Identity fetishism

My best metaphor for my impressions of Western individualism and how it often functions, comes from the engineering of the Titanic. I'm not sure why this imagery sticks with me. It surely cannot be that I suppose Western society to be doomed. My selection of this imagery probably has more to do with the idea that Western society is a piece of construction or engineering -- more so than African societies tend to be (in ways I will one day go on to describe).

At the bottom of the Titanic were compartments, which made her seemingly unsinkable. These were large walls in the belly of the boat, separating sections of the engine room, one from the other. Unfortunately these walls did not extend up to their ceiling, but stopped some way from it. The purpose of these dividing walls was that if the ship began to take in water, only one or two of the compartments would be filled. The rest would not be flooded as the dividing walls would prevent this. Obviously, for various reasons which I shall not go into here, this engineering safety plan didn't work.

How are individuals of late capitalism like the individual compartments in the Titanic? Well, for a start, they are emotionally very compartmentalized. That is the force and structure of Western individualism: It has the effect of emotionally compartmentalizing people, which often makes direct communication of emotional ideas and feelings into quite a feat. For instance, I have struggled for ages to get some people to understand some of the experiences I've had. It's very hard for many people to grasp what others want to say to them because the walls of conceptualization of ideas build up around each person, cordoning them off as "an individual", so that the urgency of a quick, sharp cry, "Help! I'm being abused!" is rarely heard -- and if it is heard, it is rarely acknowledged unless one is fortuitous enough to be surrounded by like company.

When walls of ideological meaning grow up around one -- as is common in a highly conceptualizing and emotionally repressed society -- sometimes it feels as if the only people who will attend to one's cry are those who have an ideological axe to grind. These may be precisely the sorts of people one does not want to be understood by, least of all 'helped'.

Contemporary people, I think, live in a state of great emotional repression, generally. Probably this is a feature of their adaptation to modern industrialism, with its tendency to atomize and fragment otherwise naturally growing communities.

The late capitalist individual must therefore put a lot of emotional emphasis on the few emblems of individuality allowed to him or her. These are those insignia and icons I have suggested in posts below. So much emotional potency, so much unfulfilled human potential is invested in so very little -- an external form of some sort, for example the way I wear my hat, or the coloured contact lenses I invest in, or the car I buy. Threaten a Westerner's belief in his insignia, and you symbolically undermine the whole personality of the Westerner himself.

The bourgeois individual will repress her passions out of a feeling of necessity. It's common wisdom that this is what it takes to put bread on the table: One submits to the boss and grinds one's teeth, or quietly resigns oneself to a mechanical necessity of routine and conformity. Yet the more that one represses hope and passions, the more one's insignia burn with the fateful potency accumulated from all of one's repressed or unexpressed desires. Within these few signs resides all of the Westerner's belief in his true self: the underlying passion of his repressed individualism!

Whereas a typical cultural individualist will not feel entitled to object when the boss steps his  famed boot upon the repressed worker's frail and emotionally emaciated hand, the same person does feel entitled to express his outrage if some unwary stranger manages to inadvertently insult his prized notions concerning his category and status -- after all he believes he is this narrow, factional identity.  Along with it, politically he sinks.