by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: November 14, 2009

Individuality for some is a natural state of affairs, while in other opinions mankind is a social animal completely. Certainly a social dialectical evolution has transpired in the workplace making individualism more rare than it was in former eras.

Mankind may be an individual amidst his species yet may be a sub-species of a higher order of being.What about Hegel's idea that mankind is a self-aware being representative of the fact that the Universe is becoming aware of itself-?

I do not think that people become more self-aware upon reaching brain maturity at about age 23. Consciousness exists for people, however the Universe so far pre-existed human life on Earth that it seems improbable to assume that complete ignorance has the power to create a Universe or millions of them accidentally and then self-awareness issues forth as a kind of cherry on top of the whipped creme and ice cream. Even if self-awareness occurs in individual beings that isn't the Universe itself becoming aware unless it is moving toward absolute spirit as Hegel believed. If the Universe reaches a point of absolute spirit eventually it probably already was absolute spirit before the Universe began at some point to occur as a temporal 'show'.

Individualism presents us with the circumstance of self-reflexion sine qua non. As a primitive species mankind may superficially be another one of the thousands along the river bank. It is as an individual that self-aware intelligence burns brightly, yet it is in the history of social intelligence that the individual finds the repository of data to add content for construction of ideas of increasing complexity.

In the world today individual work for one-self directly fabricating such necessary shelter against the elements, growing of food for living and manufacture of articles wanted for daily living has been replaced with accreted communally tools at a higher level than any individual might invent in a lifetime. The social work dialectic has developed to such a point that individuals seeking to be a 'man in the wilderness' without documentation for life will discover insuperable social and legal obstructions to his self-interests. Corporatism is a vast post-democratic social dialectic of organization. Corporate organizations outlast individual lives and range beyond national borders and legal jurisdictions. The organizational power is something like that of communist organizations phenomenally,except the work and pay loads differ. Each forms a kind of de facto totalitarian expression to act in the maximum possible environment, and each precludes individuals from existing except where needed as a temporary device. Individualism in an economic and environmental sense differs from that in a social dialectical context of totalization of the possible work opportunities in the environment.

As a practical matter, private enterprise works best as the economic way that individualism is expressed. Self-employment in a corporatist state can be challenging today. There are many professions with nominal self-employment that are actually equally at home in an government or corporate context as without; they are complimentary adjuncts of corporate goals serving and subordinate to it.

Challenges to individualism may require innovative responses in restructuring forms of government, environment and ecological economic enterprise and accountability. The world economy has much room for improvement and increase of efficiency, yet corporatism tends to move towards an ad hoc collectivization of a temporary and asymmetric kind regarding profit that is inimical towards the democratic goals of individualism and vice versa.

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