The lone cowboy on his horse. An outlaw. A man who lives by his own set of rules and doesn’t rely on anyone else. It is a potent image, and it is one that has been recast over and over again in American culture whether it be as a cowboy, a superhero, a private detective or a solitary genius innovator.
Our obsession with rugged individualism is as American as Harley Davidson, megachurches, bourbon and Sunday Night Football. Imbued in us are values of autonomy, independence and uniqueness whereas collectivist cultures associated with Asia, South America, Central America and Africa, see people as interconnected and emphasize relationships and social conventions.
We are a people driven by social status and personal accomplishments, and you could argue those are the qualities that have defined the nation and propelled its economic and innovation engines. Studies have shown that as economic situations improve individualistic values and practices increase. As such, it has been on the rise globally and has increased 12 percent since 1960.
But individualism also makes us singular, and this premise becomes dangerous when our separate pursuits are not tempered by the common good. This is where we find ourselves. Social bonds in our communities have frayed, and the sense of responsibility we feel is to self rather than each other.
Now, we are in the throws of a global pandemic where our interconnectedness is amplified by the virility of this disease. The decisions we make as individuals can have outsized impacts on the health and wellness of the communities that we live in, but many Americans still see this as an issue of personal choice.
The failure to see past our own lived experiences and personal sacrifices points to an ever increasing lack of empathy. One study found that the average American college student in 2009 scored as having less empathy than 75 percent of students in 1979. It is no surprise that we see a rise in single issue voters, civic disengagement and in our current state people rebuking a mandate to wear a mask.
For months, I have wondered who we would be after this pandemic was over and how the nation might right itself. My hope was that a society that has become increasingly fractured could find its way back to making itself whole.
We are interdependent, and our way through this will not be as individuals acting as the lone hero that our culture has popularized. Because even John Wayne had a sidekick. And Thomas Edison didn’t toil away alone in a laboratory. He had a workshop in Menlo Park, N.J. with teams of people working collectively towards big discoveries. Any hardship we have endured as a nation, we have made it through by people coming together.
We tend to live on the fringe of extremes. That thinking about the collective comes at the cost of personal freedom, but maybe after this the center will catch hold and we can live in the balance of individualism and togetherness.