A Treatment for Toxic Individualism

NPR recently did a story on how pandemic politics, fueled by toxic individualism, is driving healthcare workers from rural communities, featuring the town of Sterling, KS. I'm familiar with the area, as it's not that far north of my grandparents’ farm and the even smaller community of Penalosa, KS where I spent much of my youth. My dad attended Sterling college, and I remember traveling there once to pick up a bull from a local breeder. But the memories of the boy and young man I used to be recall a rural south central Kansas with values built on a greater balance between the individual and the community. It's a balance that's also rooted in our evolutionary history.

I'm not waxing poetic about a past rural utopia that never existed. Threads of racism, homophobia, a disdain for evolutionary theory, environmental degradation, and skepticism of government (which can also be healthy at times) were certainly woven into the fabric of my rural youth (and still exist). The myth of achieving success based solely on individual effort and hard work was also there, but it was better balanced with a recognition of the importance of one's community, of coming together, pooling resources, and sacrificing to help your neighbor and those most vulnerable. Local leaders, even if you didn't always agree with them, weren't the enemy. They were your neighbors; you shared a pew with them; your kids went to school together.

I highly doubt my grandfather would have balked at wearing a mask to protect himself, his family, or his community. He would have had a mask always at the ready in his truck (along with an extra) if he found himself needing to run to town or help out a neighbor. My grandmother would have made masks to give away as soon as officials started recommending the general public wear them. Such actions weren't in conflict with their Christian, rural, farming identities; they would have been the direct result of those identities - resourcefully making use of what they had to help themselves and others, particularly those most vulnerable to the disease.

This toxic individualism, this rabid notion of individual freedom, though, has undermined aspects of trust, cooperation, and collectivism critical for a strong community. And a strong community is also beneficial to the individual, as well as to our larger spheres of interaction. Over the last several decades, toxic individualism has spread throughout much of the U.S. (as well as other areas of the globe), outcompeting and displacing community centered values similar to cancer cells outcompeting healthy cells and spreading within an organism (thanks to David Sloan Wilson for this analogy). The reasons for this are many and complex.

The relative looseness of the U.S. and the cultural norms built around that certainly provided a good foundation for toxic individualism (see the work of Michele Gelfand). The myth of homo-economicus and supply side economics are kindling for the fire of individualism (spend some time reviewing the articles at Evonomics or This View of Life Magazine). Powerful ideologues of individualism, like the Koch brothers, played the long game starting decades ago focusing on embedding the ideas and champions of individualism at all levels of government. It's also woven into the ideology of Christian Nationalism, which has increased it's foothold in America over the last several decades (as discussed here). And gross wealth disparities and increasing environmental degradation from climate change act as social disruptors, undermining social networks as individuals and groups compete for perceived and actually limited resources.

All of this and more has favored individualism at the expense of collectivism. When resources appear increasingly limited and the formal and informal social measures used for promoting trust, transparency, inclusivity, and unity are weak, the environment becomes well suited for toxic individualism. It’s a cancer that literally kills communities by encouraging behavior that puts others at risk, whether that's refusing to wear masks solely because one should have the individual freedom to do so or sacrificing Medicaid expansion on the alter of small government, putting your community’s only hospital at risk for survival. 

The irony is that in such an environment of increasing scarcity, lack of services, limited employment, etc., fueled by toxic individualism, your immediate survival and wellbeing is even more dependent on being part of group, even if the group's identity is partially defined by individualism. The rural values of helping out one's neighbor aren't gone, but who you call your neighbor is perhaps now more narrowly defined (as well as who you define as vulnerable). While toxic individualism may have no real community benefits (with the individual benefits provided mostly limited to those with the greatest power - white people, wealthy people, etc.), it can function as an identity marker, signaling membership within the group. Long term, though, as the cancer spreads, embedding itself within our various social and economic spheres of interaction, communities and society at large are weakened.

Our ancestors, living in their smaller groups often isolated from other humans, developed social control mechanisms to weed out toxic individualism. Allowing such behaviors to flourish would have meant the death of their communities, and then likely themselves at some point afterwards. Having spent so much of our history in small groups, these social control mechanisms, aligned with aspects of our individual psychologies, became part of our cultural toolkit to survive and thrive in the world. Individuals able to cooperatively live together within a community became a defining aspect of being human (even while simultaneously competing against other groups). It's why groups embracing the ideology of individualism are still able to survive (and thrive in some cases, at least for a time). Some key elements of collectivism, such as peer pressure to keep members toeing the line or coming together to help out a group member too sick to take care of her cattle, are still present.

Political scientist/sociologist, and Nobel Economics prize winning, Elinor Ostrom discovered eight of these social control mechanisms, or principles of cooperation listed below, that are common to our species. While seemingly simple with universal applicability, successful implementation of these principles requires a contextual implementation generally aligned with local values and cultural norms.

When successfully implemented, the decisions people make that benefit the whole group, like mask wearing or avoiding large gatherings indoors during a pandemic, almost become automatic. And those that benefit the individual (particularly a few individuals) at the expense of the group are less likely to occur with any great frequency. This happens because a focus on equity, human plurality, shared purpose, and long term, group level factors is embedded within these principles. They act as a form of immunotherapy against the cancer of toxic individualism.

These eight principles seem fairly simple and intuitive in hindsight. And, just as Dr. Ostrom and her students did, one can certainly find examples of contemporary and historical human groups of varying sizes who've landed on most or all of these principles by accident. But it takes a fair amount of effort (along with varying degrees of engagement of those affected) to determine the best contextual version of these principles (along with potential auxiliary principles relevant to a particular setting), implement them, and monitor/tweak them moving forward. Modern societies, with our nested hierarchical groups ranging from the nuclear family to out global population, provide an additional wrinkle to their implementation (though that's where principles seven and eight can really be of benefit).

But organizations like Prosocial.World are focused on doing just that. There are already existing examples of applications from neighborhood levels to regional scales, with future designs targeting the globe. It's not hard to envision a small rural community making use of Prosocial.World's ARC Process to collectively assess their own values and develop their own versions of the principles relative to water and land-use management, economic development goals, housing ordinances/regulations, building code adoption, public education, law enforcement, food and healthcare access, etc. (also see Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups).

And the process could be employed to help formulate responses to emergencies as they arise, whether that be droughts, opioid epidemics, or global pandemics. If you've come to an agreement that access to basic health and wellness for all community members is part of what identifies you as a community (first principle), then the second principle (equitable distribution of contributions and benefits) makes it difficult to argue against temporarily tightening up in the face of a pandemic by requiring everyone wear masks. Temporarily giving up some personal freedom is required to protect the health and wellness of the most vulnerable members of your community (a value also rooted in Christianity, as well as many other religions).

However, giving up aspects of one's individual freedom, even temporarily, requires a degree of trust of your fellow community members as well as those in leadership positions at all levels of government. Toxic individualism, hyper-partisanship, and many of the related factors mentioned above have greatly weakened that trust. Going through the ARC Process itself can help rebuild trust among those who participate, as well as establish buy-in through ownership of what's produced (third principle). Other potential hurdles come from the larger governing body constraints that communities must work within when developing and implementing their principles. In some cases these constraints may even work against certain local applications of the principles, such as the established limits on the spending of federal education dollars working against a particular local distribution of those funds that would actually have the most benefit for a given community.

This points out that ultimately the principles must be applied at all levels of human interaction (e.g., Evolving a Sustainable Future in the United Kingdom), but not via a top down only, centralized planning form of application. Nor can the principles be applied via a bottom up only, laissez-faire type of application. What's needed is a Third Way that doesn't just balance collectivism and individualism, but allows us to flexibly adopt strategies as needed to benefit us at smaller individual and community scales while also benefiting ourselves collectively for the long term at larger national and global scales (or at the very least not having a negative impact).

While other strategies besides Prosocial.World's ARC Process exist for optimizing group cooperation, it's significant advantages are that it's capable of systematically applying Ostrom's principles at multiple levels, and that it's rooted in evolutionary science. It recognizes and understands the intricacies of cultural evolution - how the selection, variation, and replication of cultural traits at multiple levels impacts our short and long-term survival - and provides a method to help manage that evolution. So it can be applied by rural communities like Sterling, KS, to minimize toxic individualism and the associated risky pandemic behaviors, such as refusing to wear a mask, which in turn minimizes the pressure on their local hospitals and avoids an exodus of healthcare staff (or public health officials). Or it can be applied by individual organizations, or even entire industries, as I outlined here for the design/construction process within the AEC Industry.

If we're going to address the critical issues we face as a species - our extreme wealth gap and associated poverty, institutional racism, environmental injustice, and climate change among others, we must eliminate toxic individualism at all levels of human interaction. And we need to do that mindfully and systematically, starting in 2021.

Individualism at the expense of collectivism is a cancer to the communities and societies we live within. And communities are our natural habitat - we evolved as individuals working together for our own survival and the survival of our community. Let's remember and act on this as we build our post pandemic world.