Being from the working class, and having done my fair share of grunt work, I have been permanently inoculated against that fantasy of Marxist intellectuals, who tend not to be from the working class, the fantasy according to which workers, the poor, the ‘downtrodden,’ have some special virtue lacking in the rest of us. That is buncombe pure and simple. There is nothing to be expected from any class as a class: it is individuals and individuals alone who are the loci of value and the hope of humanity.<\/p>\n
But individuation is a task, not a given. You have to work at it. To cop a line from a neo-Kantian\u00a0 who intended it in a different connection:\u00a0 Es ist<\/em>\u00a0nicht gegeben sondern aufgegeben.<\/em><\/p>\n There are no true individuals without self-individuation, something impossible to the mass man who identifies himself in terms of class, race, sex, and who is never anything more than a specimen of a species, a token of type, and no true individual.<\/p>\n And then these\u00a0types<\/em> have the chutzpah to demand to be treated as individuals.\u00a0 To which I say: if you want me to treat you as an individual, don’t identify yourself with a group or a class or a sex or a race.<\/p>\n Tribal identity is pseudo-identity.<\/p>\n Merit, the enemy of ‘equity,’ the middle term of DEI, is individual<\/em> merit.<\/p>\n As for my grunt jobs, I’ve been a furniture mover in Santa Barbara; an exterminator in West Los Angeles;\u00a0 a grave digger in Culver City; a factory worker in Venice, California;\u00a0 letter carrier and mail handler in Los Angeles; a logger in Forks, Washington; a tree planter in Oregon; a taxi driver in Boston; plus assorted day jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Boston.<\/p>\n One thing’s for sure: blogging beats logging any day of the week, though the pay is not as good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Being from the working class, and having done my fair share of grunt work, I have been permanently inoculated against that fantasy of Marxist intellectuals, who tend not to be from the working class, the fantasy according to which workers, the poor, the ‘downtrodden,’ have some special virtue lacking in the rest of us. That … Continue reading “I Celebrate the Individual”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,64,347],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-conservatism","category-personalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14177"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14179,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14177\/revisions\/14179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}