The closest I think we’ve come in crystallizing the proper way to approach things is to live for God, not for the approval of others (our yourself). Living for yourself, doing things for yourself, is really just substituting the tyranny of the one for the tyranny of the mob. Both are fickle. Both have some advantages and problems. Doing things for yourself keeps your values closer to their immediate object and performance. So they might be clearer and better understood and executed. There is a purity that comes from having no outside influences causing confusion. But then again, with a group you have collaboration and the correction of the group, the pooling of ideas and abilities. Essentially, you have the advantages and disadvantages of dictatorship and democracy. When it comes to our personal selves and lives, in the West, we prefer dictatorship, whereas other in the East they seem to prefer a more democratic approach where the many have a say. Oddly enough, each favors the opposite approach at the larger political level. Dictatorship of the individual, democracy of the society, democracy of the individual, dictatorship of the society. I believe it’s a recognition that to some degree you always need both and will see both expressed.

Autonomy and tyranny are tools, they’re complimentary. They’re both necessary. They will be used, they will be expressed, they cannot be avoided. So the question is how do we use them? How do we use them well? Where should each be located? And this is where we’ve often corrected ourselves and found ourselves merely inventing new problems to solve. Anyone with a clear view of history can see that both rampant individualism and rampant socialism (the dominance of the group influence, I mean, not economic socialism, not that the two are unconnected, and you could see capitalism as a kind of economic individuals) have their problems. Parents raising children see these same problems arise. Some kids are way too concerned about what everyone else thinks and could use some independence, could do to care less. And some kids are way to concerned about what they want and don’t care about other people at all, and could do to care more. That’s how people are. So if you create a political system that raises those personality differences to the level of structural and political gospel, you’re looking at the excesses of childhood being writ large across a whole culture.

It’s silly to deny the power or value of the group. Social pressure is one of the great powers for shaping behavior, especially for certain types of people, making sure they restrain themselves and act according to the needs of society. An enormous amount of people don’t do certain things because society tells them they can’t and they’re afraid to be caught doing them. If they could avoid being seen, avoid being caught, they would act quite differently, according to their own interests, and would (and do) cheat on their taxes, break traffic laws, cheat on their spouses, take what they want, treat people like dirt online, etc. Look at what the anonymity of the internet has allowed so many of us to become, taking and acting in ways we could never get away with in person, in a real group. Humans are a social species, and all the dimensions of our lives operate in a social structure (because we aren’t alone in the world) as well as an individual one. We live in a way that recognizes the impact of there being other people in the world we have to share life with.

Our American culture is more one that venerates the primacy and power of the individual. And overall, it’s a very important contribution to history. One of the weaknesses of a social sense and system of morality is that it’s easy for it to become all about appearances and relations to others, without being properly founded in the individual. Socialized morality easily becomes all about power dynamics and appearances, and at home or wherever prying eyes cannot see you do whatever you want and work against the cultural ethos. And emphasis on the autonomy and value and rights of the individual allows an important shift in responsibility to the individual. It’s up to you to honor the ethos in your own life, for yourself, not just for the eyes of the masses. Your own inner life should reflect your values.

But if we get too focused on protecting the rights of the individual and forget that those protections were out in place to provide space for the assumption of individual responsibility (which would then, by its nature also translate to social value, because social structures are made up, ultimately, of individuals), and we neglect the role of the group in providing correction and support, then that approach can go just as wrong. If the idea becomes rhat your responsibility is only to yourself, you can become too free to conduct yourself however you like, and no one has the right to question or correct or judge you. When individualism becomes an overriding value it becomes very antisocial, and just as it’s true that social structures are made up of individuals, it’s also true that individuals are made up (in a different way) of social structures. Our own individual lives and so many of their aspects exist in us as a relationship, not solipsism. We need prosocial values and expressions in our individual lives in order for our individual lives to thrive and grow and operate. In order to be able to work, to communicate, to learn, to eat, to parent, to be cared for, to purchase goods, to build, to touch and have relationships, in order to do all these things that are what humans do and what they are, we must encounter and come up against and often work with and communicate with others. In order to be ourselves we must be with those who are not ourselves. To be us we must be part of more than just us. And without us those things cannot be.

This, then, is why individualism and socialism are, to a degree, unavoidable. We can’t help but be individuals. And we can’t help but be interconnected societies. So any good approach to how we should live must find the value and balance in both. And any system that tries to make only one the measure of all value and the only meaningful theater for action will inevitably slide into excess and pathological practices and either antisocial or anti-individual outcomes (or likely eventually both, since the two are not separate, but are interconnected and reciprocal and symbiotic).