Mass individualism

We must listen carefully to Luca Ricolfi, sociologist, professor, and keen observer of mass society. Even more so when he analyzes the world of young people with the decisive contribution of his wife, Paola Mastrocola, also a professor, who investigates the decline of schools and education. Ricolfi argues that one of the concerns of the latest generations is to escape the anonymity of mass society. Perhaps, reflects the Turin-based scholar, it is not a question of unbridled, fluid individualism, but of the “obsessive search for an identity that distinguishes oneself from everyone else”. The enemy is depersonalization, the inability to communicate one's uniqueness.

An interesting thesis, in some respects even encouraging, if it reflected a complete thought process of Generation Z and Millennials, an analysis of themselves and society, an embryonic core of oppositional reasoning, of contestation of the massification and de-individualization imposed by the media, cultural, and advertising machine. We fear that this is not the case and that the signals picked up by Ricolfi – indisputable – are not impatience with an increasingly inhuman model, but rather a position that is pleasing to those in power. In the end, we think and do what the dominant thinking imposes on us to think. Byung Chul Han's comparison is the metaphor of the swarm, the condition of man in the 21st century. The German-Korean thinker does not use the categories of mass or crowd, which have been superseded by the growing importance of the internet. The swarm is the mode of movement of a mass of insects, such as locusts, which move together in an unknowable, temporary, jerky direction, with unpredictable, contradictory movements, obeying an instinct that appears irrational. For Han, the swarm indicates a multiplicity of individuals who, despite having the ability to relate and communicate instantly with every part of the world, remain isolated and lonely.

In the mass society of the twentieth century, the subject lost his individuality in a common whole, conferring intelligence and individual judgment on the mass (on those who direct it). In the contemporary swarm that moves at surprising speed, subjects are together, they move together, but they remain alone. The individuals in the swarm maintain self-awareness, deluding themselves that they master digital media, but the effect is a paradoxical solitary depersonalization within a swarm that inhabits the network, moving compulsively, exposed, subjugated to the stimuli coming from the medium, becoming the advertising apparatus of itself. “The digital swarm is not a crowd, because it has no soul, no spirit. The soul brings people together and unites them: the digital swarm is made up of isolated individuals”. The relationship between the individual and the community changes, and the difference between the public and private spheres is abolished in the name of the ambiguous category of transparency.

Transparency and digital devices have changed human beings and the way they think. Naturally, those most affected are young people, who have no point of comparison and no mentors, who have been driven out by a society hostile to authority and rendered obsolete by the lightning speed of change. The interlocutors of the youth masses are phantasmal, impersonal, connected to the network, strangers to “face-to-face” communication, immersed in a present without depth observed through the digital medium. The concept of truth fades, as everything takes on the color reflected by the screen from which we observe the world, real or virtual, indistinguishable. Passive spectators, voyeurs, we become prey to a transparent individualism that no longer cares about privacy and intimacy, exposed exhibitionistically minute by minute.

The swarm moves en masse in obedience to slogans, gestures, and appointments conveyed by the internet and advertising, with an eagerness to try every experience. Continuous consumption of goods, people, substances, situations, and oneself. Just look at the disorderly invasion of groups of young people on weekend nights, the revealing clothing of girls, which reminds older people of the oldest profession in the world. The boys look like mass-produced suburban bullies, with their syncopated movements to the rhythm of trap and rap. All in search of excitement, in a forced, unnatural din. A new generational social disease has been theorized, called FOMO (fear of missing out), the fear of being cut off, of not living every experience prescribed by current social norms.

The FOMO swarm is gregarious, unthinking. However, Ricolfi hits the mark by identifying young people's fear of remaining anonymous. Perhaps this is why they record every moment, immediately photographed and posted: it certifies their subjectivity. It is I and only I who do that thing, who find myself in that place, who make that comment, usually ungrammatical, full of clichés, often vulgar. “You” must follow me and approve of me through the gesture of “liking”, the thumbs up that demonstrates the strength of my subjectivity. The collapse of self-esteem in the event of disapproval or indifference is obvious. Dependent on approval, what fragile individuality. One element in favor of Ricolfi's thesis is the pervasiveness of phenomena such as the designer brand system, a form of tribal self-recognition exploited by the commercial octopus fed by advertising.

On the one hand, inclusion is emphasized, on the other, everything that is “exclusive” is insisted upon, a privilege destined for me and only me, if I conform to the dictates of consumption. Another surprising phenomenon, straddling fashion, self-creation, and mass individualization, is the spread of tattoos. The inverted aesthetics of tattoos and the strangeness of a fashion that leaves permanent marks on the body are striking. The mental mechanism - if there is one beyond the rampant herd mentality - is self-creation, a concept of self that, through drawings, squiggles, and arabesques that are largely devoid of comprehensible meaning, claims to construct a sort of work of art of the self through visible signs - the tattoo must be displayed regardless of the part of the body that is covered and recreated - that identify and differentiate each person from every other. This is false, however, since many motifs are recurrent. In women, butterflies, roses, and snakes; among men, animals, skulls, references to strength or belonging - usually sporting or musical - rarely political, ethnic, or cultural.

They claim to be unique, but within a standardized universe, stripping the body of its flesh in an often incomprehensible aesthetic. After all, the mass reference models are cynicism, success, and the nomadism (sentimental, value-based, existential) of postmodern nowhere tribes (of no place, but also of no belonging or identity, except the cult of self), closed in a horizon made up of entertainment (the meaning of the word is dilated and obscure), vacation, i.e., absence, suspended time, adaptation to the models of the media moloch and the advertising circus. Individualism, which fights as best it can - within a system that is never questioned - against the insignificance of the masses, the enemy of responsibility, lives in the demanding claim of ever-new rights, to be borne by all. A massified, anxious subjectivism, whose vehicle is advertising, which creates and recreates the dissatisfaction of frustrated desire.

The advertising apparatus is the merchant of discontent - every desire or whim fulfilled is immediately followed by another - in which the mega-machine has the task of convincing us that every choice is ours and ours alone, feeding the appearance of a singularity that has never been so hetero-directed, monitored, and oriented. Advertising, the soul of the system, appeals not to reason but to emotion. Like any other form of suggestion, it strikes emotionally in order to subjugate intellectually. Its methods stifle critical faculties like a sedative or hypnosis. They are more dangerous to freedom than many open attacks against it, said psychoanalyst Erich Fromm when advertising had not yet achieved technical perfection and the ability to shape every aspect of existence to the point of colonizing language, modifying behavior, and changing our view of life. A veritable mental Gulag in which lies are transformed into science, whose experts wield formidable power on behalf of their commercial, political, and media principals.

Walter Lippman was one of the masters of creating the mass man convinced of his own uniqueness. He developed the thesis of the “revolution in the art of democracy.” These were conditioning techniques “used to build consensus, that is, to produce acceptance among the population of something initially undesirable.” The massified individual who does the same things as everyone else, convinced that he has chosen to do so, is an end in himself, acts according to his own interests, and recognizes no one above himself. The citizen jealous of his individuality was the invention of the first industrial and civil revolutions, but he is not suited to our one-dimensional, fetishistic times. It was necessary to invent a new figure, to whom new rights could be granted, eliminating every dimension of life other than pleasure, subjectivity, and the immediate satisfaction of desires and impulses. Neoplebe desiderante [desiring neoplebe] is Costanzo Preve's definition.

A person is someone who is aware of their ‘being in the world’, an individual is a unit that cannot be divided (in-dividuo), mass evokes a lack of form, and a consumer is someone who uses and eliminates everything (i.e., consumes and exhausts). The non-protagonist actor of a society that lives at breakneck speed, invents, produces, and throws away. The consumer is fungible, himself a product, made to buy goods to be transformed into waste: useless, consumed objects; a dot whose task is to have induced desires to be satisfied by buying today what he will not like tomorrow, hypnotized into believing that every whim is a freely chosen right. Gloomy anonymity must be countered by doing the opposite of what the megamachine prescribes. Starting with regaining our upright posture, threatened by the hunched position we adopt on the artificial devices of which we become an extension, and with the desire to reclaim our thoughts: personal, cultivated far from the din. FOMO syndrome is the sad fear of not being like others, puppets whose strings are held by the masters of the apparatus on which we keep our eyes fixed. Escaping anonymity means not being differently equal, as the universal masters want us to be.

https://www.ereticamente.net/lindividualismo-massificato-roberto-pecchioli/

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo