The U.S. of hyper-individualism
Strategy borrows from economic theory the basic assumption of scarcity. There’s a lot of stuff out there, but not enough for everyone, so we compete for it. Companies compete for market share and pricing power. Laborers compete for wages and agency. Strategy is knowing what you want and figuring out how to get it.
But a new kind of scarcity has slowly been emerging: a scarcity of recognition. It’s no longer enough to be seen as part of a group–a company, a profession, a region, a sports team fandom. We need to be seen for the N/1 individuals we are, free thinking, free doing, free being. Unmoored from societal norms that don’t suit our impulses or fit with the take we read this morning.
By at least one measure, America is the most individualistic country in the world, and belief in our greatness has been a driving force of our biggest wins and losses alike. But it always historically been counter-balanced by some shared beliefs and values that allowed it to work as a motivator for self-actualization more than proof of how flawless we are.
But that’s eroding and being replaced by a nation in which there’s only one way to see things, which is through the collection of facts each individual chooses to use to construct their own narrative.
It’s most obvious in politics. The MAGA movement is at least in part, a reaction to not being recognized for merits (I’ll leave “MEI” judgements out of this, for the moment), or being denied access to their right to hold a superior place, in America and globally.
An expression of individualism is Machiavellian (that the end justifies the means) and functionalist (its tamer sociological cousin, which says that things are the way they are because it’s the most orderly form of organizing chaos). If I win, it’s because I was the best. If I’m at the top, it’s because I belong at the top. Losers should stop being losers if they don’t want to lose so much.
It’s not just on the MAGA side of the culture war. Following the horseshoe theory, parts of the social justice left (which the right derisively calls “woke”) are also fighting to be seen. Not just to be the individuals they are, but to have their multi-hyphenate identities recognized by the state. Victimhood acknowledged; individualism ratified.
True to trend, on each end of the spectrum is further fracturing into single-issue voting around immigration, Gaza, abortion, MAHA, the environment, and countless other signifiers of individual meaning.
People on both sides feel forgotten by the establishment class. Both want to be recognized for their specialness; survival means not being forgotten.
A more benign but growing dimension of hyper-individualism is the proliferation of advice (of which this blog could be categorized). In every imaginable vertical, from fitness to food to parenting to crypto investing, there’s a self-anointed expert willing to turn themselves into a content factory for a constituency looking for a new kind of truth. One that’s their own. Search for “seed oils” on TikTok at your own peril.
In a hyper-individualistic world, what I experience is all that’s real. Experts are bought or just washed-up hacks. Credentials are symbols of sucker-dom. Other people‘s motives can’t be trusted.
This has been happening for years. Or maybe un-happening. In 2013 George Packer wrote the brilliant book, The Unwinding, about the decay of American institutions. The things we used to believe in together–institutions like politics, the financial system, media, social security, religion, and shared values like upward mobility–had begun to form a crust, no longer feeling as trustworthy or available as they had.
The growth of cultural identity in politics, both as a call for recognition and as a reaction to it, fills the vacuum of declining trust in institutions. Put another way, we’re clamoring for credit because we don’t have anything smarter, more useful, or more unifying to argue over.
And arguing is something we need more of, not less. As our social interactions become more mediated by phones — both in how we use them to do things on our own terms and as shields to unwelcome interactions IRL — we’re increasingly less likely to encounter true disagreement. This just pushes us deeper into our hyper-individualistic holes.
We can recognize the need for other people to be seen even while disagreeing with how it’s expressed (a specific example: wherever you stand on trans men in women’s sports, it’s way easier to agree that the way large swaths of the political-cultural world talks about trans people is degrading and disgusting). Lobbing insults from our bunkers is not sustainable, politically, culturally, or socially. Cynicism will rot us entirely. We can have radical self-belief and the humility to listen to where other people are coming from.
What we do is up to all of us, the collection of hyper-individuals. We might just find some things we didn’t know we shared and make recognition an abundant resource.
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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben
