We've awakened to a world that has no meaning. Nothing really makes sense anymore. As a result, there is a (I must admit, misguided) tendency to revert to what we think we know. We think the Enlightenment thinkers knew what they were talking about. They did, I suppose ... then. But, now we have, well, now. Too much has changed in the meantime.
Whether we like Freud or not, whether we think he was correct or not, we do owe him this much: he made clear that there are "forces" at work in our lives that we can neither see nor consciously control. There is, in a manner of speaking, a good portion of unpredictability in the most reasonable and rational decisions and courses of action. This unsettles most of us. It is a cause for anxiety, and the most common reaction to this anxiety, since we really don't know where it is coming from, is to simply ignore it.
We've become experts at ignoring (or is it ignorance, I'm never really sure).
With the proliferation of media, particularly social media, we can pick and choose what we what to be confronted with. We seek out like-minded thinkers, people who share our attitudes and opinions, we look for those who are like us, not different. Sometimes they root for the same teams, brandish the same colors, or simply use skin color as a criterion of distinction. Yes, these kinds of choices run the gauntlet from harmless to destructive. It is now easy for any of us to simply get lost in the mass, to be part of the crowd, to stay below the radar of individuality. But isn't this really a problem?
On the one hand, we like to think of ourselves as individuals, of free-thinking, self-choosing and deciding persons who are the captains of our own destinies, not mere pawns of Fate, as it once was. At the same time, I don't see a lot of these independent, individual free thinkers actually standing up for anything. Social injustices, for example, are simply beyond their control. There is nothing that any of us can do about a lot of things. The economy is just the way it is ... what can we little people do about it? There are other groups (clans? tribes? ... has only the label changed?) who aren't pulling their weight, contributing their fair share, but we only pick on those who we think we're better than.
It would seem that we're right back where we started from: no, this is all not a matter of Fate, but (truth be told ... or just believed?) there's nothing that I -- as an individual -- can do about anything. Have we given up? caved in? yielded? surrendered? What have we done to ourselves? What's wrong with us? Has the unconscious risen to take the place of the fate we once displaced?
To be perfectly honest, I don't know for sure ... but, I do have my suspicions
The Enlightenment's (no doubt, well-intended) emphasis on the individual has led us to believe that everything in life is up to us as individuals. We know, however, from everyday experience, that there is too much going on, too much at stake in the world for any one of us to deal with it adequately. We're lost. We felt we've been left alone. We feel isolated and alienated. And we're right: we're all of these things. What we have lost, more than anything else, is the awareness, the knowledge, the assurance that there are others just like us, that we have more in common with others than we have certainty only within our own selves.
The promise of redemption through individuality has shown itself to be little more than the threat of our own demise.
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