Blog Archives
INDIVIDUALISM TODAY
Individualism began with the philosophy of John Stuart Mill. He gave the people liberty of personal rights, without religion. Expounded eloquently by Ayn Rand, it is regarded today as extreme.
It became unfashionable when the social philosophies of Rousseau, Marx and Bentham were promulgated. They invoked equality and attended to the welfare of communities. Today they underwrite communal approaches that solve climate change, prevent pandemics and supply cheap energy.
Nevertheless, most human endeavour strives to remain under individual control. Family, home, education, employment and recreation are pursued for individual interest, resisting the incursions of corporations and governments, whose intents are to exploit it, for their own benefit.
Turkeys Not Bees traces the lives and philosophical bearings of two young people whose journey together makes a stand for their own individual interests. The fiction story is exciting, exalting individual achievement, responding positively to forced engagement with collectivism.
Available on Amazon. Reviewed at martinknox.com
COACHING PHENOMENOLOGY AND FLOW
Megan is a future champion at pole vaulting but her further improvement is limited because her coaches cannot stand in her shoes and know what she is experiencing. They make and interpret observations through the prism of their own earlier experiences, which are irrelevant. Applying the phenomenology of philosopher Martin Heidegger, she refocusses, recording, analysing and modelling her lived experience. She self-coaches, helped with biomechanics and psychology by Chance, her physicist boyfriend who researches risk taking and flow.
Turkeys Not Bees tells their personal philosophical journeys, becoming opposed by new regulations of the athletics and Covid authorities. They are leaders in a campaign, with non-violent civil disobedience, against takeover by a Spectacle, created by media, capitalism and nanny states, of overreach in sport, health, academia and employment. This an exciting story of individual fulfilment that achieves excellence.
The latest of my six novels on Amazon, it is reviewed on my blog: martinknox.com
IS SOCIALITY PROMOTED BY THE SPECTACLE?
I am releasing my new fiction novel: Turkeys Not Bees. It explores a near future of capitalism and totalitarianism controlling human evolution.
The story tells how two young people take on the establishment when their sport and then their health are threatened by emerging totalitarian control.
Chance wants to apply his physics training in his job and resists being coerced to run in the hamster wheel of meaningless work and futile consumption. Analogous to Nietzsche’s camel, lion and child, he wants autonomy. Returning to university he meets a champion athlete also doing a PhD, in psychology. He encourages her to coach herself and with Heidegger’s phenomenology she investigates her lived experience of pole vaulting. She improves using Mihaly’s ‘flow’, a psychological condition of optimal achievement.
The Athletics Association, pursuing a policy of levelling outcomes for profit, ban her from using flow. The couple resist.
At the Olympic Games they both catch Covid. The subsequent restrictions on them are oppressive and they join with others in a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience.
Reviewed by
David P Jones – Philosophy Student
August 12th 2022
My blog: martinknox.com
ON USA ELECTION EVE IS SELFISHNESS WORSE THAN LEVELLING?
ON USA ELECTION EVE IS SELFISHNESS WORSE THAN LEVELLING?
Not according to philosophers Ayn Rand and Jordan Peterson. They regard self-responsibility for family, kith and kin as paramount. It does not deny the need to care for others but opposes collective responsibility, socialist levelling and altruism. Attitudes are entrenched, for example in Britain’s class system, illustrated in the photo from a Montepython skit.
It has taken a long time and many social experiments to forge minds of modern men and women. Aristotle regarded our ultimate end as happiness, by virtuous living, which existed in a mean state between excess and deficiency. Prodigality was excessive, stinginess deficient, but liberality was virtuous. Selfishness would have been excessive.
John Stuart Mill acknowledged that individual freedom, of which selfishness is an aspect, has to be limited in the interests of the community. Nietzsche saw individual achievement as daring to oppose and endure hardships, such as social inhibitions, by the exercise of an iron will. It was the apotheosis of selfishness and when demonstrated by Hitler and Stalin, wilful selfishness lost popularity.
Simone de Beauvoir regarded freedom as requiring respect for others’ freedom, as if selfishness had a responsibility to others. The notion of ‘selfishness’ encapsulates a priori individualism and opposes collectivism without implying a dearth of social responsibility.
Individualism has levelling as a secondary concern, with the social problem being the have nots, rather than the haves, who are derided as selfish. Selfishness, in these terms, is therefore better than levelling, because self-care does not make claims on others’ responsibility and care.
This issue could be resolved by individuals taking responsibility for and helping disadvantaged persons, rather than by labelling others’ behaviour as selfish or needing to be levelled.
What is your view?
