Collective

What is the proper relationship between the collective and the individual? I ponder on an empty stomach, prompted by Che’s speech to the medical students of Cuba I just read. The question seems to have two sides, just as I flip my eggs twice and pour a double heaping of pepper upon them.

First, I suppose, as I boil another pot of tea, there is the macro level way to look at it. Here the balancing act is difficult; if the individual is too highly valued above the collective, anarchy reigns, the rule of the stronger prevails, and I wouldn’t be able to get any lemon for my tea. However, if the collective is deemed the greatest good, then one falls into the trap which enveloped the worst regimes of the twentieth century, where individual lives were seen to count for nothing and mass murder on a colossal scale was easily justified. That would be even less pleasant than the toast I just burnt. Between those two options lie a slew of others. As the collective is most often embodied by the government in our days of democracy, the balancing act takes the form of mundane arguments over taxation rates and the regulation of private enterprise.

Then, I say, as I settle down to an after-breakfast cookie, there is the micro level. This is the level I examine every time the pressures of living in society, of having to conform my existence to the rituals, expectations, and mindsets of other people, makes me want to dash it all and exile myself to a hermetic lifestyle. There is joy in society, surely, but at what cost? The accompanying question to this is, I believe, as I flip on the TV and hunt for CNN, how should we frame our relation to society? Should we use society, the collective force of others, for our own personal growth and enhancement? Or should the priority be to use our powers for the growth of the collective? The second seems to have the force of conventional morality on its side, but flies in the face of how most of us make decisions on a daily basis—even helping others is usually done with an eye on its effects on the individual, rarely only on the good of the collective. The collective is such an abstract thing that it is hard to imagine the kind of fulfillment people need in order to function coming from a strict devotion to it.

That fulfillment comes more easily from bacon.