How Tribalism Short-Circuits Rugged Individualism In America

Rugged individualism, the root of American freedom, has faded into myth and legend. Despite occasional Hollywood myths like Indiana Jones who keep the idea alive, a free thinking man is a thing of the distant past.

George Washington understood something modern Americans do not understand.

The world is not the same as in his time.

He understood that any man who is an individualist and a libertarian has a natural antipathy to regulation that limits his self-expression. He understood that royalty served only one purpose: to subjugate him to tyranny.

America made a brave bid to be the first country in the history of the world that would be free of the oppression of overlords. It was a land that loved immigrants because they had a hatred for kings in their blood. This trait to be your own person was affectionately labeled “rugged individualism.”

Today, an American who considers himself a rugged individualist finds himself in a world dominated by folly and by fraud. A fickle tyranny of advertising jingles and slogans has usurped original thinking. The greatest thing known to the human mind, the transmission of symbols, has now been preempted to persuade consumers to believe in patently absurd things, for example viewing toxic beverages like beer or soft drinks as energizing and nourishing.

A proactive, reflecting man, an anachronistic rugged individual, is left with three options in dealing with the stifling tribalism around him: retreat, attack, or cynicism.

He can retire from the mindless agendas around him, the brute conformity to corporate interests, and eke out a living doing his own thing in his own way, free, in a limited way, from the social and political leviathans that grind the will of his fellow Americans to dust.

He can choose to awaken the sleeping masses, hoping to change the fate of the world by propagating the views that once informed the Founding Fathers.

He can elect to watch it all with a cynical amusement, lampooning the follies of the news media whitewashing what is really happening and the latest political onslaught of trigger words from the elected official who is reading from a teleprompter.

The independent-minded individual of today finds himself in a sitcom culture of inconsequential conversations.

The only way he can survive as a rugged individual is to respond to the inanity with an unquenchable sense of inner-directed self-confidence. He must refuse to allow his supreme zest for life be diminished. He must defend, in whatever way he can, his dedication to truth and liberty, individual excellence, and will for achievement.

A free-thinker is the antithesis of solemn nonsense. He is free in his mind. He is not a sucker for ideological, social, and political quackery. He is not deceived by slick advertising gimmicks, glib anchor hosts, and trigger words designed to make him respond to things in a visceral way.

America, the new hope against European aristocracy, evolved the mythos of the rugged individual as the antidote to political oppression.

But, over time, America has evolved its own military-industrial complex, a new elite, to dumb down its own citizens. In effect, it has returned to that state it sought to escape in the time of George Washington. America may have won the revolution, but has developed its own brand of tyranny, oppressing not only its own people but other nations across the world. This is why the mythos of the rugged individual has to evolve again as a new call to freedom.

If America is to change for the better, the resurrection of the creed of rugged individualism is its last best hope.

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