Is this truly mine? Such is the question that drives the individual’s pursuit. Its object is not any physical thing—it is the habits and customs of life. Human nature is not entirely plastic—nothing distinctively human could otherwise exist. Yet dispositions exist not as archetypes or primordial principles, but as more or less coordinated tendencies in inhabiting the world. This world is not an ontological abstraction—it is a concrete fact peculiar to each individual. If a peculiar world exists for everyone—if the world is my world—all habits should be my habits.
Many suffer from jealousy or possessiveness without having asked the question of whether monogamy is desirable. Frustration is often felt in failing to achieve a goal which, in reality, we never set for ourselves. Emptiness often arises when, upon succeeding at a certain end, it at last reveals itself as alien. In the dynamic interaction with the world, exterior and interior, creative activity and meaning flourish. Yet most of us accept customs with the same passivity with which a place of birth or our parents are accepted.
The very essence of apathy lies in having lost the zeal required to produce these questions. Once this inquisitive attitude is lost—once habits, and with them the institutions which are their social expression, are taken to be not the products of a certain age or the commands of a certain order, but as much a fact of nature as that there are sun and moon—then any sense of potency vanishes and the precursors of sympathy are dissolved. The belief that current order equates to natural order is the greatest evil of social psychology. It implies that any intervention amounts to intervening with nature—the arrogant deed of playing to be God—. Certain lines of conservative thought heavily push such conceptions, and the notion has been cemented in the footman's mind. In fact, this is the lysis of democracy, insofar as dissent is the heart of democratic order.
Some emphasize that customs serve important purposes and should be preserved; that institutions undergo a sort of cultural selection analogous to darwinian selection, and we should not meddle with centuries of refinement. This is the very much folkloric attitude expressed in the phrase para algo está, though disguised as sophistication. It is true and in fact trivial that customs and institutions aren’t purposeless nor meaningless. However, their worth should be something to be proven rather than an axiom. If an individual finds that a certain custom stands in accord to their desires and inclinations, to their habits and their outlook, fair enough. At least then they would practice it not only knowing that future transformations are possible, if trial and error prove them to be necessary, but with a sense of deliberate action and therefore responsibility.
People often resent life conditions when these are given not as deliberate choices but as necessities. Every custom or habit has drawbacks; consciously assuming them in view of counterbalancing benefits can hardly produce frustration; accepting them as limiting forces of nature, which prevent us to act freely just as gravity prevents us from flying, leads to dissatisfaction only. In this misconception lies the tendency to blame external circumstances for what in fact were choices. If there are no competing alternatives, nothing feels like a choice—and perhaps nothing truly is. Thus, an uncritical life glides into oblivion under the illusion of faith. Heraclitus’ claim that character is destiny is true—but a man’s character is not a fact of nature but a constant work. We are never truly passive—even the profoundest rest is an ocean of activity—sterile languidity is as positive an attitude as Dionysiac ecstasy.
People aren't, but ought to be presented with the fact that many models are appropriate to life. The mathematical claim that all models are false, but some are useful, applies to the general notion of a life model as well. A teaching by analogy from mathematical models comes from the perils of overfitting. For a model to function properly it must not adjust itself too rigidly to empirical data, which is the model’s world—a decent amount of flexibility and willingness to change and readjust is needed. That noise injections, the introduction of a certain degree of irregularity or entropy into the model’s world, reduces the risk of overfitting, may also be extrapolated as a moral lesson. In general, a hard but evolving world is presented before us—from the moment of our birth we are to find meaning in the tides of fate, equipped only with boundaries in the total variation of which our innate faculties are capable. To overfit, to adjust oneself exactly to the nature of the world as is presented before us, leads at best to apathy and frustration, at worst to resentment and misery. The fact that the world is a fact peculiar to each individual implies as well that it is, unless this be resisted, rigorously limited. Conscious exploration without its boundaries is the beginning of individuation.
Education, as it is usually conceived, results in a systematized suppression of the natural zeal which drives individuation. Morals and customs are imparted without questioning—natural interrogations are suppressed and punished. It is often the case that children of talent are disorderly under the lens of formal education. The violence which the educational system does to those that, not due to the evils of malingering and vice, but because of tendencies that ought be cultivated—a passion for a certain art, commitment to social causes, the opportunity and desire to travel—is justified by claiming that a sense of responsibility must be fostered in them. The general idea is that however valuable their pursuits may be outside of the educational system, they must fulfill their obligations to it. That this idea is true is trivial—life is filled with obligations beside the inclinations of our passions or our desire to cultivate ourselves—and yet it seems to be weaponized without any regard to what is best for the child or young adult.
Anyone concerned with the cultivation of oneself realizes that the endeavor is a dynamic process; one that strongly involves our passions, worries, and creative inclinations. The process of becoming educated, let alone of discovering truths, or even that of individuation, are chaotic and disorderly to a point that the educational system never reckons. This should be obvious to anyone working in a scientific or intellectual environment. Learning is a process that actively engages the individual and his character; his peculiarities and insights; his ambitions and fears; his eagerness and zeal. All this is not only not encouraged, but smothered and extinguished by an educational system to which the individual is passively subjected. In mathematics, memorization is the primary goal of the educator—his own job depends on the students passing tests. The same applies to the natural sciences, where children are taught to remember the nucleotides which make up DNA or the organelles of the cell without fostering a dynamic understanding of the complex mechanisms of life. Even relatively simple models of nature, like the Hodgkin-Huxley model of action potentials, reveal that life consists of a highly dynamic interconnectedness. Such dynamisms paint a more faithful picture of reality than a mental array of cell types or a rigid anatomy accessible to memory. There was a time when memorization was crucial. Mnemonics was a crucial topic and received lengthy treatment in our intellectual history. The work of Giordano Bruno may be a good representation of the devotion paid to this subtle art in other times. In today’s world, however, where the formula of this or that probability distribution or the list of all neurotransmitters in the brain are accessible in seconds, memorization is a secondary skill. Furthermore, memory sprouts naturally out of engagement. The Hodgkin-Huxley model, to continue using it as an example, is complex and may prove difficult to understand to a student. But have him struggle with programming a simulation of it; engage him in the creative process of bringing the model to life. He will fail a hundred times more at this than in memorizing a few differential equations. However, he will feel the thrill of observing the system come to life, the excitement of scientific discovery; he will come to grasp exactly how the multiple factors relate to one another, for he is to simulate these relations; and simply by virtue of exposure, trial and error, he will perhaps never forget the workings of the model.
Some that claim to be driven by love of individuality—some that make religion out of the principle of individual liberty—entirely fail to comprehend that it is this rebellious spirit, this inquisitive zeal, what makes an individual. Thus, they defend an order which suppresses all the tendencies which drive individuation. Wage labor begins with the premise that work is so alien to the individual that he ought to be bribed, or worse coerced by fear of hunger, in order for him to be incentivized. This is not the place to discuss this, but it ought to be said at least schematically: conservatism lacks the love of individuality which it professes. Commitment to individuality, which leads to commitment to democracy, takes the form of either a highly progressive liberalism—one inconsistent with state capitalism as it exists today—or to some kind of socialism. Right-wing deviations of marxist thought forgot this, and mainstream political discourse made use of that forgetfulness to reinforce in our minds that socialist thought opposes the individual. The claim cannot be sustained if sincere effort is devoted to understanding the socialist tendencies of the last century and a half.
Regardless of the alternatives, that modern-day capitalism opposes the individual as much as it opposes the masses is plainly true. One might contempt himself to accept this fact and remark that any alternative is worse. In a world where most people live lives of endless toil and sterile sacrifice, I gather that a moral obligation exists to seriously explore alternatives rather than disregard them out of a rather convenient skepticism. In general, I oppose radical change—skepticism, when it doesn’t disguise apathy or cynicism, is a respectable attitude—but there is a middle-point between radical transformations and absolute conformism. Individuality consists of our acting in the world, and this world involves others. A man that cares not to transform the world around him is as despicable or worse than one that cares not to transform the world within him—and one that works solely to transform one of these aspects is lame or incomplete.