The myth of the individual

Even though it's now pretty clear that I keep repeating myself, let me slide down that slippery slope again. There is a modern myth, a misunderstanding really, that life is just up to us, that life is simply what we make of it, that the individual is the final arbiter of his or her fate. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

It is exceedingly difficult to distance ourselves from ourselves, but that's what I'm asking you to do: to take a step back from yourself, a step far enough to take an objective view of yourself as a person, and to take a closer look at what you see. I'm going to pose a few questions to help clarify that picture.

• Where were you born? (I, for example, was born into a run-of-the-mill, working-class family, in Western Pennsylvania.)
• When were you born? (Again, for me, it was near the beginning of a very strong economic upswing, though the country in which I was born was still at war in the Far East.)
• What was life like when and where you were born? (Things were relatively simple, straightforward, everybody knew how they fit in (or didn't fit in) to the community; we went to church regularly; parents, older people, teachers, police and other professionals were treated with deference, if not respect.)
• How did you come to be born where and when you were born? (And for this one, personally, the only answer I can find that makes any kind of sense to me is that I ended up there by pure chance.)

That's right, pure chance, a mere accident of fate, if you will. One day I woke up and there I was in small-town America, surrounded by a way of life that I was taught to accept and respect, that was full of unspoken rules and customs, ways of doing things, accepted topics of conversation, attitudes, and more, none of which I had any idea about before I got there and merely accepted because, well, that was all I knew. In other words, much of who you are today was established in that context in which you were born and that context has to do with the timing of your birth and the circumstances of your environment. That, if anything, is just the way things are, and there is nothing that you can do to change that.

The early years of life are the most formative years. Any child or developmental psychologist will tell you that, so let's try a small thought experiment: try to imagine that you were born somewhere else. Try being born in a ghetto where you are forced to live because "your kind" suffers heavily from discrimination. Try being born into utter poverty, in the middle of nowhere. Or, try imagine you were born in another country, say, Poland, or Nigeria, or Bolivia, or India. (This last experiment will be all the more difficult the less you know about anything outside your home country.)

Now, I ask you: who do you think you would be if the timing and placement of your birth were different? Do you really think you would think, believe, and act just like you do now? If you do, I have to question whether you really seriously tried the thought experiment.

If you were born poorer or richer, all your surroundings change. If you are born in another country, you grow up loving that country, not your current one. If you are born in an economic crisis, things develop quite differently than if you were born in a period of economic growth and stability. In other words, the cards a shuffled anew, and you are a completely different person than the one you are now. And that's why the "individual" is for the most part a myth. We are who we are largely by virtue of the accident of our birth. No more, and no less.