The Corporate Cultural Pillow Has Smothered Many Of Us

What has been the impact of individualism? Contemporary theory faces the challenge that a market society persists but the conditions for extracting a common morality of values from a possessive individualist culture do not. Research indicates that there have been several impacts:

1. State regulation – possessive market relations (capitalism) have so penetrated society and individuals that extensive state intervention is required to protect society and humans from themselves.

2. Reliance – since we must eat, have a roof over our heads and live an existence, whoever can provide us with those things, gets our support. The power and control rests with those who own capital and assets.

3. Contradiction – the origins of individualism were around freedom from other men. Ironically it has led to the opposite in many cases. We struggle to think differently, organisations have similar offerings, we are comfortable buying the same things. What it has brought about is the conforming individual. Then brands complain when they cannot recruit someone dynamic.

4. ‘The Littlest Hobo’ – like the dog in the TV series, “one day I’ll settle down but until tomorrow, I’ll just keep moving on.” We have several generations where fluidity is the norm.

5. New individualism - signified by people designing their own biographies, creating several identities over their life time, individual expression, self actualisation and the ability and confidence to think different rather than comply with the norm, their parents so easily leant towards.

6. We have been busy creating selves rather than beings.

Individualism in today’s current climate is very different than previous generations. The aspirations are changing. Increasingly we are less  concerned with the ownership of property as a means to freedom, (as well as the future economic restrictions) but we have entered an era of individualised identities and constant creation, not necessarily physical consumption. Reinvention and transforming ourselves several times over the period of our life has become the pattern. That is why we keep moving house, careers and enter into serial monogamy.

It’s a double force of equal impact to the starboard bow; globalization and the technological revolution, or should I say, the communications revolution. The current social structure we have all grown up in is dissolving. Flexibility rather than conformity, self definition rather than brand definition, mobile rather than static, the merger of virtual and real life, emotional freedom to express oneself and constant disruption are life’s comfortable bedfellows.

Capitalism as we know it has reached maturity. Globalization will not signify the death of the market society but it will change it. Almost every week, across the world we are seeing the slow death of corporate arrogance; Leaman Brothers, Arab uprisings, News International, HMV and even cultures. Giants in previous years, condemned to the scrap heap in forthcoming years. Institutionalization will not survive in the new social society. It requires a different set of principles, a unique set of values and a transparent approach to business that requires nakedness at an uncomfortable level for the more traditional generations.

Elliott & Lemert write “ So bitter has been the failure of the social whole to provide stable and reliable goods for its individuals that the dream withers against the growing terror of social failure into, for many, an illusion.”

Rushkoff in his book ‘Life Inc’ talks about how we turned to brands and organisations when society started to fail. Now we recognize that corporate impersonality was not any better. In fact, the corporate cultural pillow smothered many of us when what it should have been doing was encouraging the play and excitement of a pillow fight. In fact, we have lived in an era of ‘manipulated individualism.’ Apple selling individuality to the mass audience brings a wry smile of irony and proof of how beguile we have become.

The market will not be the absolute measure of all worth especially materialistic goods, what and how you think will: a shift from market capital to social capital.

William James called this the ‘social self.’ Brian Solis comments that we are entering a ‘digital Darwinism.’ For me we are entering a post traditional phase, the introduction to the social society where we will socialize everything we do even huge sections of so called capitalism.