There is something striking happening in the individuation and actualization process in the Western industrial world that I wanted to get at. This has been noticeable for quite some time, but for much of the time I've personally observed it, I've been quite puzzled by it, though now it is starting to make a little more sense.
This is another tough and complex subject to broach, but it might be made a little easier by simply pointing to a comparable allegory in a familiar literary work. In particular, I'm referring to what I think is the more interesting of Hemingway's novels: The Old Man and the Sea.
In that novel - or novella - there is a progression that is faintly visible in his previous novels, but which becomes fully crystallized in the story of the old man. What we see throughout Hemingway's work is a relentlessly austere descriptive style, a "just the facts, ma'am" which posits a harsh "man of action" ideal of masculinity that seeks to cope with an equally harsh but frankly rendered modern world, eschewing internality and reflection in favor of a stripped down bare action and power of observation, which posits itself as pared down to the essentials, a contention which is highly suspect, and which has been thoroughly criticized and picked apart over the last century.
However in the frank descriptions of the protagonists' dour moods, alcoholic lapses, and the deterioration of the protagonists' personal lives and surrounding circumstances - which often culminates in a personal tragedy - and in the details of Hemingway's life itself, just as much work as the reacting criticism is done to deconstruct such a stance.
In the Old Man and the Sea in particular, we see this tendency bloom fully into the overarching plotline itself, mirroring the progression of deterioration and resultant degraded fruit of the greater individuation process in the West, which we'll get into shortly.
An old fisherman takes to the sea in pursuit of a big catch, and eventually hooks what is probably a legendary marlin. In the ensuing struggle, both man and fish engage in the fight of their lives, with the old man going through a trial of mythic dimensions, fighting to the edge of his life to take home his prized fish which he eventually bests.
But then the fish is too big and has to be lashed to the boat, leaving a trail of blood that attracts sharks on the way back home, which then have to be fought in turn. By the time the old man returns to his home town, the prized marlin is but a skeleton that has been completely stripped away and destroyed by the sharks, leaving nothing but an empty husk as trophy.
This is a very curious plotline to be celebrated in those factories of productive individuation: American high schools, which in my experience have overwhelmingly turned to Old Man and the Sea as the emblematic literary work of Hemingway's to be studied, though of course interpretations of that work will vary, and a work's message can always undergo some sort of spin.
So now I'd like to turn to one of the more visible and universal of the West's individuals, the American President. I've personally found the last two decade procession - and of course you can always go back further - of American Presidents very odd to watch: they are welcomed up to the governance pedestal with both great fanfare and derision, and then proceed to self-destruct, dragged apart by the sharks of American big business, the state, and the body politic itself.
With highly varying but familiar narratives, they become embroiled in personal scandal, disastrous foreign venture, failed domestic policy, and so on. Of course depending on the perception and location of the observer, all sorts of manner of image construction and rehabilitation can be employed to alter the direct subjective experience of said individuals' legacies, but one can survey the facts and watch the deterioration in real time and glean what one can.
From a deliberately cultivated standpoint of naivety - because there are so many ways to rationalize and account for this phenomenon - I'd look at these presidents and think, "Why do it? How could someone want something like that?" It was appearing more to me like some sort of ritual sacrifice, to be elevated to some high vision of honor before being dismembered and set alight. This was nothing new of course, one could observe the same process in Roman emperors which culminated in incredibly short and violent lifespans in the periods of state turbulence and civil war.
One could make the same case with the never ending procession of Western celebrity and creative talents, enjoying varying lengths of brilliant output and regard before their predations - or the predations of the surrounding management and audience consuming their images and expressions - catch up with them and they flame out, with the fall itself becoming the spectacle to be consumed.
Similarly with the "captains of industry," or just simply the billionaires in a financialized economy: the individual emerges as a conqueror on a wave of economic myth, which then proceeds to evaporate as the product is shown to be noxious and/or a public nuisance, and more and more scandals of economic malfeasance are laid bare.
To mirror the never ending stream of planned obsolescent material waste, what we see more generally is an accelerating decay of the old and aged, and the corresponding necessity of an accelerating instantiation and replacement with the new.
Of course this is a highly subjective and fanciful analysis. The naive "why do it?" question can be easily set aside in favor of the parsimonious acknowledgement of the familiar and faithful human pursuit of ever growing power, wealth, and fame, which although in the longer run may appear increasingly fraught, absurd, and even dangerous, is in the shorter run all too irresistible for the ambitious and unscrupulous, naturally barred off from any hindsight at the time. The same was the case for that procession of Roman emperors living through the civil war periods, stepping up to the throne to be cut down, almost as if they were waiting in line for the chopping block. Each one had to be thinking, "but I can do it better, I will survive." What else was there to do?
The point about indulging in such a subjective and fanciful analysis is to attempt to instantiate a narrative and a pattern and abstract it away for later use further into the analysis, aware and wary of what it really is. And gazing through this lens, I do think there is something there in this light: an accelerating degradation of the process of individuation.
