Pathogenic individualism, society in a coma

Rebecca Atzori
7 days ago
10 min read

When you think of Her, what words do you use to praise her? “She’s autonomous, independent, self-sufficient, emancipated, self-determined, confident, resilient, enterprising, courageous, free, self-aware, responsible, rational, balanced, self-disciplined…”. Yet when She speaks about herself, She doesn’t share that enthusiasm. She’s begun to believe that many of those adjectives aren’t necessarily positive. She doesn’t want to underestimate herself, she’s proud of her individuality —she repeats that often. Raised to the refrain of “you must be independent!” and “don’t change for anyone!”, she built a life centered around herself alone. Affections come and go—only you stay with yourself your whole life, she heard time and time again. She spent years growing, improving, understanding herself, pulling out the roots of her own traumas to rediscover and rebuild her authentic self. She read between the lines of her own story and reached some form of imperfect completeness. She made peace with her sensitivity and impulsiveness, and learned to say those “nos” so fervently encouraged by the new wave of psychologists, psychotherapists (and psycho-influencers). She is self-aware, and by placing boundaries between herself and others, she shed the ballast weighing her down; she travels now in a sterile, uncontaminated space, safe from others’ complexes, demands, and expectations. Proudly, through her headphones, she listens to “living with no one and nothing is tough, those who make it are afraid of nothing” [“vivere senza nessuno e nulla non ci si riesce / chi ce la fa non ha paura di niente”], finding herself in that category of those who make it.

And yet, when She finds herself in those rare moments of silence—silence left for her to think—when the noise of social media, expectations, judgments, and the race toward a “better version” of herself finally fade, She is afraid. In those moments She becomes a wanderer inside her own sensitivity. She asks herself why the world does what it does—and She doesn’t understand, even though she grasps its logic, even though she’s a capable young woman. She is empathetic, and she cannot fathom how, in the face of atrocities, death, and devastation, most of the world remains indifferent, proceeding with their lives. She herself goes to work every day, trains, follows her goals, and sleeps soundly. Her daily life is untouched by the deaths beyond her borders. And yet in high school, during history classes she often wondered, “But where was everyone while a genocide was happening?”—and now she finds her answer in her own agenda full of meetings, telling others how she is doing something with a positive impact on the world.

It’s in those moments alone with herself that She recognizes her frustration, her helplessness at being unable to halt events or even have a voice in them. And with these thoughts, She feels existentially alone. She feels lost in a society made of individuals who have stopped conceiving of community, of themselves as part of a collective—and she realizes that she is also one of those individuals, nothing more. These thoughts take shape as that constant sense of unease she has felt since adolescence, which she tried to fill by looking inward, forgetting to look outward as well. She is beginning to understand that what sickens her soul is the absence of something beyond the self: a common purpose, deep sharing, resemblance and belonging. After thoughts, readings, exchanges, and more thoughts, she realizes she is both pathogen and host to a modern bacterium: individualism, which has pushed society into a coma.

She reflects on how, in a state of health, a society corresponds to one or more communities. Within them, actions are guided by shared values and collective projects—not only to preserve them, but to improve them in the name of care for future members of that same community. In such contexts, ancestors, members, and descendants stand on the same level, recognizing in each respectively knowledge, action and innovation, and the very product of the community. A healthy society sees in that product a new community ready for action and innovation for the sake of its own successors, through the lessons of its predecessors. In it, the individual perceives themselves as part of a whole; as such, they recognize their own uniqueness within context and, consequently, their irreplaceable role. From this the individual draws self-esteem and self-love, through their purpose in the community and the fruits it yields. Ideally, through peer correction and patience, society moves upward. Progress is conceived as the improvement of life’s conditions and pleasures for the community. What counts as improvement is determined by the values shared by the community as a whole.

When most individuals in a society present themselves and act as the ultimate purpose of their own existence, society enters a coma.

The individual who sees their limited existence as the final end of their actions—treating themselves as the only ecosystem to nurture, raising themselves above the community—wipes out the set of values necessary for a cohesive, united, prosperous society. The individual whose end is themselves devalues—or eliminates—from their evaluative scale all those principles and morals that lead one to relate to others for reasons beyond personal pleasure and gratification: empathy, sensitivity, altruism, goodness, kindness, morality itself become useless accessories. All actions without personal return are immediately downgraded and attributed to social leftovers, considered wastes of time and of potential gains. This leads to pouring effort into purely utilitarian activities that bring benefits and pleasures only to oneself, carrying with them temporary ambitions limited to the brief span of one’s life. It is in this scenario that the entertainment industry has overtaken global markets, devoting money and effort to temporary forms of pleasure and merriment that have no constructive power. The brightest minds of our time are either enjoying pleasures or creating them—and creating platforms to spread them. Every market is shifting toward the temporary, the rentable, the subscription-based: the possibility of severance and substitution is a necessary condition for this loyalty to oneself. Thus many great socio-economic problems have flared up: from the rise of fast fashion to satisfy the need to please others and appear always new and different, to mass production that privileges disposability and short product life in the name of profit, to improper—sometimes impossible—waste disposal, to the exploitation of workers’ dignity to ensure low prices that further encourage disposability and the cut-and-replace mentality of ownership. The list could run longer than our own attention span—which is itself a victim of this mechanism of severance and reduced lifespan—would allow.

All this leads to deriving satisfaction only from oneself and the swelling of one’s ego, a form of contemporary self-eroticism in which new hermaphrodites chant a radical, deified independence: the more independent you are from the community, the more “self-utilitarian,” the more powerful you feel—your chest swells, your chin rises—the more you feel like God and therefore institute a new value system. All of this accompanied by the new global religion of the followers of the Dollar-God, lubricant of the ultra-individual’s masturbation.

With such a mentality, society cannot improve. If every individual in the world is incapable of conceiving actions that will outlive them, the best society can do is remain in neutral balance—its coma. Occasionally, paroxysmal movements occur: a new technology, a governmental reform, some display of solidarity. But these do not necessarily signal a return to consciousness or a positive prognosis for a comatose society; on the contrary, these spasms often feed the condition, deluding many into believing progress is happening, thus stifling initiatives toward true recovery. Let’s take the recent pro-Palestine demonstrations in our Bel Paese. In early October, at least hundreds of thousands (CGIL says two million) gathered in Italian cities to show support for the Palestinian people and the establishment of a State of their own, while protesting against the silence and inaction of the Italian government in the face of a verified genocide carried out by the State of Israel. For one day, an enormous number of individuals chose collective action driven by their values and humanity, in the name of a red line crossed by Israel, by the Italian government, by Western governments, and more. For one day, people of different religions, ethnicities, ages, sexes, genders, sexual orientations, professions, inclinations, beliefs came together to amplify their voices, their “yeses” and their “nos.” For one day, Italian citizens realized that being a citizen entails as many duties as rights, and that by accepting what is done to someone else, we tacitly consent to it being done to us one day. For one day, many self-ecosystems (ego-systems) remembered that the we-ecosystem can overcome the impotence, the silence, the frustration that define Her. And it is therefore true that this awareness is in fact dormant in modern “selves,” otherwise such a demonstration would have been unthinkable and never realized. However, that collective momentum lasted only the length of a newspaper headline—the length of our new attention span. We shouted “victory!” at a false ceasefire, and although civilians continue to die daily in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories, not a shadow remains, not a cry—not even a sigh—of that collective, communal effort that seemed to remind us what it means to be a society made of a “we” and not a thousand “me-s.” We took the ephemeral gratification that defines this comatose society; we absolved ourselves from responsibility and agency with a gesture—moving, yes, but not remotely sufficient for real change or meaningful impact. The day after the national strike, individuals woke up again inside their bubbles that include only themselves and whatever benefits their own interests. And so, the demonstrations became an involuntary spasm from the coma, not a first sign of recovery. A month later, those who move the pieces of the international chessboard continue to lie, mock, and ignore the few who protest daily in various forms; civilians continue to be torn apart, without a home, without a State, without a future, with hunger, anger, and despair rising; and the “selves” have returned to their daily lives, focused on themselves only, after pulling the finest wool’s into their own eyes, branded “on-October-4-I-was-in-the-streets”, appealing to social media.

Among the other involuntary spasms, we find the rise of social media: despite the promise of rapid, unlimited circulation of information and global connections—and the presumed increase in knowledge and breakdown of barriers and discrimination—social media are showing negative externalities that far outweigh their intended benefits. To name a few: rampant manipulative misinformation, increased polarization and consequent extremisms, heightened social pressure regarding appearance and performance—with a rise in psychological disorders—an increased sense of loneliness (paradoxical given the increased connection). The enormous potential influence of these platforms comes as wasted, subordinated to profit logic. Their very pioneer, Zuckerberg, could be one of the leading minds driving greater social cohesion, yet he too is a victim of the individualist wave, blinded by his (estimated) net worth of 258.7 billion dollars. In the name of this power, rather than honouring the promise of progress aligned with the community’s actual needs—the promise that first attracted investors to him and his newborn Facebook—Zuckerberg, along with many other social-media magnates, chooses daily to perpetuate society’s cancerous cells: misinformation, polarization, preference for the viral over the truthful. With the means, platforms, and resonance at his disposal, he and his company hold immeasurable transformative power capable of bringing relief and dignity on a large scale to future generations. Users too could exploit these platforms for the good of the community—if the community still crossed their minds. But no, social media have become showcases of the self, of strategies that yield profit and advantage to the self, of the social coma itself. It’s right before everyone’s eyes, and everyone chooses—more or less consciously—to ignore it. The tireless pursuit of profit—which is never enough in this individualistic mindset—and the swelling of ego lead to the degradation of collective moral values, in favour of the individual and their solitary life, redirecting the masses’ values toward egoistic and individualistic ones that push an entire society toward coma.

This depiction sets itself at the extreme of the selfish individualism blazing through our days. One must be careful not to claim that every form of individualism is harmful; on the contrary, the kind of individualism that upholds fundamental human rights (freedom of opinion, expression, choice, the right to hold property, and so on) is itself functional to the community—so long as some form of altruism remains, directing at least part of those rights toward others (and not against them) and toward a meaningful future, rather than toward oneself within the frame of a single life. Conversely, it is crucial to highlight that altruistic individualism is of fundamental importance in the innovative process of society. The distinction lies in the ultimate purpose of that process. It is with this altruistic individualism that thoughts in opposition to the individualist system remain possible, though in the minority. In reality, in the depicted scenario, little space remains for those who keep community values alive in their hearts and actions. The person who, in a comatose society, strives to seek out additional support in the form of grants, funding, and opportunities for constructive and collective projects, and who tries to dedicate their life to the community and to long-lasting impact, lives like Her. Lives with frustration, invisibility, and a sense of loneliness. Lives in constant self-doubt, due to the misalignment between communal and individualist values—dynamics She knows well. She navigates the world seeking her own kind, increasingly rare as many have given in to the individualist logic—out of exhaustion, out of weakness, or simply as a consequence of a changed system that shapes and redirects thoughts. She fights against the imposed system with micro-rebellions against the superficiality of the coma.

She often wonders, “what for?” The fighting and the resistance to a mass movement seems a fight against windmills. And perhaps this exhaustion—this fatigue from fighting—is the first sign of absorbing that individualistic mindset that does not belong to her. The loneliness She feels increases her desire to reconnect with others in some sensory trace of community—community made of individualisms, what a paradox! And yet she knows that She, and those like her, are the only ones capable of bringing society back to activity, back to consciousness. These people are the few remaining doctors, physicians of society, those who have not lost hope and continue to act according to the Hippocratic oath, able to awaken society from this coma before coma becomes death. There is a need for a platform for those like Her. An existential need to bring these isolated voices together and make them resonate, to bring society back to life. In the end, what everyone wants are affections, experiences, wonders. And these are possible only within a community. Even the greatest exalters of individualism and of the Dollar-God end up using their power to surround themselves with people, to make discoveries to show to others, to gather new experiences to tell, share with and display to others. Even the final output of the greatest ego-centric individualist still exists in relation to someone outside themselves. The societal and communal component is still alive, though dormant, and people like Her must unite and awaken it, as a warning to the many who have abandoned the idea and surrendered to the apparent inevitability of this new condition.