Should Collective Conscience Overwhelm Individuality?

Pawas Bisht  

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was the first, the road new, the vision un-borrowed, and the response they received- hatred. The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great invention denounced.

Whatever be the legend, somewhere in the shadows of memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that one paid for his courage. 

The “One” that these words of Ayn Rand refer to is the same who challenged the colossal might of Olympus as he stole the fire of the Gods. He is the same who found paradise dispensable when the tyrannical bliss of obedience kept him from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He is the same who in the quest to be God haggled over his very soul with the devils of hell.  

He finds himself born in a new age where though, like his fathers, his struggles remain Promethean and his trials greater than Faust, a new horror dawns on him. It is neither an Olympian assault that he confronts nor an infernal onslaught that he has to brave. He has to confront the sheer clamouring numbness of a horde, a horde of his own brothers that seeks to drown him in the amorphous indistinction of the collective “We”. A thousand eyes of supplication disarm him; a thousand fingers of censure assault him, a thousand sighs of reproach bring him crashing down. And he, who confounded the powers of heaven and the terrors of hell, falls before the collective glare of a thousand mirrors that dwarf his greatness.

A puzzled question dies on his lips, “Why?” 

It is the “Why?” that captures the essence of a primeval conflict.  

The archetypal battle between the “I” and the “We” in all its chilling immensity and in all its banal infinitude is played again and again. The “I”, the heroic figure of the classical liberal tradition, the individual with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute clashes with the “We”, a manifestation of the collective conscience, the society, a set of brutal, repressive empty structures painstakingly evolved over the period of years, a well oiled and complex machinery with the negative energy of confinement, which seeks to stifle any break for freedom, any quest for individuality. 

The collective emerges as a leviathan, whose greatest pleasure is to be left undisturbed, which views both greatness and criminality alike as dangerous aberrations. Tradition becomes the sacred injunction through which any break for individual progress is quashed. “Need” and “Charity” become the spiritual leeches of individual productiveness. Elaborate insidious codes of morality and convoluted class structures emerge as the fetters into which man is born. The history of human civilization emerges, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it,  “only a biography”, as the story of individuals that could have taken on the very heavens but fought frustrating battles against indistinct collective abstractions. 

The questions, which then pose themselves glaringly, are simple and stark ones, but need to be confronted with honesty.

Is the collective conscience as represented by the state and the society, by the social structures and institutions meant to subsume the individual?

Are there super-individual values and ends that these indistinct abstractions seek to achieve?

How can Society, which is at a basic level just a collection of individuals transform into a set of imperatives that that seeks to curtail the very freedom of its constituents?

The answer to all these questions is tied in inherently with one primordial question.

What is Man?

It is only if man is perceived according to the Hobbesian myth, as naturally savage and at war with his fellow men, with his “reason” non existent; guided by the animalistic emotive psychology of passions and wants; driven by the factitious amour-propre, or vanity, that society as a manifestation of the collective conscience, as the whip that cracks to keep the individual in line, is justifiable. 

The essence of the Hobbesian delusion that the life of man in the natural state is “nasty, brutish and short”, is perhaps best captured in this farcical assertion that he made in the Elements of Law, 

“…seeing right reason is not existent, the reason of some man or men, must supply the place thereof; and that man, or men, is he or they, that have the sovereign power…and consequently the civil laws are to all subjects the measure of their actions, whereby to determine, whether they be right or wrong, virtuous or vicious…” 

This injunction, which denies man his reason and makes him a slave to the opinions and laws of other men whereby he is to judge the morality of his own actions by their standards, is perhaps the most violent assault on the idea of man itself. In making this assertion that justifies the idea and existence of the society,“civitas”, the leviathan, as the tempering force that keeps the individual in check for his own good, Hobbes reduced man to something less than human. 

As Rousseau pointed out, unlike animals always enslaved by their appetites, provided by Nature with only the instincts and capacities needed to sustain life, human beings are by free agents, endowed with the free will, capable of choice and of bearing the responsibility of determining how we live. Hobbes in rejecting this conception of human liberty not only belittled the idea of man but also in conjunction, as Rousseau further points out, attributed to man in the natural state a set of traits that he could only have acquired in society. The projection of the society as the collective that would impart a legal and moral uniformity is exposed as a hoax perpetrated by the few in power to preserve their dominance,

As Rousseau puts it “All ran headlong to their chains, believing they had secured their liberty.” 

The true conception of man is as a heroic creature, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute.

He is defined by his free will, by the ability to shape his own destiny and not to submit to any power or authority unless it is allowed by his reason.

A society which emerges from the interaction of individuals that follow this creed is a voluntary association that would further their happiness and well being. It would never become something greater than the sum of its parts.

The state would exist to only protect individuals from coercion by other individuals or groups and to widen the range within which individuals can exercise their freedom; it is to be purely instrumental, having no significance in and of itself. The ultimate value is of the individual. When this truth is recognized then the questions would float away, and so would the spectre of the collective shroud, only a harmony of “I” would remain.  

My country today is falling prey to the spectre of deified abstractions. Progress is being measured in terms of collective dreams, “exploding a nuclear device, sending a manned mission to moon” dreams that are stolen, dreams that are pathetic attempts at imitating “greatness”. Dreams that are not yours or mine, that drain away our resources that do not improve a single life but feed an artificial need; they are offerings made to an abstract notion of  “India”. They feed on individual dreams, every second an idea dies under the weight of some manifestation of the collective, the state, society, communalism, regionalism, caste-ism…an idea that could have made a better India dies. Is it not ironical that the government in wooing the NRI’s, asking them to contribute to the development of their “motherland”, fails to recognise that these are the individuals who were driven away, who strove to keep their dreams from being smothered under the weight of collective shrouds? Five minute TV commercials beam mirages accompanied by cacophonic melodies of celebration, serve up a “resurgent India”: smiling farmers talking on cell phones, gleaming highways, colourful camels and happy school children…they tell me I am to “feel good” and will probably holler “blasphemy” if I dare to venture a “Why?”

 

India is not about this slickly packaged bundle of images made for the consumption of the collective. It is true that India, its culture and its history are an integral part of my identity but there is a greater identity that every individual strives to realise through his work, his vocation; that which in Conrad’s words gives him a chance to “find himself, to find his own reality, which no other man can ever know”. This is the ultimate human quest, the freedom to discover one’s own reality, but is this freedom available to every citizen of my country?

 

No, the spectre of the collective haunts them still and every attempt to live a dream, a dream that promises something, new and beautiful is a struggle against the spectre of the collective.

 

There are no panaceas, just a simple truth is to be realized: India is not about a collective abstraction but about the individuals that are its people, it is about the “I” who stands at the beginning of every new dawn and has the strength to echo the words of the great Luther,

 

“Here I am and here I stand and I cannot do otherwise.”

 

This essay was published by Essay published by IHC as it was included in EQUUS-IHC Young Visionary Award- Final Round Presentation (2004))