A Maze to Trap the Living: Society and the Unique One

Get your copy of Enemies of Society at 38 Blood Alley for the reading group discussing the anthology of individualist and egoist thought. We will discuss section 5 pg 199-330.

“Individualism is the sentiment of a profound, irreducible antinomy between the individual and society. The individualist is he who, by virtue of his temperament, is predisposed to feel in a particularly acute fashion the ineluctable disharmonies between his intimate being and his social milieu. At the same time, he is a man for whom life has reserved some decisive occasion to remark this disharmony. Whether through brutality, or the continuity of his experiences, for him it has become clear that for the individual society is a perpetual creator of constraints, humiliations and miseries, a kind of continuous generation of human pain. In the name of his own experience and his personal sensation of life the individualist feels he has the right to relegate to the rank of utopia any ideal of a future society where the hoped-for harmony between the individual and society will be established. Far from the development of society diminishing evil, it does nothing but intensify it by rendering the life of the individual more complicated, more laborious and more difficult in the middle of the thousand gears of an increasingly tyrannical social mechanism. Science itself, by intensifying within the individual the consciousness of the vital conditions made for him by society, arrives only at darkening his intellectual and moral horizons. Qui auget scientiam augel et dolorem.

We see that individualism is essentially a social pessimism. Under its most moderate form it admits that if life in society is not an absolute evil and completely destructive of individuality, for the individualist is at the very least a restrictive and oppressive condition, a necessary evil and a last resort.”

Accessibility Info: The venue is situated on the south side of Blood Alley Square. There are several cobblestones, but there is ramp access and it’s an open space once inside. There are fewer cobblestones to navigate coming from Abbott as opposed to Carrall. The washroom is not fully WC accessible, the doorway is about 27 inches wide.

This event is taking place on occupied and unceded Coast Salish Territories.