Philosophies are a dime a dozen. Or is it a Penny a piece?
Heck, with inflation rates today I can’t tell for sure! All I can say for sure is the market of ways is certainly volatile. In particular, Individualism in the philosophical sense has plenty of flaws, but that, in the true sense of the possibility that there indeed ever was a collective nature to human ontology, individualism is the spark that burned it all to the ground.
Whether a fleeting Atlantis is a socio-spiritual metaphor or historical fact is irrelevant. What is relevant is how the downfall of humankind is certainly going to be marked by an ontological anomie. One of the most significant qualities of such phenomena is a state of normlessness. Arguably brought about in part by individuation (psychologically deep deviation from otherwise collective thought or realms of being / the creation of uniqueness of identity, mostly mental…), it is really only one, albeit significant, descriptive factor of the complete discombobulation of all things social.
Reference here isn’t made to any specific nor general social movement that promotes individuality. All social movements tend to be vague and ambiguous and therefore weak and short lived methods of collective bonding—the more vague and ambiguous, the more room for a wider number of persons to join in and the more short-lived and inevitably “troubled within” a movement will be.
Rather, this will be an attempt to illustrate a much more broad and yet marked change in the psyche of individuals and therefore society as a whole (if there is such a thing)…an attempt that will fail primarily due to you, the reader…and if by chance you can reason and possess the intellect or background to navigate these statements, perhaps flaws in the author’s theory or explanation can be found. Nevertheless, they are based in fundamentally sound ‘truths’ about the human condition…at least as far as the social sciences are valid in some way.
Individualization is a sociological term that encompasses psychology’s individuation (which is differentiation of individuals psyche’s and identities on the presumption that human beings somehow have a sense of social cohesion on a soul-level, embedded consciousness sort of thing) merely for purposes of the following explanation and because sociology studies society at large whereas psychology focuses on individuals. While science itself is inadequate and limited—weaknesses exacerbated by the fact that when human’s attempt to utilize it, it inevitably ends up as a situation like giving a MacBook to a group of macaques—even specific findings that may hold certain facts true that in reality are true, are always limited to certain contexts. Nonetheless, sociology’s individualization, if understood by persons with the capacity or intellectual/academic background necessary to fully comprehend objectivity as an aim of the scientific study of human social life, must inevitably conclude there are indeed major shifts in human gatherings and relations that can justifiably be summarized as they are—by the categorizations under linear time known as modernity and post-modernity, broadly interpreted with deliberately little specificity where one point begins and another ends. Or is it just another means of categorizing human life in this time-space realm they all exist on.
What is the meaning of “all men are created equal”? Not under the folly of the American Constitution, not with regards to gender, not with regards to race or religion, but about fundamental aspects of human individuality? Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations suggests to it’s students / readers / self as author of diary, that “what one man can do, another man can do.” Is this really true?
Unanswered questions about human autonomy surface. If human autonomy is actually and realistically a supreme concept, would it make it more or less likely to convict someone of crime where the element of intent is required?