--- Title: Individualism kills Date: 03/11/2020 Category: Morality Tags: individualism religion URL: https://marxismo.school/communia/en/individualism-kills --- Individualism kills and yet few know how to confront it. Pounded through practically all works of fiction, education and the official historical narrative, the individualistic conception of society and human experience, with different modulations, seems to have always been there. It seems to be… "natural". ## Individualism kills Discourses on pandemic and unemployment keep emphasizing _individual responsibility_, putting everyone's fate on their own shoulders. You do not want to get infected or spread it? Decrease your social contacts and wear a mask. Are you unemployed? Recycle and train for what is in demand. The trap of pandemic individualism is clear: unless a lockdown is imposed, not going to work is not a real option and as long as there is community transmission public transportation, and workplaces will keep becoming contagion hotspots. If there is unemployment, it is not because of a lack of worker training, but because the general situation does not encourage companies to expand production and hire more people. Even if we all _recycle ourselves_ and gain new skills, it will be useless if there are no new jobs in which to hire them. capital precarization But what to do? Pushed by almost all works of fiction, education and the official historical narrative, individualism, the individualistic conception of society and human experience seems to have been there forever. It seems to be... _natural_. ## The origin of individualism as a religious theory [![The origins of individualism: The believers, when communicating, become one with the god-man forming the mystical body of Christ](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/assets/Cuerpo-mistico.jpg)](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/assets/Cuerpo-mistico.jpg) The origins of individualism: The believers, when communicating, become one with the god-man forming the mystical body of Christ Even if we accept the mildest definition of individualism there is nothing _natural_ in the conception that people, taken individually, enjoy a wide space of sovereignty allowing them to determine their own future and to shape social reality. Nor is there anything evident in the fact that society is the result of interactions, disputes, and agreements of different kinds between individuals. And, in fact, the idea of the _individual_ is quite recent in historical terms. The remote origin of the idea of the individual occurred in the religious sphere. For centuries the only great monotheism of the time, Judaism, lacked a _personal god_. God related to the people of Israel, not to Jews one by one. His _communication_ with _the people_ took place through specialized characters with a particular gift, the prophets. To fulfill a destiny traced by the divinity was a characteristic of the Israelites as a whole vis-à-vis the rest of the peoples. That is why it was _the chosen people_, not a collection of _chosen individuals_. The fact that the particular favor of a tribal god who ends up affirming himself as the only real god implies certain opportunities and responsibilities for his chiefs and kings, does not deny but rather reaffirms the collective nature of that relationship. However, [the physical expansion of Judaism throughout the Roman Empire and the logic of its proselytism](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/el-antisemitismo-antiguo-y-feudal) became increasingly contradictory to the idea of a tribal god. How could one redefine the _chosen people_ when a growing proportion of the faithful came from other groups and lived in other kingdoms? The _overcoming_ of this contradiction will be at the center of the reflections of the Judaeo-Hellenistic currents (Philo of Alexandria) but they will influence above all a sect that will be at the same time irrationalist and universalist afterwards in a few decades: Christianity. The final response, that of St. Paul, will be to convert the _Yahweh's chosen people_ into _the people formed by those who chose Yahweh_. The personal relationship of the members with the divinity comes to the fore. It is so important that it renders unnecessary the rituals of belonging to the people of Israel like circumcision. Henceforth one does not become part of the people of God by being born a Jew. One becomes part of the people of those who have chosen god because one chooses him oneself. What defines Christianity is the relationship of each individual Christian with God. The believer becomes an _individual in relation to god_ and the people become a _community of faith_ mystically united among themselves by the communion of each one with the Christ. Christianity is also, in its first century, an apocalyptic religion. The people of God live in immediate and permanent expectation of a _second coming_. Before the imminence, social and class divisions are blurred. All believers are equal in the eyes of God, and that equality, born of the devaluation of all material and social things at the gates of the end of the world, allows a _fraternity_ of _brothers in Christ_. That is to say, the primitive Christian community is not a community in the strict sense, it is not a concrete whole, it is not a set of interpersonal relationships **making things in common** and **shaping the life** of its members. Christianity, on the contrary, is the _mystical body of Christ_, the aggregation of the believer-god relationships. mode of production The _people of God_, Christianity, will be increasingly defined as the collective beneficiary of the Church's mediation. The feudal serf, but also the noble and the clergymen, will not have an individualistic conception of themselves. The _individual_ will survive only in theological argumentation - a product for the internal consumption of the ecclesiastical elites - and in the more mystical and sectarian forms, considered heretical, of the margins of Christianity. Most of these had been forcefully persecuted since the conversion of Christianity to a state religion, and we have few traces left of their existence. But not all of them will disappear. One of them will in fact be redirected by the church itself until it is converted into a pillar of European feudalism, a parallel and separate world in which the _individual vis-à-vis god_ will live and which, unexpectedly, will be the incubator of some of the practices and ideological bases that the bourgeoisie will later use in its ascent. ## Monastic individualism [![](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/assets/Monasterio-copto-de-Deir_as_Suriani-800x600.jpg)](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/assets/Monasterio-copto-de-Deir_as_Suriani-800x600.jpg) Coptic monastery of Deir al Suriani, in the Egyptian desert. Were the monks the first people living individualism as we know it? Monasticism was born from the second century onwards as an attempt to redirect the eremitic movement. The hermits, in that exaltation of the personal relationship of the Christian with his god, would abandon the material community to retreat to the wastelands and deserts. Some, the stylites, will even end up on top of the columns of the classical temples destroyed by Christian fanaticism. The aim of such solitude will be to focus on cultivating their relationship with the divinity without _distractions_. Because for the _radical_ Christian society is nothing but a distraction, a trial or a sacrifice that separates him from the only relationship in which he is an individual by himself, the only one that is oriented to the future and can give meaning to his life. From the beginning, eremitism will be a problem both for the church and for the hermits themselves. A cloud of more or less wandering mystics without strict ideological control was not at all comfortable for the church, being treated as _saints_ by quite a few of their faithful and preaching prophetic inconveniences too often. That is, when they were not mere madmen or bandits. For the hermits, on the other hand, solitude could be very desirable, but extreme isolation in wild areas tended to require a considerable effort to obtain the basic provisions of life, and was accompanied by a permanent danger of assault. The solution, which would soon appear, would be the construction of hermitages and monasteries. The interesting thing is that the monastery will be a _real_ community in the terms of Christian theology, that is, it will not be a community at all. Its very name _monastery_, from the Greek _monakhós_ (solitary, unique), reveals that the aim of monastic communities is to provide and organize solitude, the isolation of the individual in his relationship to God. The monastic community is a group of individuals united not by their relationships or a collective endeavor, but by the superposition of individual actions that only make sense in the relationship of each person with god. The Christian society projecting itself under the monastic ideal is not a society, it is a mass of individuals linked by a centralizing relationship. Alienation Factory time is being prefigured, marked by arbitrary shifts and hours rather than by sunlight or the cycle of harvests. It is not by chance that [the first mechanical clocks](https://modelsofexcellence.eleducation.org/writings/invention-mechanical-clock-and-perceptions-time-13th%E2%80%9315th-centuries), so important [for the birth of capitalist morality](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/el-automata-social-la-utopia-mecanica-de-la-burguesia), were developed in monasteries. And it is precisely because individualism is a form of denying society to the persons living in it, it cannot assert itself without also denying the very Nature of which human society is a part. _St. Benedict's rule_ renders the monk's _hours_ independent from those of the sun; it makes the time he dedicates to work independent from the needs of his community; and it teaches him that his true _realization_ does not exist in his productive and collective activity but in the contemplative isolation he carries out together with the other monks and at the same time, but not together with them, because in reality this is his time alone with God. Cradle of the individualism and the _individual_, the monastery will be the first model, the first sketch of the [great social automaton that the bourgeoisie will take as an ideal form -antithesis in reality- of human society](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/el-automata-social-la-utopia-mecanica-de-la-burguesia). Because, if we think about it, life under capitalism is not so different from life _under the rule_. We live in an abstract time -that is, [a time that is both abstract and abstracted out of natural time](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/el-cambio-de-hora-y-el-espiritu-del-capitalismo)\- centered on producing according to a system whose goal is not the satisfaction of human needs. work ‎info‎ ### Read also - Our [series of articles on the origins of capitalist morality (in Spanish)](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/tema/moral-comunista) ‎/info‎ ## Beyond the automaton [![](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/assets/ivan-puni-trabajadores-en-automovil.jpg)](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/assets/ivan-puni-trabajadores-en-automovil.jpg) Ivan Puni. "Workers riding a car".1919. religion value|values salary proletariat That is why the system wants us not only to accept the existence of the individual, but to consider ourselves individuals. accumulation Moreover, we will be as incapable as the monk to be part of what is really communal and collective, thus renouncing both to the ability to resist and to the ability to transform anything. Like the monk, we will be unable to imagine work as anything other than a curse, and that universal and concrete human needs can take precedence over abstractions. And our own life will become, like his, the experience of individualism, of being an _individual_, a meaningless _transit_ to nothingness. proletariat|class fighting for universal needs