The person and the individual are not compatible with their relationship to the Earth or the cosmos. The person self-actualizes their internal core with the extensible relationship to their environment whereas the individual is caught in the constant struggle of attempting to be divided by the personal achievements which are judged and made valid solely on their external values. The individual presupposes the arena in which he is held captive, expelling other individuals who are entering the game as a means to find what is assumed is a wholesome personhood. Rather than assume religious or seemingly less-fulfilling and empty acts of conscience and self-discovery, the individual constantly examines his perceived opponents in the race for individuation. To understand more clearly what the term individual means and how it has been so widely misused in Western culture, we must examine it’s definition:
individual –
being or characteristic of a single thing or person; “individual drops of rain”; “please mark the individual pages”; “they went their individual ways”
separate and distinct from others of the same kind; “mark the individual pages”; “on a case-by-case basis”
person –
a human being; “there was too much for one person to do”
characteristic of or meant for a single person or thing; “an individual serving”; “single occupancy”; “a single bed”
a single organism
Now how is it that a person can be self-perceived as whole and part of a larger functional community (most read: society) if the whole process of individualism is making one separate and alienated in contrast to their peers and allies? There is never a single person in a group of individuals because they have not recognized or actualized their personhood among the only relations that they truly may perceive rationally. Unless by intense pressure and neurosis or other afflicting illness, how would a child respond to his peers but as part of the only thing he has ever known? Until the collective mythos is contaminated by shoddy exercises in ego flexing, the muscles of the person are made to respond well to the inner and outer forces that govern his life on the Earth (unless there are humans elsewhere we include in this society, which may or may not be part of the issue ie. history) and later rise to present local political dilemma with which to provide diplomacy or destruction.
To the outsider looking in, the abyss is so vast and bereft of others with which to judge, the fragile self crumbles on the weight of the hierarchal systems employed by the individual race. It is inherent that in individualism that it is not a humanistic outlook and extends shallow ego games into the finitude of our vacuous resources here on Earth. Without the solemn recognition of the inner emptiness that pervades mainstream culture and Western ideology, there will be no hope to explore space, inner or outer. The quest of mankind may be deplorable to a point in which the masses have been toxified by the implications of rhetoric abusive of natural language and so there are many among us who are confused by the concept of solitude and personhood. Rather than making oneself individual by finding the “newest” fashions or fantasies, what has become of the fertile lands beneath us which are the least abstract under any rational consideration?
“Paradoxically, authentic solitude, solitude well used, may be the basis of the healthiest conviviality – because only whole and autonomous persons make clean friendships.” – Theodore Roszack, Person/Planet, p109