Individualism And Statism Depend On Each Other

Individualism and statism can coexist
in fact, they depend on each other

This might sound strange on its face, but it’s undeniably true.

The reason: a state is unnecessary if individuals are strong enough, but individuals are weaker than groups in almost every case. Pushing individualism forward splits the masses into
a small number of gorillas who can fight comfortably even alone, and a majority of sheep who cannot fight alone.
Only a state can support a large mass of sheep lined up together.
Everyone senses this, so they lean toward statism.

For a more detailed explanation, see below.

https://www.clazytech.com/2020/10/369/

The divisions that emerged from COVID are set to considerably weaken the power of group formation through employment. No — it has already begun.

From a young age I believed strongly that “lifetime employment should just disappear.” That belief hasn’t changed, but as I’ve gotten older it has softened into “I personally don’t need it.” Put simply, I’ve come to accept that some industries need lifetime employment, and that there are situations where it ought to exist — namely, for “weak individuals” in economic activity. (To everyone who put up with my prickly younger self: thank you for bearing with me. Look how fine an adult I’ve become! Ha.)

From a career standpoint, a textbook example of a weak individual is someone who, intentionally or not, has been “left in charge of running a siloed department’s silo for many years.” That person carries extremely high risk. If some change in the business environment occurs — a change of management, a drastic decline in earnings, an acquisition — and the company decides to dismantle that silo, the person becomes useless in any other department. As long as the silo exists, their position is secure, but no one knows when it will collapse. Here, if lifetime employment properly exercises its power, the logic runs:

• It was the company’s mistake to have fixed his/her career in that way
• The company should retrain them properly and put them to use in a different department

Many large companies actually put this kind of flow into practice.

But if you instead placed strong emphasis on individualism, the logic would run:

Individuals bear responsibility for building their own careers, and a company that thoughtlessly restricts an individual’s career advancement, without understanding this, is unacceptable. Everyone should just leave such a company. It deserves to eventually be weeded out by the churn of this fluid society.

Now, how persuasive is this line of reasoning?

In my twenties, it was perfectly persuasive to me. By setting my own turning points at my own initiative, I lost out and got burned at times, tumbling my way through building a career, and looking back now I have almost no memory of depending on a company for anything (my apologies to everyone involved for that attitude). “Don’t let anyone else hold the power over your life and death.” I wanted overseas experience, and when it looked like the company wasn’t going to send me, I quit and made my own way to America. During the period when I wasn’t in a department that did proper product planning, I drew up product plans on my own private time and carried them all the way up to management (my apologies to everyone involved). Even now I’m essentially independent, so whether I let my own career rot or make it flourish is entirely my own responsibility. As it should be.

This is a fairly unusual case (my apologies again to everyone involved, in various respects).

Tens of millions of people in Japan are in some form of employment. How many of them could agree with the argument above?

Looking at it soberly, I suspect most people’s reaction would be “I understand what’s being said, but it feels difficult in practice.”

But if the post-COVID era arrives smoothly, there is a very high chance that everyone will be forced to agree with the above whether they like it or not.

As remote work becomes the norm, companies lose (or are relieved of?) several of the general obligations they owe to employees. Having an office, for instance, is likely to stop being a given. The level of benefits aimed at promoting employee health is also likely to decline. Companies are also likely to stop functioning well as places for socializing and expanding one’s network. Even where a role for the company as a place of talent development is still expected, its effectiveness will probably grow more limited. In other words, it’s likely to become taken for granted that employees must secure their own workspace, manage their own health, cultivate their own networks in their private time, and design their own plans for skill development, spending their private time on it themselves.

Long live individualism.

Now, once individualism has grown this strong, what kind of social movement can we expect?

Will we get a lively society in which individuals stand on their own and freely build their careers?
Will individuals contribute more to the economy by flexibly using their private time to build networks and develop skills unbound by their companies?

No — I believe individuals will instead start telling companies, “take better care of us.”

Why? Because this is an already-proven template, playing out between the state and the individual. When individuals are emphasized, groups weaken, and groups lose the motivation to contribute to individuals. As a result, groups stop functioning as a foundation supporting individuals. In the end, the only group left that can be trusted is the state. It’s a logic arrived at almost by process of elimination.

A company functions as a combination of many groups: project teams, sections, business divisions, and so on. What does it mean for these to weaken? When I joined my company fresh out of graduate school, frankly, I didn’t even know how to use a soldering iron properly. I was a useless, all-theory-no-practice type. My practical knowledge of components was hugely lacking, and I had no idea how to handle conversations with outside vendors. But during that period, senior colleagues close to me in age, mentors, and veteran old hands taught me all sorts of things. That is the strength of a group. Shift the perspective to personal life, and it’s the same as the beautiful, supportive world of the old row-house neighborhood, where relatives and neighbors all pitch in to look after a toddling baby. Unfortunately, that kind of world has already been lost. As a result, raising children has grown harder. And to fill that gap, solutions at the level of the state and local government — child allowances, municipal daycare, free extended hours at kindergartens — are now called for. In truth, these were things much smaller-scale groups could have solved. This is proof that groups have weakened.

It’s a perfect match. The same thing is happening here.

As individualism grows stronger, companies will start demanding stronger results from individuals. They will come to value outcomes over process (since process can no longer be monitored anyway, outcomes are all that’s left to look at). Individuals will come to demand compensation from the company commensurate with their results. The company will raise the workload in response. Individuals’ private time will shrink. There will be no time left for skill development or networking. Individuals will start demanding some kind of guarantee from the company. For a company whose sense of obligation to hold onto its employees has weakened, about all it can offer is some temporary monetary benefit. It will demand results commensurate with that compensation. The workload rises. Time runs out. Individuals demand some response from the company. The company says, sure, we can do that, but we’ll cut your pay accordingly, won’t we? People grit their teeth and bear the load. In the end there’s still no time. They start thinking about quitting. Because their skills haven’t grown, changing jobs is difficult. They’re stuck choosing between continuing to endure the load or changing jobs at a pay cut.

This is the vicious cycle.

Of course, some people will say such a negative spiral is none of their concern. I might be one of them. We’re the kind of high-intensity people who from the start have only ever thought in terms of carving out our own careers. We’re the tough gorillas who believe that no matter what — job changes, layoffs, even company bankruptcy — as long as you yourself are solid, there’s always a way forward.

I’m suddenly reminded of an experience in America. I was once called in for a meeting billed as “we’ve decided to bring in an HR service, so let’s hear an explanation from that company.” The HR service in question was essentially about employee benefits. I went in with zero enthusiasm, thinking, “right, I remember getting an explanation about resort facilities and discount ticket usage when I joined some other company too (not interested)” — and quickly noticed everyone else’s enthusiasm was unusually high. (Even T, a guy who almost never showed his face at the office, was there!) Why? The reason is medical costs. Medical costs in America are high, and there is no universal national health insurance system equivalent to Japan’s. So the role of covering that gap falls to the company — more precisely, to the insurance plan the company joins by leveraging the benefits of collective bargaining. During my five years in America, there was a period when I was, technically, unemployed (to be clear, I wasn’t there illegally). The cost of medical care truly made my eyes pop. At least a quarter of your income, and as much as nearly a third, gets taken. If another third goes to taxes, only a third is left. On top of that, rent is expensive too. That leaves nothing. You have no choice but to eat into your savings. For me that period was very brief, so I could endure it, but it made clear that living permanently as a complete freelancer in America takes considerable resolve. Incidentally, if you belong to a large company, insurance premiums drop to less than a tenth of what they are when you’re unemployed. At that point, it actually feels cheaper than the burden of social insurance premiums in Japan. This, too, depends on the size of the company and its benefits policy. Plenty of people in America already find that life becomes unsustainable unless they demand a great deal from their company. Aside from a portion of the wealthy, most people fall into this category. If anything, I suspect most Americans consider this normal. You come to recognize that the company you belong to, and that company’s policies, matter enormously — and at the same time, you see that your very survival could be gripped by something as large-scale as that, something an individual has no control over, especially the policies of a big company. It’s not hard to imagine that in America, everyone sits at their office desk with their rear end perpetually half raised off the seat, ready to quit at any moment.

Does the rise of individualism actually make people happier?
Thinking about that isn’t really very meaningful.
There is almost no escaping a society in which individualism is on the rise.

So the choices are simple, and there are two of them.

Either live tenaciously within a society of rising individualism, or build an entirely separate small-scale society.

Global capitalism never misses a chance to advance rationality and gains. Individual happiness is a secondary concern. It runs on the logic of “if you don’t like it, there are plenty of others to replace you” — in a sense, the completed form of utilitarianism.

If you don’t want that, the only option is to say NO to the overall increase in utility. Fighting as part of a small-scale group should let you put up a far better fight than fighting alone as an individual. Whether that takes the form of a village, a city, or even the organizational form of a corporation — that seems to me to be the area where innovation, once it takes root, will be most needed going forward.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/04/401/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.