomitant of homelessness and uprootedness, is, humanly speaking, the very disease of our time. To be sure, you may still see people–but they get to be fewer and fewer–who cling to each other as if in midair, without the help of established channels of communication provided by a commonly inhabited world, in order to escape together the curse of becoming inhuman in a society where everybody seems to be superfluous and is so perceived
by their fellow-men. But what do these acrobatic performances prove against the despair growing all around us, which we ignore whenever we merely denounce or call people who fall for totalitarian propaganda stupid or wicked or ill informed? These people are nothing of the sort.
They have only escaped the despair of loneliness by becoming addicted to the vices of solitude.”
Hannah Arendt The Nature of Totalitarianism