An Ant Colony of One: Coming Into Relationship with Individualism
The relational core at the center of the Western individual
Hello fellow traveler,
Below is an essay yes…but more so, I want to share with you what is perhaps some of the most potent work I have ever created from an artistic standpoint.
Following inspiration to turn my flagship essays into ‘something more’, I have created a ‘sonic adventure or sonic body’ for the essay.
🔥The Ancestral Now: Stories By The Fire
It’s on a whole other level than the written word alone.
It connects music, sound effects, quotes, timing and rhythm to bring the words to life in a way only the sonic element can. I would love it, if you listened and shared it with others. It is soul level work from me, that I hope touches yours.
Or… Download here straight off Substack.
Who Is This Mysterious Individual at the Center of the World?
An overwhelming majority of the humans living within modern Western culture take the ‘individual experience’ for granted. Like a blazing ball of light and fire in the sky, the feeling that we are ‘individuals’ appears self-evident; as plain as the sun.
Unsurprisingly, a common theme that emerges in mythology, connects solar consciousness to the development of the individual ego. The all-consuming brightness of the personal experience can easily blind out all other layers.
To say that ‘I am in this body, and you are in that one; my skin ends here, and yours begins there.’ is no great revelation to most. Our current model of the world creates clear boundaries, like a scalpel cutting through flesh, seeking to parse out this from that.
Our culture reinforces these ideas as it sings songs of Newtonian physics, calling in the spirits that segregate, isolate, and dissect. We are taught from a young age that what we harvest in this lifetime is dependent on our own efforts alone.
Furthermore, the dominant cosmology of life itself is one in which petty and selfish genetics bust up the competition in an endless pursuit of individual dominance (also known as Darwinism).
As a culture we each move through life unquestioning of these ideas. I am me, and you are you.
This is further reinforced by the existential sense we each have of being at the center of the world. I do not refer to being egotistical or narcissistic in the classical sense...nothing quite so mundane. More so, I refer to the fact that you cannot know anything other than your own direct experience.
This experience can range from the most narrow of individual focuses, to complete dissolution, and yet, something mysterious about your awareness continues like a taught thread. However, this thread is like a tightrope of consciousness that you walk, knowing it as your only perch.
Right now you sit somewhere on planet Earth, in a particular country, reading or listening to this piece of work...besides that, there are billions of other human lives...experiencing.
Some are being born, crying out their first breath, while some are dying and breathing out their last, some are being tortured in some deep dark hole, and some are in throws of intense ecstasy on a bed made of silk. All is unknown to you in this moment.
In the Amazon a jaguar relishes and chews on a kill, and the creature that it feast upon experiences being eaten. Close by, an army of ants march by the millions with an important agenda on their schedule and they crawl over mushrooms that are in communication with large portions of the rainforest through underground mycelial networks. All unknown to you.
Beyond Earth’s biosphere, black holes are drawing in gargantuan amounts of matter, comets collide with planetary bodies, and supernovas billions of times brighter than the sun are exploding in the distant reaches of space. All unknown to you.
This is the mysterious individual at the center of the world.
From a certain vantage point, it is ‘true enough’ to say that your experience is the only thing that is ‘real’. Yet, of all the puzzling and profound questions that swim within the human experience, by far one of the most convoluted is ‘What is an individual?’Although apparently conspicuous, it is in fact...not.
This clear-cut notion of a distinct individual separate from all others is a relatively contemporary idea, that many older cultures did not lean into quite so strongly, because they were primarily relational in their orientation, and saw each person, nay, each ‘thing’ as a crossroad.
A Soul Standing at a Crossroad
A crossroad is a liminal space where multiple currents of energy or pathways intersect. It is a place where you are neither here nor there, but in both places at once. A crossroad is not clear-cut, definable, and bound by an exact set of rules, because it is a place where dimensions bleed into one another.
We could call these nodes of collusion open-ended spaces that endlessly generate unique outcomes. This is so because of the mixing that gives birth to new possibilities.
An ‘individual life’ is far more like a crossroad than a secular ‘bit of something’. Why?
Consider that the water and minerals residing in you at this very moment are facilitating the transmission of electricity between brain cells in the form of your ‘thoughts’ and these have come from outside you.
These rocks and liquids do not just come from the tap in your kitchen, but from the clouds, oceans, rivers, fossils, soils, animals and plants. You are capable of thinking because of ‘other’.
Consider that the time and place you were born was facilitated by your Ancestors who lived entire lives before your born, and along with the gift of life, they have also given you ancestral karma to contend with.
Were you born poor, middle class or rich? Black, white, Latino, or mixed race? Tall, short, skinny, fat, or athletic? You were born in a particular location, in an ancestrally inherited body because of ‘other’.
The languages you speak were created by those who are long since dead and the cultural values you currently being influenced by are created by collective orientations.
The government you are ruled by, and thus the options available to you, was not created by you. The food that sustains you is dependent on the farmers who grow it, and the social systems that support it. Most of the world around you and within you has been created by ‘other’.
So then, who are you?
What is this underlying sense of continuity that you define as ‘yourself’?
What emerges at times with a deeply correct sense of being ‘authentic’?
*We are each unique…like everyone else.*
You are the consciousness… the soul force at the core of the experience. You are a piece of the totality that contains a fractal representation of the whole within you like a hologram. An individual soul who emerges from and returns to a common source, standing at crossroad of relationality.
You are an ant colony of one.
The Roots of The Western Individual
It has become more common these days for individuals within the ‘Ancestral’ communities, those seeking to align life and culture with indigenous wisdom, to point out that Western culture (and thus the people within it) is highly individualistic. This is fundamentally true.
As a people we do focus on individual desires, freedoms, and accomplishments more than other cultures who focus more on collective drives, responsibility and duty. A few examples:
+We can live a neighborhood and not know our neighbors.
+We divorce ourselves from Ancestry and generational homes.
+We herald the nuclear family of domestic partnerships, as opposed to the tribe, as the nucleus of life.
Deeper than this, however, is a pervasive sense of separation that pervades the Western relationship to the world.
While I recognize this fundamental truth about our culture, I tend to differ in perspective about how to best relate to individualism than is common in these circles. While well-meaning, with hearts that are likely in the right place, I find that many of those who claim that we live in a ‘relational’ universe ignore the relational basis for individualism and thus resist coming into relationship with it.
To get a better grasp of where this essay is taking us, let us first explore the lineage and roots of modern individualism. By the way, roots by their very nature imply relationality, for to be rooted to something and cling to it for life is to be in relationship with it and even individualism has roots.
Said another way...individualism is already relational by virtue of existing in a relational universe.
In ‘The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous’ by Joseph Henrich a very compelling case is made that modern individualism emerges from Christianity.
WEIRD stands for ‘Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.’
The book connects together how religious movements and social changes have given rise to Western individualism. As a whole, Abrahamic religions have heralded in the modern age of individualism.
Much could be said about this, but in this particular post, I want to point out one key element: the church’s ban on cousin marriage.
Rob Henderson in his awesome book review (which I suggest you read) of the aforementioned tome, writes:
‘Henrich posits that Christianity, or what he terms the “Western Church,” began in about 400 CE to spread throughout Europe and slowly eroded intensive kin-based institutions and weakened ties with extended family members within communities. The Church supplanted ancestral gods such as Thor and Odin, old Roman deities like Jupiter and Mercury, as well as other variants of Christianity. Additionally, the Church initiated what Henrich terms the “Marriage and Family Program” (MFP). This program dissolved people’s connections to their extended family, banned cousin marriage, and gradually, made the nuclear family and voluntary associations the center of social life.
The extreme incest taboos were enacted in part because the Church did not want to compete with family members for people’s loyalty. Weakening family ties bolstered the Church’s place in people’s hearts. Additionally, the message of the Church spread when young adults would leave their homes in search of a spouse, and when they would form voluntary associations. The Church also blocked the transferring of inheritance to anyone save the genealogical line of descent—that is, birth children, which furthermore eroded kin-based relations.’
I jokingly wonder how many of the well meaning people who seek to erode individualism would willingly bring back cousin marriage and/or marry their cousins?
Along with these religious and cultural changes came the need to get better at dealing with strangers who were not a part of our clan, the opening of broader systems of trade and economy, and the rise of a universal savior who would wash redemption over the whole of the earth, thus displacing clan-based traditions.
The Instinct Towards Collectivism
The human animal is by its very nature a collectively orientated creature, and this is true from the moment we are born, clinging to our mother, and pursing our lips for the sweet nectar that trickles from her nipples, for it means survival, nourishment, love…
Collectivism lives in our bones, and contrary to what many have said about it, individualism has not eroded this sense.
Consider that we are so utterly orientated towards collectivism, that individualism is taught to us by the collective itself. In our drive towards being individuals, we are united. We are an ant colony of one.
Individualism is a collective pattern that emerged within our culture. It is a cultural pattern that is held in the heart of each individual...like all other cultural patterns.
What it says about us as a people is a different story altogether:
In it’s ‘current’ iteration it tends to create a story of isolation, stress, supremacy, hardship, competition, and an intense focus on the role of the ‘personal’ aspect of most phenomena.
This story is one in which your problems are yours, and your responsibility to manage...but so are your rewards. In this story, each individuals ‘personal’ contribution, and ‘personal’ responsibility is magnified, for better or worse.
The unique crossroad that is each individual is given room to stand out. The peculiar configuration of different forces that gives way to ‘the mysterious individual at the center of the world’ is allowed to shine...if they are lucky enough to figure out how.
This thematic weather spreads itself across the whole of Western culture. I have spoken before about how ‘trauma’ perpetually backlogs because we no longer live like our indigenous Ancestors, who had ‘trauma release’ built into their society as a whole; though they did not call it trauma release.
They consistently experienced deep flow states in nature, cathartic hunts of savage release, intense ritual processes held in a communal context, shamanic healing performed by raw powerhouses and close familial bonds.
Taken together these would through a collective means dissolve most trauma on a continual basis. But today, trauma release rest squarely on the shoulders of each person to ‘get right’, in a context that is about you and them in an enclosed room.
This is a world where you might rise to billionaire status or die cold in the streets, and regardless of the outcome, most people will place the end result on your personal merit.
In a paradigm like this, the greater context that surrounded the person (ancestry, family, genetics, friendship, country, fortune, birth charts and fate) is secondary. In a relational context, they might be thought of as primary. Much of the ancient world tended toward the relational context, where as much of the modern one leans toward the personal.
Is about the hand you are dealt or the hand that you play?
We can just as easily map reality as being utterly interrelated, or decisively discreet. Both lead to different iterations of reality, for both are stories about a grand mystery, and every story is a spell that we weave like an enchantment upon the world.
A World of Wheat and Scythe
Even though our modern story lays out a plot of isolated islands and individualist characters pioneering their way through a random landscape, we still orientate collectively; it’s just that most modern humans tend to defer to institutions, and the rules created by them, for in the absence of tribal context and animist relations, our instinct towards collectivism tends to rely on corporations, big tech, governments and fundamentalist religions to help us feel connected to something greater than us.
However, to these institutions, you are nothing but wheat for the scythe. They are not a real replacement for a deep abiding connection to a true community...
A community that walks down to the local watering with you everyday, on trails worn down over generations...
A community that prays with you every spring to honor the great winds...
A community that dances together every fall, calling in periods of fertility and communal coupling…
To these large faceless forces you are resource, and a cog that must fit in the machine. If you are broken, you are quickly unscrewed and tossed into a landfill, to be replaced.
Your ‘unexamined’ drive towards collectivism could easily lead down a path where you are cannon fodder, breeding more generations of cannon fodder.
In reality, it could be that coming into right relationship with individualism could be a form of guardianship in such a story. Guard yourself enough to establish a different context than the one already given to you by the collective.
Most people do not possess a cultivated individualism, that places the individual in a greater context. As such, they are not truly self-governed; they have just been divided and conquered.
Who Decides to Be an Individual?
You live in a society in which individualism was not chosen by you, it was taught to you and reinforced (and still is) by the culture that you live in. The very structure of our society depends on it, for better or worse. It will not disappear in your lifetime, and your exposure to it has permanently altered your crossroad, for you have been in relationship to an individualist society since you were born. These are the rules of the game, for it is the current iteration of the world.
We are culture of individuals...an ant colony of one.
I am not interested in getting rid of individualism, but in coming into right relationship with it, and placing the gifts it might possess in service of the collective.
What would happen if we both reclaimed the indigenous wisdom of relationality and then proceeded to come into relationship with modern individualism...loving it dearly into service to the greater whole?
The Offering of Individual Gold at The Collective Altar
A part of coming into right relationship with individualism is reweaving the personal experience back into a broader context, which could be accomplished by animism, shamanic practice, mythology, embodiment and spirit work. The specifics of which are topics for another story.
Modern individualist culture differs in many ways from that of relational indigenous culture, but one way that is very relevant to this particular talk, is the service we provide the whole.
In a tribal culture everyone is capable of doing nearly every job. On top of that each person’s gifts are often recognized at an early age, giving them their small ‘slice of specialization’. This is possible because there are ‘less problems’ to deal with. Not lesser problems, just less in sheer variety and number.
Modern civilization generates an incredible amount of problems, that require many different possible paths and professions to address. As a result one could serve the whole in an untold number of ways.
However, because we are so instinctually collective, most people walk down the beaten path expected of them. This is in part because of a lack of mythological and spiritual technology that would allow them to do otherwise. That would allow them to weave gold.
Weaving gold refers to a process that honors the individual experience, cultivates true self-governance (which is fundamentally relational anyway) and then proceeds to harvest the unique gifts emerging from the field of possibilities that is that place of flux at the center of your crossroad.
This would require for us to acknowledge the divine inspiration that exists even in ‘this iteration’ of the world and trust that you were born in the 21st century with a unique configuration of gifts distinctly suited to solve a set of problems no one else can.
This is a medicine that emerges from the soul, a fruit that grows from the individual experience and is offered to the collective. Now more than ever, the world aches for true individuals, connected to and in service of the greater whole, for we are an ant colony of one.
"You are an ant colony of one." I really like this sentence. It's one of those phrases that just beg to be quoted, or put on a T-shirt, or used as an email signature. Great topic and article, Ramon!