IN LIFE, it is best to remember that there are really only two numbers — one, and all. I mention this after a recent survey by the Joseph Rowntree foundation suggests that “individualism” is a scourge of modern society.
Individualism — it has a bad name, but do we speak with forked tongue on the matter? After all, democracies are built on it. So we are quick to berate President Robert Mugabe for not allowing the individuals in Zimbabwe to have their say in the recent elections. And we line the streets against China’s corporate government — ever keen to affirm the rights of the individual in that country.
Individualism is warmly endorsed as an absolute right elsewhere — but in this country? Here, apparently, it’s an absolute wrong, and the basis of everything that is not right with our land. So what are we saying exactly?
Of course, individualism is one of our greatest national exports. It was English individualists who were the first to hold the king to account — first King John, and then Charles I.
Individualists affirm the dignity of the individual, and, with that revolutionary thought, we witness such wonders as the Chartist movement, the Jarrow march, the suffragettes, and the welfare state. When pushed, the English have always declared that the individual matters more than the status quo, and these are movements of which the nation should be rightly proud.
Individualism loves you; it affirms that you matter. It declares your sanctity, the marvellous significance of one — a significance that power often finds hard to accept. But it can hardly stop there: the maths do not allow it. For if one is significant, then so are all. How could I be sacred, and everyone else on the planet not equally so? The idea is clearly ridiculous. So, yes, we are individuals; yet we are in it together. I am one — and I am all; and any who suggest the breaking of this equation would appear to do Satan’s work for him. We do different things, but we are the same.
Jesus, of course, expressed this supremely. We are told he was like us in every way — and he was the ultimate individualist. He drove a coach-and-horses through the religious corporations, and placed a stiletto in the side of the political corporation. He died a suitably lonely death, for such behaviour was individualism gone mad, and yet he died at one with all, and separate from none. “Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do.” They were all one really — they just had not noticed it.
There are other numbers in the various equations of our lives: two; 147,034; and one billion, to name but three. But these numbers lack wholeness and will fade. Only one and all remain — as every true individualist knows.
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