The Failure of "Rugged Individualism"

As Americans, we relish in the notion of “rugged individualism.”  An idea originally peddled by a history professor by the name of Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. In a nutshell, he proposed; Due to the pioneering experience of the west, and the isolation that resulted from it, Americans are unique as we have learned to be self-reliant and can go at it alone.  Turner’s romantic view of the American pioneer experience makes for good story telling, but pretty poor history.  In truth, even in the migration west, American families formed larger communities along the trails west and ahead of them, were the US Army cavalry.  They formed long, often heavily organized wagon trains where several different extended families worked together to get to their final destinations.  The idea that mom, dad, and a few kids got into a wagon with few guns and supplies and went to “settle” land alone is as factual as the tooth fairy.  The expansion West was no different than European colonialism in other parts of the world at that time.  The manifest destiny was an organized plan from the highest reaches of the federal government to expand the Nation west.  This was not a handful of pioneers who up and decided on their own it would be wise to move west.   

We Americans have this belief that we can do it all ourselves.   We are seeing the results of this change of focus.  The importance of a close knit, extended family has been reduced.  No longer do we often have older relatives stay under the same roof as younger family unit until they pass away.  In fact, we unwisely assume that our elders are better off in the care of a paid staff in some old folks home.  We don’t know our own neighbors.  People go months or even years without knowing the people that live within yards of their own home.  Paid strangers take care of our children to the tune of sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a year while we work, and not relatives or trusted neighbors.  Depression, likely bought on by this voluntary isolation and the financial stress thereof, is at record levels.   

Here is the reality:  Human beings would have been extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago had we adopted such an unrealistic and laughable individualist philosophy.  Humans from a physiological standpoint were never endowed with big teeth, armor, or big claws to defend ourselves from predators in the wild.  Organized bands of armed hunters protected the tribe from animals which were easily more than capable of making an individual human; even well armed with primitive weapons; it’s lunch.  These early hunter/warriors were also useful for defending against other groups of humans (which gets into another discussion altogether).   

The country itself was not founded on the notion of individualism, period.  It was founded because a group of people that collectively (see word here, collectively) decided that they were tired of paying taxes to a British king 3500 miles away.  Going back even further; had it not been for Native Americans teaching the farming and hunting techniques to very early colonists, the early British and Spanish colonies in the Americas would have not survived at all.  Humans share knowledge.  Humans work together to accomplish goals.  Humans don’t do their own thing, and magically human progress is accomplished.  It has never worked that way, and it never will.   That’s not communism or even socialism to understand and accept the fact that humans are social animals.  Using the aforementioned points about the physiology of humans, we had to be social animals just to make sure we weren’t picked off one by one by hungry saber-tooth cats or any other apex predators that were more than willing and capable of killing us.  We had to be social animals to make sure important knowledge was passed on through the generations.  

We see this even today.  Take the African Water Buffalo for example.  Even though these hardy and strong beasts are more than a match for a single lion or lioness, it takes the herd working together to ensure that herd’s survival.  Adult bulls form tactical defensive positions around the young, and if necessary, actually counter-attack lions.  Imagine if you will if every member of the herd did its own thing when they were under attack from a lion pride.  They would be massacred on a regular basis.  Even the largest toothed mammal in the world, the sperm whale, travels in groups, and uses a “Marguerite formation” similar to what the water buffalo use to protect themselves from predators.  Here, adult females surround the calves in an attack by groups of Orca and use their tails to beat up an attacking pod.  Again, we see these mammals don’t just protect themselves or even just their own young.  They work together to protect all of the young members of the group.  It even goes beyond protection to education.  Not long ago in the human world, little boys after a certain age were essentially taken away from their mothers to live among adult males of the community, related or non-related by blood, and were taught to farm, build, fish, fight, and hunt.  And this was before they were given any classical education.         

My point in this is that we humans are social animals, who; like other mammals such as the water buffalo and the sperm whale, work together for the survival and success of their species.  It wasn’t until very recently in human history, that babies in just about all societies, were nursed by not only their mothers or other women in the extended family, but other unrelated lactating women in the communities.  I’m not saying we should go back to the days of communal breast feeding, but the days of voluntary isolation and avoidance has been an utter failure.   This delusional form of individualism is not only based on myth, but it’s unnatural and wholly ineffective.  At no point in time in human history have we survived without working together at the most basic of levels.   In this “me, me, me” “not my problem” society, we are seeing the negative consequences (IE depression) on the most vulnerable of us; the children and the elderly.    

We need to assess and reset our priorities, and look to the past to look for solutions to our current social ills.  We need to ask the hard questions: Is making that extra 20 grand worth sending your child to a complete stranger who will go ahead and charge you that amount anyway?  If potential parents can’t afford to have one parent stay home in the early years of a child’s life, can you really afford that child?  Who is really raising that child if they spend most of the first years of their life with paid help instead of a parent or even relative?  Will your elderly parents or grandparents be happy spending their rest of their lives among family, or among strangers in some old folks home forgotten and cared for by underpaid workers?  We let paid help raise our kids and send our own elders to exile, then wonder why life in our society seems off balance.  Solutions to these problems can be fixed at the family level, are not radical, and have been around for thousands of years.