I held leadership positions when I was employed and upon retirement, held leadership nonprofit positions. One of the main leadership attributes that I tried to exhibit was not using the singular pronoun “I” when discussing the work performed by the team I led. I wanted to uplift the contributions of the team and downplay my role. I accomplished this goal by letting others know the strengths of each team member and used “we” when describing the group’s performance. Even when I was cited by others for my leadership contributions, I returned the compliments by saying that it was a team effort.
Another leadership trait that I tried to model was strategically aligning the team’s goals within the macro community. For example, I chaired the Investment Committee (IC) of a small liberal arts institution of higher education. The IC managed the college’s endowment. Our role was to grow the endowment and to do no harm. When giving the Board of Trustees the IC’s biannual updates, the presentation included the connection between the endowment’s investment performance and the financial aid to lower income families who desired higher education but could not afford the institution’s tuition. Our individual efforts must be placed within the communities that are served.
In this blog, I will discuss Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1805–1859) writings concerning individualism in democratic countries. He credited religion in the United States as a counter to individualism. Religion provided cohesiveness and collectiveness against the forces of social isolation. It is first necessary to understand how Tocqueville defined individualism (Part 2, Chapter 2: Individualism in Democratic Countries, p. 587–9). “Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which persuades each citizen to cut himself off from his fellows and to withdraw into the circle of his family and friends in such a way that he thus creates a small group of his own and willingly abandons society at large to its own devices.”
Tocqueville stated that individualism was a recent trend originating within the newly established democracies. Before individualism, there was egoism. What is the difference? “Egotism is an ardent and excessive love of oneself which leads man to relate everything back to himself and to prefer himself above everything. … Egoism springs from a blind instinct; individualism from wrong-headed thinking rather than from depraved feelings. It originates as much from defects of intelligence as from the mistakes of the heart.”
A person can be both egoistical and individualistic. A person is egoistic when he or she plays in a team sport and scores, then boasts and give no credit to their teammates who assisted. For example, a football receiver may boasts about their touchdown catch without crediting the quarterback’s pass, the front line who protected the quarterback, the coaches who trained them, or the organization who supported them during training. The same can be said of executives who boast of exceeding profitability goals without crediting the individuals in their organization, suppliers, and customers.
Individualism and egoism eventually merge. “Egoism blights the seeds of every virtue, individualism at first dries up only the source of public virtue. In the longer term it attacks and destroys all the others and will finally merge with egoism.” Egoism can be found in all forms of governments, but individualism grows with democratic equality. Tocqueville understands aristocratic societies having lived in France during the early nineteenth-century. “All the citizens of aristocratic societies have fixed positions one above another; consequently each man perceives above him someone whose protection is necessary to him and below him someone else whose cooperation he may claim.” This aristocratic interdependency dampens individualism. “As each class closes up to the others and merges with them, its members become indifferent to each other and treat each other as strangers. Aristocracy had created a long chain of citizens from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks down this chain and separates all the links.”
Tocqueville supported democracy, but he was worried about the breakdown of communal connections. “Not only does Democracy makes men forget their ancestors but also hides their descendants and keeps them apart from their fellows. It constantly brings them back to themselves and threatens in the end to imprison them in the isolation of their own hearts.”
How does individualism relate to the Christian religion? “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27) Yet God created humans with individual gifts as part of the larger body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12) and are used in love towards benefiting the community while giving thanks to God, the giver to gifts. (1 Corinthians 13) Individualism can separate people from community. Christians see themselves as part of the body of Christ. Their gifts are used to lovingly raise up their community, not themselves. This is why the Christian religion is a counter to individualism.
My next blog will illuminate Tocqueville’s views on combating American individualism.
