The “Me” Generations – Can “Me” Become “We”?
10 July 2020 (Wall Street International)* — Attempting to prevent police racism and violence is a worthy and overdue reform. However, to adequately address racism, we need to take a step back and understand the ‘me’ generations. Then perhaps we may begin to move away from the me-culture towards a we-culture.
We might even consider completing the French revolution, giving equality and fraternity the same priority as individual freedom (Prilleltensky 2020). We may find our lost morality and build community (Brooks 2020). Let us try to understand how the me generations evolved over the last 60 years.
The background
The generation of the sixties created a new kind of individualism. For example, Students for a Democratic Society wrote in the Port Huron Statement, “the goal of man and society should be personal independence… a concern not with an image of popularity but with finding a meaning of life that is personally authentic.”
At the time, we interpreted this as emancipation from conformity, dogma, prejudice, and political oppression. And as David Brooks points out, “the individualistic culture that emerged in the sixties broke through many of the chains that held down women and oppressed minorities. It loosened the bonds of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia.” He also believes that “we could not have had Silicon Valley or the whole information age economy without the rebel individualism and bursts of creativity that were unleashed by this culture” (Brooks 2020).
However, gradually our society began to take this framework to an extreme.
One of the most prominent examples of this tendency is the star system of rewards, which remarkably spread to many endeavors. It began in Hollywood with the public’s desire to know the name of the actors, and the concept of movie star was born. It spread to Broadway and then to sports, to fashion, to academics, to cooks, to authors, to every profession. The media continually presents the stars with evident admiration.
We are being told to strive to be like these winners. It is a very effective motivational system since we also believe that the stars are worthy. This provides sport for the economic elite. We work ourselves very hard to be exceptional individuals, downplaying all the resulting frustrations and health consequences such as divorce, opioid abuse, and obesity. The uncomfortable secret is that in the end, there is not much room for everybody to be a star, and not all stars are worthy. This is conveniently forgotten.
With this individualism, the autonomous individual becomes the fundamental unit of society, free to achieve self-realization. It is no longer the task of parents, schools, and institutions to create a shared moral order; it is something you can do on your own (Brooks 2020). Social goals are your individual option or can be ignored.
The nature of consumption has also evolved towards sustaining hyper-individualism, using all means possible, such as Artificial Intelligence, to forecast and even control the selection of individual products and services. The other essential task is to individualize, design, and produce these personalized products.
This, together with the fast delivery of Amazon, has created a very seductive individual model of consumption, imitated worldwide. Unfortunately, it ignores the environmental and social costs. Also, our social problems concerning inequality and fraternity are reframed into individualized services of amelioration rather than looking at the primary causes.
