Individualism In An Individual

Individualism is a particular ideology or social understanding that human beings are the most pivotal in nature and that each individual is presumed to pursue his or her own needs and requirements in order to progress accordingly. Freedom, respect, equality; these are the values of self-determination and self-reliance which is what individualism is all about. The father of Classical Liberalism, John Locke as cited by Salvadori (1959) once said:

"Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom, and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power, not only to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men."

The concept of individualism is built upon several distinguishable yet inseparable facts. One such fact is that the individual is unique and central within his or her place in society. The existence of one person does not require the input from another person, whereby the distinctiveness of his or her identities between individuals is particular and separated as cited from Machan (1998), “one dies by oneself.”

Another essential component is the element of self-directedness. According to Elias (1991), an individual’s characteristics are based on his/her own self-determination and free will which influences the process of individualization over a life time of development. Furthermore, self-generated rationality is a part of the individualist’s notion of the human being as well. Every human being’s self-cognition is generated to aid the individual and is not affected by the influence of other people, of history, or even of their own parent...

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...an be understood simply as an additive accumulation of many individuals. Men are social animals and it cannot be denied that human live social lives and that it affects the behavior of humans, this can be seen by Aristotle’s simple example of the relations of stones to a house. It does not explain the amount of individual elements needed together but for once, it certainly is not possible to establish the structure of the house if the stones are in isolation. Though everyone is different and unique, it is still possible to achieve the end (house) whereby the stones are no other than the means. For the sake of a social whole, individuals do live and love, struggle and die in order to achieve greater societal gains.

In the modern world, and still more, important achievement is and will be almost impossible to an individual if he cannot dominate some vast organization.