Most people have seen a rally. Everyone in the same colors, chanting the same lines, clapping before they can realize if they even agree with what they just heard.
In the center of the rally a man wears a shirt that reads I AM AN INDIVIDUAL. He believes that the shirt proves he is a sore thumb.
It does not. Thousands of people can buy the same shirt and wear it to the same rally.
And that’s what happens. The same man goes to a later rally and finds many people wearing the same shirt. They all chant in unison “I AM AN INDIVIDUAL.” They believe their words but deep down they hope they just became the tribe’s latest colors.
We never ask what the tribe demands from us before we are granted a place within it. The price is always the same. It demands the individual sacrifice their individualism .
Do not confuse the individual with personality. Personality is a style. Nor is the individual a set of preferences, a person’s taste, or their biography. The individual is something more fundamental: the unrepeatable particularity of a human being. It’s a specific configuration that makes one person this person and not that person a specific arrangement of experience and perception that only exists once in reality and is never seen again.
Some believe that society bestows dignity upon an individual through rights, recognition, and laws. These things matter as they can protect dignity. But they do not create it. Before any government or constitutions there were particular human beings whose existence mattered simply because no one else could occupy the specific space that they occupied. Each of those people carried something that had no duplicate. They carried something that if lost would leave a particular shape of absence in the world.