Ishaan Nag – My diary of the human society.

There is an epidemic of sorts, in both the West and the global South, of increasingly individualistic and collectivized societies. We are becoming increasingly polarized, no matter the region of the world, and this is a trend on the rise. I feel that the imperfect way in which our society is shaped is partly to blame, the absence of a middle ground is to blame.

Of course, the divisions are different. In collectivized  societies, it is an “us” vs “them” division, while in individualistic societies, it is an “I” vs “them” division, but divisions exist nonetheless. The former is mastered by the group and the government, while the latter is the result of rigid individualism hindering opposing viewpoints. The former has given rise to cruel totalitarian regimes who tolerate no dissent, while the latter has given rise to a fractured social fabric with no solidarity and low interaction, and then one must wonder, is that how humanity is poised to exist, locked by borders between these two extremes?

Emile Durkheim’s influential though controversial work on suicide gave us four types of suicide: Altruistic Suicide, Egoistic Suicide, Anomic Suicide and Fatalistic Suicide. Egoistic Suicide is one which occurs due to an individual losing their sense of belonging. One has no tether in life, nothing to identify with and nowhere to belong to. Anomic Suicide occurs when an individual has no morals, codes of conduct to follow, a lack of communal, societal structure. One can see why: privacy in such societies is a worshipped concept. Neighbors are separated by good fences, and usually, health and welfare is taken care of by the government. Communal living, however, with greater urbanization and de-industrialization, has drastically reduced. Where one would be expected to conform to rigid standards of living in closely knit villages where closely knit groups knew and cared about each other and thus result in a sense of security, new towns with cosmopolitan demographics and freedom to behave and follow disparate religions, traditions and faiths replace this social safety and security with freedom, resulting in confusion and disappointment. Hyper-nationalism in pre-First World War Germany and toxic identity politics grew out of this transformation from villages to metropolis, from homogeneity to diversity, and as a response to these unwelcome changes. This shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesselschaft, or from community living and norms to a society where self-interest guides the society, as underlined by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies, had thus given rise to national chauvinism in Germany and various other newly industrialized nations as a struggle to regain that lost sense of belonging, as a response to a chaotic, lost and sinful individualistic life.

The problem, I feel, is graver in the case of highly collectivized society. Fatalistic suicides occur due to a feeling of oppression, a sense of failure in conforming to societal rites.  Countries with the highest suicide rates are ones with such rigid, collectivized societies where the community’s needs and wants are put above the individuals needs. For example, South Korea, with a suicide rate of 28.6 per 100000 people, is the country with the fourth-highest suicide rate, while Lesotho coming at first with 72.6 per 100000. South Korea, along with it’s East Asian counterparts, have a highly collectivized society where societal pressure such as pressure at work, education, and a social stigma on open discussion about mental health. The same goes for Lesotho and India, with a strong social stigma against discussion about mental health, countries with the most and 41^st most suicides per 100000. This social stigma, I believe, stems from a direct community imposition of rigid codes of conduct for every individual to conform to as a collective, downplaying the individual.

On the other hand, politically unstable countries such as The Honduras and Syria have some of the lowest rates of suicides. Am I suggesting a country must be rendered politically unstable to have a harmonious social fabric? I honestly cannot suggest anything, for I am not a psychologist. This article may not provide closure or a solution, but my point stands: hyper-individualistic societies and hyper-collectivistic societies are dystopian. The former lack any kind of solidarity, while the latter grant barely any, even basic freedom to it’s individual components, and in extreme cases such as some cases of nudge theory policies as in wide scale surveillance and government invasion of privacy, also serves to dehumanize the individual. In the process of moving towards our own ideas of utopia, one of liberty the other of mutual solidarity, we forget to check these growths and instead form hordes of the lonely and the lonesome in a horde.