The Unbearable Complexity Of The Individual

Longing for totality and the danger of group identities

There are many ways to define people, we can do this socially, economically, politically or by their music taste. In a sense the individual is limitless, meaning that he/she can be defined through an almost infinite amount of dimensions or categories. This makes it rather hard to fully capture a human being in its entire essence, even a single person can’t be fully overseen and not only their character, but also when judging whether they’re good or bad for example.

You can persecute a person as evil due to the fact that he has eaten killed animals his entire life or cherish him because that same person saved a child during a house fire and then again persecute him, because he saved the kid not out of pity for the kid, but merely to impress his wife.

This example makes us clear that the individual is infinitely complex and also unbearably paradoxical. Yet, given that human beings aren’t the only thing complex in the world, we try to reduce that complexity to categories, this way we can get some order, clarity and above all certainty. People do this, not only to others, but also to themselves.

Whether they do it through astrology or personality types or whether they’re red or blue, black or white and for some just healthy or sick. This way of categorising the self leaves lots of sides of people’s character in the dark, they only let themselves get defined through one narrow category.

Of course I admit, people aren’t always busy with their own identity, however it is interesting to think about people their self-perception and how they establish a sense of self.

With these binary ways of defining oneself people often neglect how broad they actually are and on how many fronts of reality they operate which I think is a great loss, somebody’s personal life could be much richer if they embrace the paradoxes that exist within them, embrace the unmappable person they really are. On a deeper level, this means letting the chaos within them exist without having to make order from it.

Letting the chaos flow can obviously lead to uncertainty and anxiety, not being able to sum up who you are in a catchy one-liner, it isn’t stable enough for most people to hold onto. Here’s how I do it: I really like reading classical literature and philosophy, it’s a central pillar of my identity, the thing contrasting those ‘high culture’ interests are of course ‘low culture’ ones, such as ‘shallow’ comedy shows without any deeper layer. So it would be normal for people who like to occupy themselves with ‘high culture’ to have a disdain for ‘low culture’ and vice-versa. So naturally given my interests you would think I would be on ‘the high culture team’(or just the snob team), well then here is a surprise for you, after I finished reading Dostoevsky’s masterpiece Demons I flushed it down spending 2 hours watching Family Guy clips.

People are afraid of chaos, as it implies uncertainty and danger. This makes people yearn and long for totality, a solution or answer that leaves no possible room for doubt. The more uncertain and chaotic the times are, the bigger the craving for totality gets. It manifests itself through religion, which satisfied the hunger for the complete answer and certainty of the entire world for millennia, which it still for many does, however when religion fails, we fill the empty gap God once occupied with the State. Just look at the totalitarian regimes in the 20th century. Entire societies where the state, government was treated as sacred and absolute as God was the centuries before.

But, because safety, certainty and overall well-being of humanity have only gotten better and better we managed to keep this desire in check, however it still manifests itself on other fronts. The most primary example of which being the identity of the individual.

Just like the complexity of reality which could be made understandable by the state in the 20th century or religion in the ones prior, labels and absolute identities can do the same thing in order for the individual to navigate themselves. Being oneself without them, falling in the abyss of oneself without them, the complexities of oneself seem to be unbearable for most to carry.

This eventually leads to people coming together and forging some kind of group identity, letting their personality be dictated by the footballclub or the political party they support. It provides a sense of order, however it can bring a halt to change, development or new ideas, as the group identity brings a sense of tribal comfort, they wouldn’t risk letting a contradictory part of themselves slip through.

They want to completely fit the package of their assigned group or ideologue, silencing the unique or contradictory parts of a person making their personality more shallow and in turn by adopting a more absolute sense of self they get more polarised, estranged and alienated from other people. But when people just try to conform to a group identity in what sense are they left remaining an individual?

This, being able to accept that you’re larger than these categories or ideologies takes courage, it requires a person to break free from comforting chains, to face the unknown within themselves, to not be so sure who is the enemy anymore. It takes a lot, it’s a long road, but that is when a hero is forged, when you’re left with a person actually becoming oneself, a human in process of becoming an individual.