When the Rebellion Is the Cause

Like many others in this country, I am trying to understand just what is behind the national spate of schoolyard slayings. And like most everyone else, I have no easy answers, no simple formula to offer as a solution to the mess. But as a specialist in cultural studies, I do have some thoughts about the role that popular culture may be playing in this ghastly crescendo of violence that we are witnessing at all too many school campuses.

I don’t want to get involved, however, in the debate over whether violent entertainment directly stimulates violent behavior. I have no new data to offer and, besides, I think that the spotlight being directed upon such entertainments is a bit too narrowly focused. And I also don’t want to get involved in the “what’s happening to the children” lament. As at least one commentator has noted, teenagers aren’t the only ones running amok these days. No, I want to look at American culture as a whole, where I see a certain pattern that has not yet been widely discussed.

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That pattern is what I’d like to call “the apotheosis of alienated individualism.” To explain what I mean by that mouthful, I’ll start with a radio commercial I’ve heard recently. The commercial, for a telecommunications service, features an angry male voice (in the register of a 20- to 30-year-old) complaining about all the “annoying rules” that he doesn’t like, rules like having to have a passenger or two along to be allowed to drive in the diamond lane. What’s remarkable about his rather long list is that none of the rules he names is really so oppressive, and many are socially useful; he simply doesn’t like them. But rather than being told to chill out and get a life, the angry young man is offered, by a second male voice, a telephone service that has no annoying rules and so is just the thing for hip individualists who can’t stand being told what to do.

I think this ad is significant because it reflects a cultural trend in which resistance to any and all forms of social authority has become fashionable. And it is not only fashionable among the young: Grown-ups from all walks of life and from all over the political spectrum, but especially from the radical right, have gotten into the act, culminating in such hyper-individualistic eruptions as the Freemen movement and the Republic of Texas fiasco.

Corporate America has been quick to cash in on the trend, crafting marketing campaigns, like the ad I mentioned, tailored to appeal to the angry--and alienated--consumer, commodifying, so to speak, his dissent. Thus, where personal dissent once placed one on the margins of society, the current trend is to marginalize society instead, making everyone a dissenter, rebels without a cause.

This cultural development did not come out of nowhere. America has long valued its traditions of self-reliant individualism, and our entire political economy can be traced back to the Hobbesian notion that society is simply a convenience invented by naturally isolated individuals to protect their personal property. What has kept us in the past from evolving into the kind of every-man-for-himself anti-society that such an ideology encourages has been a second, much more communitarian strain in our history. We can find this strain at work in the first Puritan settlements, where the requirements, and will, of the community set the agenda for personal behavior.

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What has made this country a nice place to live is precisely the way we have achieved a delicate balance between our traditions of individualism and communitarianism or, to put it another way, between anarchy and tyranny. But what worries me now is that the balance is breaking down. The communitarian spirit that once tempered our individualistic tendencies has become something to sneer at. Add to this the self-aggrandizing effects of the “self esteem” movement and you get a population of increasingly estranged individuals who are being taught that the only thing that really matters is getting what you want. Attitude is everything. Don’t tread on me.

This apotheosis of alienated individualism is bound to produce antisocial behavior. With youths and adults alike being told that any social phenomenon that annoys them is evil, is it any wonder that the more unstable among us are snapping? We can try to tone down the violence in popular entertainments and send more counselors to our schools, but until we stop sending the message that the individual is everything and society only an annoyance, I don’t think we are going to have much effect.

We need to realize that “having it your way,” as the burger commercials put it, isn’t everything, and that if everyone insists on having it their way, we might end up with an anti-society that isn’t worth having at all.