The Individual is the Oppressed.
WHAT IS AN INDIVIDUAL? That is not an easy question to answer. I’m an individual. You are an individual. My neighbor is an individual. Biologically we are all individuals but socially and economically and even philosophically that is a difficult question to answer.
According to the United States government, there are those who do not claim to be individuals but members of a protected class. Federal law states there are at least ten groups with agency who do not claim to be individuals, that is socially, economically, and philosophically.
The US protects these agents from discrimination or harassment; the following characteristics are "protected" by United States federal anti-discrimination law: Race, religion, national origin, age (40 and over), sex, sexual orientation and gender identity, pregnancy, disability status, veteran status, and genetic information. So if you meet one of these characteristics, then you can be part of the collective.
TO BE AN INDIVIDUAL IS simple, it is not hard at all to claim your individuality. You just need to reject being a victim. Just reject being a part of the collective. You need to think for yourself.
Individualism makes the individual its focus and emphasizes its intrinsic worth. The individual—and their immediate family— values independence and self-reliance over reliance on the state, unlike the collective in which some groups are actually protected by the government: the protected class.
The individual is dying a slow death and going the way of the VCR and AM radio. The concept of the individual is fading and is causing me to slowly become a manthorpe. It is hard to show an example of an individual as it is easier to find somebody who publicly claims to be a Trump supporter.
Everybody claims to be part of a group, part of the protected class. All one needs to do is scroll through YouTube or TikTok for a few minutes and you will quickly see this.
The great Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) reviled the "herd mentality" of modern society, in which the victim mentality rules. He proposed, instead, that an individual might attain the "transvaluation of values," in which one could generate authentically for oneself the unique principles that would guide oneself and oneself alone—read: individuality. These principles cannot be imposed or taught by one to another. Rather, the authentic individual must discover in a radically individualized way those precepts that realize his or her own valuation.
Scholars such as René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke believed in order to understand society one first had to understand the individual. In the case of society, those parts, the building blocks of a society, were instances of "the individual." Their individual was a highly abstract being, squatting outside the world.
To be part of the collective, that is to claim some sort of victim hood, a person must give up their autonomy. A person must become a follower—a sheep—and forget about the idea of becoming a leader. One must give up the idea of having independent thoughts; the group takes precedent over the individual.
Any execution of an idea by a group, or the collective can be boiled down to the consummation of a smattering of individuals who are not acting on their own behalf—unlike the individual—but on an abstract idea that everything is oppressive. This is common when it comes to groups seeking social change. There is usually a billionaire behind the scene bankrolling the organization. This is a far cry from what Karl Marx thought, he just thought capitalism was oppressive.
SO WHY IS THE INDIVIDUAL FADING? It is not that the individual is fading, it is that weak people are being drawn to the [false] promise of security that groups can provide. It is this and another reason: the postmodernists are against truth (read: the individual.)
Truth always resides in the individual and the individual is always stronger than the collective—even if it is not apparent at first—because the individual has an opinion. The opinion may not be what you want to hear but that is besides the point, the individual is a practitioner of the First Amendment which for the postmodernists acts in the same manner as garlic does to the vampire. The forte of the collective is illusory, formed by the protected classes who have no opinions besides socially constructed talking points.
For better or worse, the intellectual mainstream postmodernists have ushered in the “post-truth” era. They contend there is no objective truth, rather truth is constructed by society; the only truths which exist are “your truths.” Postmodern ideas slowly seeped from the ivory tower and gradually became prevalent amongst the wider culture, persuading more and more people they had their own “truth,” and it would be indecent of somebody to affirm somebody’s truth is fallacious..
The declaration that the Creator has revealed himself to us presupposes objective truth as the cognitive content of revelation; the Creator is the fountain of objective truth about man. This is what drives postmodernism, not that they acknowledge it but they repudiate it in the strongest words available. Objective truth over rules “your truths.”
The postmodernists would rather yield to the Platonic view that claims truth is abstract and independent of the Creator's being and revelation than to acknowledge there is objective truth. Objective truth is truth that is not dependent on any creature’s subjective feelings, desires, or beliefs. The Creator’s truth is not dependent upon any individual’s or group’s experiences or interpretations, however strongly felt or culturally entrenched they may be.
THE CREATOR’S TRUTH IS INVARIANT. His truth is true without exception or exemption; it is never relative, progressive, or amendable. It just is. The emphasis on absolute, objective truth is an extreme stumbling block for postmodernists—given their absolute abhorrence of the absolute. R.J. Rushdoony in Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church commented, “Truth is exact and precise, and the slightest departure from the truth is the substitution of falsity for truth.” Postmodernists find this hard to swallow, because of their taste for a smorgasbord of varying ‘truths’ selected and combined according to whim, fashion, feeling, or even frenzy.
So, to destroy the notion of God—and organised religion—is to destroy objective truth. To destroy objective truth is to destroy the individual and to place postmodernism as the leading form of philosophical thought which drives legislature and cultural norms.
In accordance with all postmodernists, all ideas of morality are unfounded, they are socially constructed. A popular talking point of the collective today is that gender and sexuality are social constructs. They arise from our relationships to other people, and they depend upon social interaction and social recognition. Postmodernism falters on its assumption there is no universal truth beyond our individual perspective; truth is subjective. Postmodernism fails to adequately distinguish between right and wrong.
The mind is the attribute of the individual, that is individuals think for themselves. There is no mind in the collective because there is no you, those of the collective are sheep who will go wherever they are led to. You are an avatar of your group. There is no such thing as a collective brain, just a collective thought. Your opinions are socially constructed because of your affiliation to a certain hierarchy of identity and that hierarchy of identity conditions everything you say; the postmodernists believe you don't have an opinion because there is no you, no individual.
THERE IS A VIEW OF life which conceives that where there is a crowd, there is truth. There are ample marches and demonstrations in America preaching their “truth,” but, in reality where there is a crowd, there is the “untruth.” Just look at the Black Lives Matter’s “mostly peaceful” demonstrations, this is a textbook example of collective thought. Would an individual of BLM have stood in the streets setting cars ablaze or smashing the glass of store fronts? No matter the ideas of the individual of a group, they follow; a crowd renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing the individual to a fraction.
But giving up your identity to be classified as part of a politically protected social group inevitably leads to fragmentation of the soul. You are no longer yourself but a fractional part of society. Regardless of the oppressed social group you claim to be part of or worse yet, others claim you are a part of. "Losing yourself" in the midst of the crowd is an evasion, a cop-out, and a desecration of the image of God within you.
Indeed following the crowd is a form of slavery where you surrender your freedom for the sake of a supposed sense of security. You become self-deceived because you no longer "own" yourself but became the ward of "another." Becoming a member of a politically protected social group or a self-proclaimed oppressed group makes you into a copy or similitude, a shadow rather than a person of substance.
And it appears this is what Americans want, they want to be a victim. People are weak, they need to be part of a group to have the courage to speak the truth but once they become part of an organization the truth becomes irrelevant; only group think matters.
POSTMODERNISM DESTROYED THE INDIVIDUAL. The postmodernists have fractionated society, everybody is oppressed. They have talked about every aspect of mankind and turned them into an “oppressed” group. Who you are depends on the group you are identified with such as your gender, your race, your socioeconomic group, your class.
Women are oppressed. Anybody whose skin color is any color except white is oppressed. Anybody whose sexual orientation lies outside of heterosexual is oppressed. These are the top tier of the hierarchy of oppression. The original distinction in Marxist theory was a person's socioeconomic position.
And then there’s intersectionality; it is a tool of the collective. Intersectionality is another way of describing "simultaneity of oppression," "overlapping oppressions," "interlocking oppressions" or any number of other terms that Black feminists used to describe the intersection of race, class and gender. Identity politics is the political wing of intersectionality and is the process that brings people together based on a shared aspect of their identity.
Intersectionality pits one “oppressed” group against another according to conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro. It is a kind of "oppression Olympics."
"Intersectionality is a form of identity politics in which the value of your opinion depends on how many victim groups you belong to." Shapiro continues, "The more memberships you can claim in oppressed groups, the more aggrieved you are and the higher you rank."
INTERSECTIONALITY CAN BACKFIRE. When it is taken too far, to its extremes it can expose individuals. If you take everybody’s group-centered peculiarities such as gender, and sex, race and uniquenesses such as attractiveness, IQ, and eye color into account, with all the plethora of identities you end up with the individual, hence the saying by Christina Engela, “Everybody is unique and different. Nobody is the same as anyone else. there is no 'normal' - it is a lie taught to us by a system so flawed that it is threatened by the awesome diversity of nature.”
As an individual you have a light you have to bring into the world. If you do not bring it into the world the world becomes a dimmer place and it can become a very dark place. So it is necessary for you to take care of yourself because you are in the best position to do so. It is imperative for you to take care of yourself.
The individual is above all.
AUDIO: The Individual is the Oppressed