In Defense of Individualist Culture

Epistemic Status: Pretty much serious and endorsed.

College-educated Western adults in the contemporary world mostly live in what Id call
individualist environments.

The salient feature of an individualist environment is that nobody directly tries to make
you do anything.

If you dont want to go to class in college, nobody will nag you or yell at you to do so.
You might fail the class, but this is implemented through a letter you get in the mail or
on a registrars website. Its not a punishment, its just an impersonal consequence.
You can even decide that youre okay with that consequence.

If you want to walk out of a talk in a conference designed for college-educated adults,
you can do so. You will never need to ask permission to go to the bathroom. If you miss
out on the lecture, well, thats your loss.

If you slack off at work, in a typical office-job environment, you dont get berated. And
you dont have people watching you constantly to see if youre working. You can get
bad performance reviews, you can get fired, but the actual bad news will usually be
presented politely. In the most autonomous workplaces, you can have a lot of control
over when and how you work, and youll be judged by the results.

If you have a character flaw, or a behavior that bothers people, your friends might point
it out to you respectfully, but if you dont want to change, they wont nag, cajole, or
bully you about it. Theyll just either learn to accept you, or avoid you. There are
extremely popular advice columns that try to teach this aspect of individualist culture:
you cant change anyone who doesnt want to change, so once youve said your piece
and they dont listen, you can only choose to accept them or withdraw association.

The basic underlying assumption of an individualist environment or culture is

that people do, in practice, make their own decisions. People believe that you basically
cant make people change their behavior (or, that techniques for making people change
their behavior are coercive and thus unacceptable.) In this model, you can judge people
on the basis of their decisions after all, those were choices they made and you can
decide they make lousy friends, employees, or students. But you cant, or
shouldnt, cause them to be different, beyond a polite word of advice here and there.

There are downsides to these individualist cultures or environments. Its easy to wind
up jobless or friendless, and you dont get a lot of help getting out of bad situations that
youre presumed to have brought upon yourself. If you have counterproductive habits,
nobody will guide or train you into fixing them.

Captain Awkwards advice column is least sympathetic to people who are burdens on
others the depressive boyfriend who needs constant emotional support and cant get
a job, the lonely single or heartbroken ex who just doesnt appeal to his innamorata and
wants a way to get the girl. His suffering may be real, and shell acknowledge that, but
shell insist firmly that his problems are not others job to fix. If people dont like you
tough! They have the right to leave.

People dont wholly make their own decisions. We are, to some degree, malleable, by
culture and social context. The behaviorist or sociological view of the world would say
that individualist cultures are gravely deficient because they dont put any attention into
setting up healthy defaults in environment or culture. If you dont have rules or
expectations or traditions about food, or a health-optimized cafeteria, you can choose
whatever you want, but in practice a lot of people will default to junk. If you dont have
much in the way of enforcement of social expectations, in practice a lot of people will
default to isolation or antisocial behavior. If you dont craft an environment or uphold a
culture that rewards diligence, in practice a lot of people will default to laziness.
Leaving people alone, says this argument, leaves them in a pretty bad place. It may
not even be best described as leaving people alone it might be more like ripping
out the protections and traditions they started out with.

Lou Keep, I think, is a pretty good exponent of this view, and summarizer of the classic
writers who held it. David Chapman has praise for the sane, optimistic, decent
societies that are living in a choiceless mode of tradition, where people are defined by
their social role rather than individual choices. Duncan Sabien is currently trying to
create a (voluntary) intentional community designed around giving up autonomy in
order to be trained/social-pressured into self-improvement and group cohesion. There
are people who actively want to be given external structure as an aid to self-
mastery, and I think their desires should be taken seriously, if not necessarily at face
value.

I see a lot of writers these days raising problems with modern individualist culture, and
it may be an especially timely topic. The Internet is a novel superstimulus, and it
changes more rapidly, and affords people more options, than ever before. We need to
think about the actual consequences of a world where many people are in practice being
left alone to do what they want, and clearly not all the consequences are positive.

But I do want to suggest some considerations in favor of individualist culture that

often-derided atomized modern world that most of us live in.

We Arent Clay

Its a common truism that were all products of our cultural environment. But I dont
think people have really put together the consequences of the research showing that its
not that easy to change people through environmental cues.

Behavior is very heritable. Personality, intelligence, mental illness, and social

attitudes are all well established as being quite heritable. The top ten most
replicated findings in behavioral genetics starts with all psychological traits
show significant and substantial genetic influence, which Eric Turkheimer has
called the First Law of behavioral genetics. A significant proportion of
behavior is also explained by nonshared environment, which means it isnt
genetic and isnt a function of the family you were raised in; it could include lots
of things, from peers to experimental error to individual choice.
 Brainwashing doesnt work. Cult attrition rates are high, and brainwashing
programs of POWs by the Chinese after the Korean War didnt result in many
defections.
There was a huge boom in the 1990s and 2000s in priming studies
cognitive-bias studies that showed that seemingly minor changes in environment
affected peoples behavior. A lot of these findings didnt replicate. People dont
actually walk slower when primed with words about old people. People dont
actually make different moral judgments when primed with words or videos of
cleanliness or disgusting bathrooms. Being primed with images of money
doesnt make people more pro-capitalist. Girls dont do worse on math test
when primed with negative stereotypes. Daniel Kahneman himself, who
publicized many of these priming studies in Thinking, Fast and Slow, wrote an
open letter to priming researchers that theyd have to start replicating their
findings or lose credibility.
Ego depletion failed to replicate as well; using willpower doesnt make you too
tired to use willpower later.
The Asch Conformity Experiment was nowhere near as extreme as casual
readers generally think: the majority of people didnt change their answers to
wrong ones to conform with the crowd, only 5% of people always conformed,
and 25% of people never conformed.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has generally been found to be false by modern
linguists: the language one speaks does not determine ones cognition. For
instance, people who speak a language that uses a single word for green and
blue can still visually distinguish the colors green and blue.

Scott Alexander said much of this before, in Devoodooifying Psychology. Its been
popular for many years to try to demonstrate that social pressure or subliminal cues can
make people do pretty much anything. This seems to be mostly wrong. The conclusion
you might draw from the replication crisis along with the evidence from behavioral
genetics is People arent that easily malleable; instead, they behave according to their
long-term underlying dispositions, which are heavily influenced by inheritance.
People may respond to incentives and pressures (the Milgram experiment replicated,
for instance), but not to trivial external pressures, and they can actually be quite
resistant to pressure to wholly change their lives and values (becoming a cult member or
a Communist.)

Those who study culture think that were all profoundly shaped by culture, and to some
extent that may be true. But not as much or as easily as social scientists think. The idea
of mankind as arbitrarily malleable is an appealing one to marketers, governments,
therapists, or anyone who hopes that its easy to shift peoples behavior. But this
doesnt seem to be true. It might be worth rehabilitating the notion that people pretty
much do what theyre going to do. Were not just swaying in the breeze, waiting for a
chance external influence to shift us. Were a little more robust than that.

People Do Exist, Pretty Much

People try to complicate the notion of person what is a person, really? Do

individuals even exist? I would argue that a lot of this is not as true as it sounds.
A lot of theorists suggest that people have internal psychological parts (Plato, Freud,
Minsky, Ainslie) or are part of larger social wholes (Hegel, Heidegger, lots and lots of
people I havent read). But these, while suggestive, are metaphors and hypotheses. The
basic, boring fact, usually too obvious to state, is that most of your behavior is
proximately caused by your brain (except for reflexes, which are controlled by your
spinal cord.) Your behavior is mostly due to stuff inside your body; other peoples
behavior is mostly due to stuff inside their bodies, not yours. You do, in fact, have
much more control over your own behavior than over others.

Person is, in fact, a natural category; we see people walking around and we give them
names and we have no trouble telling one person apart from another.

When Kevin Simler talks about personhood being socially constructed, he means a
role, like lady or gentleman. The default assumptions that are made about people in
a given context. This is a social phenomenon of course it is, by design! Hes not
literally arguing that there is no such entity as Kevin Simler.

Ive seen Buddhist arguments that there is no self, only passing mental states. Derek
Parfit has also argued that personal identity doesnt exist. I think that if you weaken the
criterion of identity to statistical similarity, you can easily say that personal
identity pretty much exists. People pretty much resemble themselves much more than
they resemble others. The evidence for the stability of personality across the
lifespan suggests that people resemble themselves quite a bit, in fact different
timeslices of your life are not wholly unrelated.

Self-other boundaries can get weird in certain mental conditions: psychotics often
believe that someone else is implanting thoughts inside their heads, people with DID
have multiple personalities, and some kinds of autism involve a lot of suggestibility,
imitation, and confusion about what it means to address another person. So its
empirically true that the sense of identity can get confused.

But that doesnt mean that personal identity doesnt usually work in the normal way,
or that the normal way is an arbitrary convention. It makes sense to distinguish Alice
from Bob by pointing to Alices body and Bobs body. Its a distinction that has a lot of
practical use.

If people do pretty much exist and have lasting personal characteristics, and are not all
that malleable by small social or environmental influences, then modeling people as
individual agents who want things isnt all that unreasonable, even if its possible for
people to have inconsistent preferences or be swayed by social pressure.

And cultural practices which acknowledge the reality that people exist for example,
giving people more responsibility for their own lives than they have over other peoples
lives therefore tend to be more realistic and attainable.

How Ya Gonna Keep Em Down On The Farm

Traditional cultures are hard to keep, in a modern world. To be fair, pro-traditionalists
generally know this. But its worth pointing out that ignorance is inherently fragile. As
Lou Keep points out , beliefs that magic can make people immune to bullets can be
beneficial, as they motivate people to pull together and fight bravely, and thus win more
wars. But if people find out the magic doesnt work, all that benefit gets lost.

Is it then worth protecting gri-gri believers from the truth? Or protecting religious
believers from hearing about atheism? Really?

The choiceless mode depends on not being seriously aware that there are options
outside the traditional one. Maybe youve heard of other religions, but theyre not live
options for you. Your thoughts come from inside the tradition.

Once youre aware that you can pick your favorite way of life, youre a modern. Sorry.
Youve got options now.

Which means that you cant possibly go back to a premodern mindset unless you
are brutally repressive about information about the outside world, and usually not even
then. Thankfully, people still get out.

Whatever may be worth preserving or recreating about traditional cultures, its going to
have to be aspects that dont need to be maintained by forcible ignorance. Otherwise
itll have a horrible human cost and be ineffective.

Independence is Useful in a Chaotic World

Right now, anybody trying to build a communitarian alternative to modern life is in an

underdog position. If you take the Murray/Putnam thesis seriously that Americans
have less social cohesion now than they did in the mid-20th century, and that this has
had various harms then thats the landscape we have to work with.

Now, that doesnt mean that communitarian organizations arent worth building. I
participate in a lot of them myself (group houses, alloparenting, community events,
mutual aid, planning a homeschooling center and a baugruppe). Some Christians are
enthusiastic about a very different flavor of community participation and
counterculture-building called the Benedict Option, and Im hoping that will work out
well for them.

But, going into such projects, you need to plan for the typical failure modes, and the
first one is that people will flake a lot. Youre dealing with moderns! They have
options, and quitting is an option.

The first antidote to flaking that most people think of building people up into a
frenzy of unanimous enthusiasm so that it doesnt occur to them to quit will probably
result in short-lived and harmful projects.

Techniques designed to enhance group cohesion at the expense of rational deliberation

call-and-response, internal jargon and rituals, cults of personality, suppression of
dissent will feel satisfying to many who feel the call of the premodern, but arent
actually that effective at retaining people in the long term. Remember, brainwashing
isnt that strong.

And we live in a complicated, unstable world. When things break, as they will, youd
like the people in your project to avoid breaking. That points in the direction of
valuing independence. If people need a leaders charisma to function, what are they
going to do if something happens to the leader?

Rewarding Those Who Can Win Big

A traditionalist or authoritarian culture can help people by guarding against some kinds
of failure (families and churches can provide a social safety net, rules and traditions can
keep people from making mistakes that ruin their lives), but it also constrains
the upside, preventing people from creating innovations that are better than anything
within the culture.

An individualist culture can let a lot of people fall through the cracks, but it rewards
people who thrive on autonomy. For every abandoned and desolate small town with
shrinking economic opportunity, there were people who left that small town for the big
city, people whose lives are much better for leaving. And for every seemingly quaint
religious tradition, there are horrible abuse scandals under the surface. The freedom
to get out is extremely important to those who arent well-served by a traditional
society.

Its not that everythings fine in modernity. If people are getting hurt by the decline of
traditional communities and they are then theres a problem, and maybe that
problem can be ameliorated.

What Im saying is that theres a certain kind of justice that says at the very least, give
the innocent and the able a chance to win or escape; dont trade their well-being for that
of people who cant cope well with independence. If you cant end child abuse, at
least let minors run away from home. If you cant give everybody a great education, at
least give talented broke kids scholarships. Dont put a ceiling on anybodys success.

Immigrants and kids who leave home by necessity (a lot of whom are LGBT and/or
abused) seem to be rather overrepresented among people who make great creative
contributions. Leaving home to seek your freedom and fortune is kind of the
quintessential story of modernity. We teach our children songs about it. Immigration
and migration is where a lot of the global growth in wealth comes from. It was my
parents story an immigrant who came to America and a small-town girl who moved
to the city. Its also inherently a pattern that disrupts traditions and leaves small towns
with shrinking populations and failing economies.

Modern, individualist cultures dont have a floor but they dont have a ceiling either.
And there are reasons for preferring not to allow ceilings. Theres the justice aspect I
alluded to before what is goodness but the ability to do valuable things, to flourish
as a human? And some if people are able to do really well for themselves, isnt limiting
them in effect punishing the best people?
Now, this argument isnt an exact fit for real life. Its certainly not the case that
everything about modern society rewards good guys and punishes bad guys.

But it works as a formal statement. If the problem with choice is that some people make
bad choices when not restricted by rules, then the problem with restricting choice is that
some people can make better choices than those prescribed by the rules. The situations
are symmetrical, except that in the free-choice scenario, the people who make bad
choices lose, and in the restricted scenario, the people who make good choices lose.
Which one seems more fair?

Theres also the fact that in the very long run, only existence proofs matter. Does
humanity survive? Do we spread to the stars? These questions are really about do at
least some humans survive?, do at least some humans develop such-and-such
technology?, etc. That means allowing enough diversity or escape valves or freedom
so that somebody can accomplish the goal. You care a lot about not restricting ceilings.
Sure, most entrepreneurs arent going to be Elon Musk or anywhere close, but if the
question is does anybody get to survive/go to Mars/etc, then what you care about is
whether at least one person makes the relevant innovation work. Playing to keep the
game going, to make sure we actually have descendants in the far future, inherently
means prioritizing best-case wins over average-case wins.

Upshots

Im not arguing that its never a good idea to make people do things. But I am
arguing that there are reasons to be hesitant about it.

Its hard to make people do what you want; you dont actually have that much influence
in the long term; people in their healthy state generally are correctly aware that they
exist as distinct persons; surrendering judgment or censoring information is pretty
fragile and unsustainable; and restricting peoples options cuts off the possibility of
letting people seek or create especially good new things.

There are practical reasons why leave people alone norms became
popular, despite the fact that humans are social animals and few of us are truly loners by
temperament.

I think individualist cultures are too rarely explicitly defended, except with ideological
buzzwords that dont appeal to most people. I think that a lot of pejoratives get thrown
around against individualism, and Ive spent a lot of time getting spooked by the
negative language and not actually investigating whether there are counterarguments.
And I think counterarguments do actually exist, and discussion should include them.