[Kirism is a contemporary philosophy of life that I’ve developed over the last several decades. It is psychological, philosophical, and existential and takes into account human nature, the human predicament, our contemporary understanding of the world, and our pressing individual and species-wide challenges. I hope that you’ll enjoy learning more about it. In the first four posts of the series, we looked at the idea of absurd rebellion. In these four posts, we look at the issue of individuality, an idea that matters to Kirists. This is the first of those four posts. To learn more about Kirism, please take a look at Lighting the Way, in which Kirism is introduced. To be in touch with me about Kirism, please drop me an email to [email protected].]
It’s likely that you’re an individual. Most people are born conventional and prize conformity. But some people prize their individuality. Kirists know to prize theirs. They know that individuality and freedom are linked and even identical.
You may have been stubbornly prizing your individuality since birth. That can’t have been easy. From the first moments, you were coerced by society to fit in and to look like somebody’s idea of normal. You were different; they said, “Be the same!”
Even if she trains herself to hold her tongue, an individual will already know as a young child that she can’t conform and that she wasn’t built to conform. But the pressure applied on her! That pressure is enormous, even back-breaking, even killing.
Looking around you, mistrusting the rule-makers, feeling alienated and like a “stranger in a strange land,” you find yourself burdened right from the beginning by this pulsating energy that invites retaliation: the energy of individuality.
This fierce need produces lifelong consequences. You find yourself presented with some odd-sounding rule—say, that God will be offended if you don’t wear a hat. You find yourself obliged to ask, “Why?” And they will certainly tell you why!
The whole world will tell you why. But their answers will not make sense to you. So, you’ll get your ears boxed or worse. You’ll fall silent or cry, “No, I can’t believe this nonsense!” You’ll unwillingly acquiesce or grow oppositional.
If you take the oppositional route, you’ll adamantly reject humbug and try to make personal sense of the world. What will this feel like? Like sorrow, anger, anxiety, alienation, rootlessness, and fierceness, all balled up together.
This oppositional attitude, maybe suppressed in childhood, begins to announce itself and assert itself in adolescence and to grow as an individual’s interactions with the conventional world increase. A battle begins with all sorts of skirmishes.
This oppositional energy grows as his ability to “do his thing” is directly or indirectly restricted by the machinery of society. He finds himself in an odd kind of fight, not necessarily with any particular person or group but with just about everyone.
He is in a battle with everything meant to constrain him and reduce him to a cipher. His sees a falsehood there—skirmish! He sees a restriction there— skirmish! He sees a nonsensical rule there—skirmish! He is marginalized there— skirmish!
We repeatedly see this dynamic in the lives of our heroes. Where the dominant ideology challenges reason, they feel obliged to speak out, to do what they believe is right, and to pursue their own goals, even though they may be punished.
Popping out of the womb individual, needing to experiment and to risk as part of their individuality, and feeling thwarted and frustrated by the oh-so-conventional universe into which they have been plopped at birth, they wriggle like fish bait.
They rush headlong, like a ski jumper down a steep ramp, toward reckless ways of dealing with their feelings of alienation and frustration. Driven to be individual, they race through life, not wisely but fiercely and obsessively.
Born individual, you likely have more energy, more charisma, bigger appetites, stronger needs, greater passion, more aliveness, and more avidity than the next person. Individuals often do. Nature saw to this, blindly of course.
Nature can’t joke or bestow blessings. But this may be nature’s way of fueling the individual so that he can be individual. And this extra energy and greater appetite will incline an individual toward addiction, mania and insatiability.
How could this supercharging not lead there? How can you have a ton of energy and not court mania? How can you have extra adrenaline and not drive a hundred miles an hour? Nature inadvertently created a fiery, insatiable creature.
Nature does not joke but it does produce unintended consequences. One of the major unintended consequences of this extra drive and bigger appetite is that an individual is hard-pressed, and often completely unable, to feel satisfied.
You eat a hundred peanuts—not satisfying enough. You write a good book— not satisfying enough. You win the Nobel Prize—not satisfying enough. This inability to get satisfied produces constant background agitation and unhappiness.
When nature provides extra energy, it adds susceptibility to mania. When it provides extra ambition, it adds susceptibility to grandiosity. When it provides extra appetite, it adds susceptibility to compulsion. How charming of nature!
So, nature, which doesn’t joke, nevertheless has its little joke. It creates an individual who must know for himself, follow his own path, and be himself, then heightens his anxiety and makes sure that nothing will satisfy him. Good one, nature!
Then there is a second scenario, the scenario of suppressed individuality. This is the more usual path. A person is born individual but succumbs to conformity. Life then feels not quite right or worse. Maybe much, much worse.
Does a third path exist, where a born individual manages to fit beautifully into society? Not on this earth. Either you take the path of individuality and absurd rebellion or you take the demoralizing path of conformity and suppressed individuality.
Opt, then, for individuality. You will not fit beautifully into society. You will be begging for skirmishes and battles. Too often you will feel like you are jousting windmills. But this is just another way of saying that you are obliged to do the right thing.
To learn more about Kirism, please take a look at Lighting the Way, in which Kirism is introduced.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
