Blog 13: The Herculean way: a road travelled together

This week I attended my university’s graduation ceremony. I probably attend a ceremony every year and have done so for about a decade as part of my commitment to academic life. This year I had another PhD student graduate and being in the academic procession when a graduate student you’ve supervised receives their testamur is a very special moment. Graduations are incredibly important days in the University calendar as they mark the end of a student’s academic journey and the beginning of the next phase of their lives. They are important also because students celebrate with their nearest and dearest sharing the joy of the ceremony and accompanying celebrations.

This year, the valedictory speech given by one of the PhD graduates was about the importance of community and she reminded us that every degree is the result of a collective effort. Further, she emphasised the collective nature of life. Her own thesis was about a village in India and as she argued that it takes a village to write a PhD. Her point is that our successes are inevitably a “team” effort. In the first blog I wrote, this same point was made by Arnold Schwarzenegger when he said that no one is self-made but made by the collective buy-in of those we bring in to help us on our journey. He went on to say that it is our role in life to do the same for others.

This is not a new concept at all. Aristotle remarked some two thousand years ago, “Men are by nature a social being.” But the philosophy of our age is individualism. On the one hand, our existence is one that is defined by those we bring on our life journey and the life journeys of others we share with them. And, on the other hand, we are told by more than one source that all that matters is the individual and what we can do for ourselves. In this world of the survival of the fittest, we must look after ourselves first. Which is it? Because philosophically and practically, it cannot be both.

The logic of individualism

Since the 1980s, an idea of individualism has been propagated globally. In the main, without going into too much detail, the idea is tied to the logic of market activity and the belief in the survival of the fittest. Individualism is a 19th century ideal that emerged, one can argue, as a response to growing interest in socialism, collectivism and universalism. As a reaction to arguments for the common good, individualism was developed as an ideology that untied those with privilege and increasing wealth from their responsibilities to those with much less. Interestingly, the proponents of individualism were often the same people who championed nationalism and the national good.

However, in this contradictory dance, they were not pursuing the common good within the nation, but of the nation vis-a-vis other nations. The way to deflect the contradiction was to create an idea of common good vis a vis people from a different nation, ethnicity, religion or race. In the process, their national privileges were protected by pitting their fellow nationals against other nations, peoples, races, etc., This is a little bit of a caricature of the 19th century imperial mindset, but also as we have seen in the rhetoric of Donald Trump, as an example, a fairly accurate representation of the conflicting ideals that individualists often articulate.

The flaws in the logic of a system designed to, first and foremost, promote individual gain, are increasingly obvious. In this period, we are witnessing the atrophy of public trust in government, in the institutions of the state, and of the belief in the public good. These things are not happening because of some innate laws, as some would have us believe, in the inherent failings of the public. Rather, what we are experiencing is a direct consequence of a system that has been designed to put the individual above the collective. It makes sense that such a logic would erode the very thing that it is aimed to undermine.

I recall in 2013, Tony Abbott, then opposition leader, saying that public schools performed poorly and that they needed to be reformed. When he became PM, he made massive cuts to funding for public schools, redirected that money to private schools and then attacked public schools for being ineffective. It wasn’t that public schooling inherently is less capable of delivering education than private schooling.

Rather, the ideologies responsible for individualism, purposefully strip resources and morale from public institutions and then argue that they perform poorly compared to the private sector. We’ve seen this process at work for decades and the result, the withering of the public sector, the privatisation of many services that the state was once responsible for and unsurprisingly a lack of trust in the governments that have been responsible for overseeing this process.

Is it any wonder we lose trust in government, when elected leaders of the public sector like Tony Abbott, tell us not to have any faith in the public sector. Would we buy a product if the head of that company told us that the products they made were defective and other companies had better products? Definitely not. They wouldn’t do that, they’d have faith that their people could fix the problems and improve the product, or most if they thought the products couldn’t be rescued, they wouldn’t take the job in the first place. Maybe, it is time to stop electing politicians who don’t believe in the institution of government, or the public sector they get elected purportedly to lead. If we made this promise, we might see the institutions of the state improve. Just a thought.

The Power of the Collective

Education, health care, utilities and justice to name but a few should be public goods that we all share in equally. However, once sold off to private companies, these social necessities inevitably become services sold for profits rather than public goods. The irony of almost every profitable service that we pay for is that the public built it before it was sold off to private capital. Think airports, telecommunications infrastructure, utilities such as the electricity grid, and public transport. In fact, even after it is privatised, public transport is still called public transport.

In the process, the idea of public goods makes way for user-pay individual interests. The common good no longer exists. The sense of society evaporates, and in this process people feel like they are constantly in need of more to pay for this service or that one. The dog eat dog that is seen to be human nature is instead a result of this system, making each and every one of us individually responsible for all our needs. As I write this, the denaturalisation of individualism becomes really clear to me. I hope it is for you too.

From Socrates to Modern Day Motivational Thinkers

I’m not saying we don’t have responsibility for ourselves and our families. Rather, I am saying that building a system where we have a common good is much more meaningful than striving just for ourselves. I believe we all feel better being a part of society. Not just because as Aristotle said some 2500 years ago, we are social animals, but because contributing to more than just ourselves gives our lives purpose. So much of what I read these days confirms this. Almost every motivational speaker, guru of leadership and business and sport, says exactly the same thing. They almost all say that it is contributing to something greater than me, and mine, that is where life’s meaning is found. And the amount of people who volunteer their time and skills for a cause greater than themselves is further proof of this. Not just me, Arnold Schwarzenegger or the PhD student I spoke about at the start of this article.

I think that if we start the process of believing in society, rebuilding it by scorning those who make a career of trying to convince people just to look out for themselves and to not believe in public institutions, and society more broadly, we will do amazing things for ourselves and for the world which we rely on and exist in. The more that we think of ourselves as part of a greater whole the better we’ll be and the more likely that collectively we can develop ways to reduce the scale of problems that we face globally such as climate change, obesity, homelessness and poverty. The Herculean Way is not a road for just one to travel. THW is to have others be a part of your journey and to join others in theirs. Until next week, be collective, think of the greater good, and be Herculean.