At some point, journalist Rachel Cohen began to realize that her generation’s focus on collective action is making them unhappy and eroding their personal agency.
there is no point to intentionally increasing one's unhappiness. i like being happy but it is not the ultimate object of existence. collective action obviously shouldnt preclude individual good deeds. some problems, however, are institutional and require an institutional approach- houston''s leaky water mains wont be fixed by volunteers/individual action-no amount of household conservation efforts will rectify the massive amount of water loss due to failure to provide maintenance. many individual efforts provide actual benefit-my daughter sees a homeless person in the grocery parking lot and buys them a sandwich or organizes a clothing exchange at the school to provide free clothing for students whose families are struggling. one could argue that every change starts as someone's individual action or agency but remaining so is unlikely to solve massive corruption or increasingly complex problems. during covid, some doctors, journalists, scientists, politicians started questioning the official narrative, and good on them for being honest and brave enough to do so. pretty quickly they began collaborating, forming alliances and organizations that allowed them to increase their influence and widen their audience. the revolutionary war would not have taken place without collective action. collective action has the ability to overwhelm the system, ie vietnam war protests and mass draft card burning , that individual action usually cant accomplish. plato can offer insights into the human condition but his world was much smaller, less complex and the rate of change was infinitesimal compared to our present world.
Granted that it is simplistic, I can best relate the phenomenon to another: The Bockenforde Dilemma.
there is no point to intentionally increasing one's unhappiness. i like being happy but it is not the ultimate object of existence. collective action obviously shouldnt preclude individual good deeds. some problems, however, are institutional and require an institutional approach- houston''s leaky water mains wont be fixed by volunteers/individual action-no amount of household conservation efforts will rectify the massive amount of water loss due to failure to provide maintenance. many individual efforts provide actual benefit-my daughter sees a homeless person in the grocery parking lot and buys them a sandwich or organizes a clothing exchange at the school to provide free clothing for students whose families are struggling. one could argue that every change starts as someone's individual action or agency but remaining so is unlikely to solve massive corruption or increasingly complex problems. during covid, some doctors, journalists, scientists, politicians started questioning the official narrative, and good on them for being honest and brave enough to do so. pretty quickly they began collaborating, forming alliances and organizations that allowed them to increase their influence and widen their audience. the revolutionary war would not have taken place without collective action. collective action has the ability to overwhelm the system, ie vietnam war protests and mass draft card burning , that individual action usually cant accomplish. plato can offer insights into the human condition but his world was much smaller, less complex and the rate of change was infinitesimal compared to our present world.