When 'Individualism' Becomes Deviant
Superflex, Critical Art Ensemble, and Beehive Collective are among the many eco artists who prefer working as members of a team, instead of producing art in a solo fashion. Their implicit rejection of individualism may signal the culture-wide shift that is required to halt humanity's rampage against the planet Earth. Demonstrating an alternative to the entrenched, culture-wide adoption of individualism would constitute a revolution. This cultural bias exists in the form of an assumption that each human is a separate self, driven by selfish impulses.
Systems thinking, food webs, hydrologic cycles, biological decomposition - the mutuality of these concepts is core to solving the planet's myriad deficiencies and excesses. Since they all present shared conditions, sharing seems required to erect solutions.
Strategies to prevent further abuses and remediate current conditions are, of necessity, collective efforts.
In an essay entitled, “Maintaining Mental Health in an Age of Madness (March 18, 2013) Carolyn Baker askes, What happens to those who do not conform to the mandates of individualism? How are those who are sincerely affected by the plight of others, human and non-human, treated? She focuses specifically upon those who experience despair that is unrelated to their individual conditions, but caused by the suffering of others?
Baker explains, “Assuming that all our drives are ego-generated, therapists tend to regard feelings of despair for our planet as manifestations of some private neurosis.”
She goes on to ask, “…if in recent years or months you have dared to explore the realities of peak oil, climate change, and economic contraction and their inevitable ramifications, you may feel mega-schizophrenic as you live with this information and at the same time attempt to navigate a society in which every form of functioning is dictated by denial.”
Members of Superflex, Critical Art Ensemble, and Beehive Collective have support groups to bolster their resistance to individualism and their pursuit of collective planetary solutions. They have established a model that may ultimately transform Earth empathy from ‘deviance’ into ‘necessity’, and from ‘mental illness’ into ‘solution’.