Flimsy Individuals

If you dislike capitalism then it is a fair enough bet that your analysis of the problem has something to do individualism. Everyone knows this sort of argument, it's been around forever, and shows no signs of disappearing in the near future. Here is one I lifted of someone's formspring page...

'It can feel hard to justify passion about expression in a society that openly disregards the individual and works more towards it's self-created idea of economic greatness, and the individual stops being a remarkable mind with ideas and feelings and becomes a pawn in a machine, going through the motions and appreciating very little of the already tiny amount of what is really real.'

Of course the irony of this has always been, for the last 5 or 6 decades at the very least, that the other side (you know, the ones who write books about the road to serfdom, the enemies of the open society and how there are two concepts of liberty) have always made exactly the same claim about the alternatives. Look again at the quote above, swap out 'economic greatness' for 'socialist utopia' and it could be the opposite argument, just as eloquently put, now given in support of Margaret Thatcher's 'vision' in the 1975 conference speech of...

'A man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master - these are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free economy... and on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.'

The obvious initial response it that this can only mean one thing, someone is wrong (well that was mine anyway). I'm not discounting that possibility, but I'm also not going to get into it now because I don't have the space, or the patience, or inclination, or the first clue about how to conclusively do so. So what am I trying to say? This is of course the old totalitarian horseshoe theory. Leaving aside it's academic merits it is a masterpiece of cold war politics. Bending the political spectrum to show that communists and fascists are basically pretty similar, smearing the soviets, and with the happy side effect of demonstrating maximum freedomee goodness consists in a happy blend of left and right wing politics, a middle of the road, mediocre, middle class western polity - in other words. But the difference is that for both sides now the thing attacked now is not Marxist-Lenninism, it's democratic socialism - just look to Obama's troubles with the tea party, and it's not a capitalism that even comes close to recognising William Sumner's famous remark that 'the drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be' - just look at David Cameron's progressive conservatism.

So now the question raised by these critiques seems to be not what kind of thing is bad for individuals but, rather, what on earth is not heavy enough (left or right) that it crushes all individualism? Apparently we can now only dare to express ourselves under the absolute prime conditions now. The slightest hint of disapproval or malice towards us causes people to simply give up and go with the whatever we perceive to be what we ought to do, communist or capitalist, no matter how much we dislike it? Just a little depressing...