“Rugged individualism” was a commonly-heard phrase in my youth. I don’t know about the rugged part, but the spirit of individualism was still strong when I was growing up in the 1950s . By individualism, people meant that individuals should be free to voluntarily interact with others, socially and economically, within the existing socioeconomic order. The obvious opposite of individualism was socialism, wherein society used coercive means to restrict the actions of individuals to only those that had been preapproved by authorities. (Even in those days, socialists already controlled several important sectors of American society, but outside of those sectors individuals had considerable freedom.)
It is important to recognize the natural restraints that society places individualists. Individualists do not live alone in isolated pods. All humans depend on others for survival. We are only free to engage in those interactions allowed by the people we interact with. In other words, a truly individualistic society, where the rights of individuals are generally respected, naturally tends to limit interactions to those that are voluntary for all participants. Society is able to perform this function naturally through the collective actions of people acting individually without the need for central planners, though not without a certain degree of coercion.
Individualism requires a compatible socioeconomic order. The socioeconomic system in which individualism thrived in the 1950s consisted of a number of layers. The outer layers that least affected the individual included foreign affairs and the federal government. The innermost layers, closest to the individual, included neighborhood and family. There were, of course, numerous layers in between, but I want to address how families, neighborhoods, and our relationship with the federal government have changed.
For most of our nation’s existence the nuclear family, parents and children, has been the core of American society. (Some dictionaries claim that a nuclear family must include both parents, but a family consisting of a single parent and his/her children is also nuclear for practical purposes.) The extended family and neighbors provided a second layer of support. While this is still the case for many families, it is much less so than before for a number of reasons.
One reason that is not new is distance. Since the days of the early settlers, it has been common for Americans to be raising families far from the influence of extended family. This is still the case, though perhaps less so than before, as the availability of affordable long-distance communication and travel has extended the potential influence of extended family over larger distances. In the absence of extended family support, neighborhood support is even more important.
People used to know their neighbors. With few families owning more than one car, people walked a lot, meeting their neighbors as they did so. It helped that without air conditioning those neighbors spent much of their time outdoors in the summertime to escape the indoor heat. With transportation limited, neighbors tended to shop in the same local stores. Now, in much of suburbia, people open their garage door remotely as they approach, drive in, and close the door automatically behind them, allowing no opportunity to interact with neighbors. They pick up their kids from school so the kids don’t have to walk or ride the bus and get to know the neighboring kids in the process.
Starting in the 1950s, the federal government expanded its programs to “help” the poor. Much of the assistance was limited to families with no father in the home on the theory that if the father was present, it was his responsibility to support his family. As one might predict, poor fathers felt obligated to abandon their homes so their wives and children could obtain government assistance. This was one of the early government programs that contributed to the weakening of the nuclear family, but many more have followed. Ill-conceived government programs are rarely ended; instead, additional programs are piled on in attempts to patch the flaws in each program, leading to larger, more top-heavy, and less efficient programs that create more and more flaws to be patched with more and more layers of programs.
Technology has been another factor in the weakening of the nuclear family, especially “The Pill”. Female contraceptive pills first became available in 1960, and were in widespread use by 1970. While it can be argued that the “sexual revolution” started in the 1950s or even before, The Pill kicked it into overdrive. It weakened the association between sexual activity and pregnancy, thus weakening the perceived need for marriage before sex. However, weakening the link between sex and marriage has led to more and more children being conceived out of wedlock, often with the mother not even knowing who the father is. This has contributed to most families in poorer neighborhoods not having a father in the home.
The separation of men from their families has led not only to single-parent families, but also to lone men, with little or no family involvement. In relation to the nuclear family, they are kind of like sub-atomic particles. But the breakup of American families has not stopped there. For reasons I have not been able to fathom, a movement has grown up to break families down even further. Institutions have hijacked the principles of individualism to promote a society wherein individuals are truly alone. For example some public schools have introduced curriculum for children as young as age 4 to encourage them to choose deviant self-centered sexual behaviors instead of the cooperative bonds of traditional marriage between a woman and a man.
As family and neighborhood connections have broken down, people have increasingly come to depend on government agencies to replace the support formerly provided by families and neighbors. But government can only provide support for one family by forcibly taking from another family. What is worse, government cannot provide the emotional support of family and neighbors. Government programs cannot replace the nurturing environment of a traditional family.
There are still institutions that people can turn to for emotional support. Many find emotional support by joining religious congregations. Although civic organizations and clubs, another path to companionship, have been in decline, many are still operating. Unfortunately, too many lonely people turn, instead, to their bartender or drug dealer for companionship.
Posted 2021/04/03