Being an Individual Does Not Mean Being Separate

Notes on modern collective fear, the deification of autonomy, and the possibility of a rooted singularity.

Being Individual Does Not Mean Being Separate

One of the deepest paradoxes of modern hyper-individualism is the almost visceral fear that the collective will erase singularity. This fear presents itself as a defense of freedom, autonomy, and personal authenticity, but it stems from an imagination impoverished by institutional, colonial, and psychocentric modernity, which has taught the individual to imagine themselves as separate, neutral, objective, and self-founded.

The modern subject fears being dissolved by the common because, often, they only know collectives organized by obedience, homogenization, productivity, or the morality of consensus. But this image is not universal. It is a localized cultural memory. Of course, the challenge is to acknowledge that modernity tends to project itself as the norm for humanity. But this reveals, above all, a lack of imagination and an inability to listen to other ways of being an individual within a sense of belonging. What appears as independence is, in truth, a neurocolonized form of invisible dependence.

Because no individual (yes, even the modern one) has ever been independent, but has always been co-produced by institutions, markets, schools, families, therapeutic languages, self-image technologies, and forces that shape them while telling them they made themselves.

Modern colonial ignorance and deep amnesia regarding the diversity of indigenous and community cultures make it difficult to imagine that the collective need not devour the individual. In many relational worlds, the common is not an undifferentiated mass that demands the sacrifice of singularity, but a living field that offers place, ritual, history, responsibility, and grounding so that each being may actualize themselves in ecological and contextual belonging (and no, none of this extinguishes or erases conflicts, frictions, or crises; in fact, expecting this to be the case is detached romanticism that erases the complexity of things).

In these contexts, singularity is not erased but rooted; it becomes denser, more responsible, and more capable of responding to the body-place that sustains it. What hyper-individualism reads as a threat to identity — bond, obligation, reciprocity, ancestry, belonging — may be precisely the grounding that prevents the individual from becoming an empty, anxious abstraction, always incomplete, always performing value.

The paradox is that the modern subject fears losing themselves in the collective, yet is already deeply and inevitably entangled in a collective they do not recognize as such — an institutional, extractive, and normopathic collective that manufactures them as a consumer, a competitor, and an infinite project of self-optimization.

Perhaps we can reframe the question from “does the collective erase the individual” to: “what kind of collective is bringing us into being, what bonds make us more whole, and what worlds do we need to unlearn so that singularity may once again have a body, a place, and kinship?”