Individualism and statism can coexist because they depend on each other

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

At first glance this might sound like a strange thing to say, but it’s an undeniable fact.

A state becomes unnecessary when the individual is strong enough, but in almost every case an individual is weaker than a group. Push individualism far enough and it splits the population into a small number of gorillas who can fight even as individuals and a majority of sheep who can’t fight alone. Only a state can support a large number of sheep lined up in a row. Everyone senses this, and so they lean toward statism.

For a more detailed explanation, see this.

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

The fragmentation caused by COVID is likely to considerably weaken employment’s power to form groups. No—it already has.

Since I was young I’ve strongly felt that “the lifetime employment system should just disappear.” I still think that way now, but as I’ve aged the thought has softened into “I personally don’t need it.” Put simply, I’ve come to accept that some business forms require lifetime employment, and that there are scenes where lifetime employment ought to exist. In other words, there is such a thing as the “weak individual” in economic activity. (To everyone who put up with my prickly younger self—thank you for bearing with me. Look how respectable an adult I’ve become! Ha.)

From a career perspective, a clear textbook example of a weak individual is someone who, intentionally or not, gets left in long-term charge of a department that has itself become siloed. That person is extremely high-risk. If some change in the business environment occurs (management changes hands, profits deteriorate dramatically, the company gets acquired) and the company decides to break up that silo, the person becomes useless in any other department. As long as the silo exists their position is actually secure, but there’s no telling when it might collapse. When the lifetime employment system rightly exercises its power in this situation, the logic runs:

• It was the company’s mistake to let his or her career become fixed in that way
• The company should properly retrain them and put them to use in another department

Many large companies actually run this kind of process.

But suppose instead we placed heavy weight on individualism. Then the logic would run:

Individuals bear the responsibility of building their own careers, and a company so lacking in understanding that it needlessly restricts an individual’s career advancement is unacceptable. Everyone should just leave such a company. The company itself deserves to eventually be weeded out by the swirling currents of this fluid society.

How persuasive is this line?

In my twenties it was completely persuasive to me. By setting my own turning points at my own pace, I took losses, got burned, and forged my career through trial and error, and I have almost no memory of relying on a company for anything career-related (my apologies to everyone involved for this attitude). “Never let another person hold the power of life and death over you.” When I wanted overseas experience and sensed the company wasn’t going to send me, I quit and went to America on my own; during a period when I wasn’t in a department that did real product planning, I drew up product plans on my own private time and pushed them up the chain myself (apologies again to everyone involved). Even now I’m essentially independent, so whether my career rots or develops is entirely my own responsibility. As it should be.

This is a fairly special case (again, apologies to everyone involved for all this).

Tens of millions of people in Japan hold some form of employment. How many of them would agree with the above?

Realistically, I suspect most people’s reaction would be, “I understand what you’re saying, but it feels hard to accept.”

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 will lose (or be relieved of?) some of their general obligations toward 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 venues for socializing and expanding one’s network. And even where companies are expected to function as places for training talent, that effectiveness is likely to become limited. In other words, employees will likely be told, as a matter of course, that they must secure their own workspace, manage their own health, cultivate their own networks on their own private time, and plan and design their own skill-building opportunities using their own private time.

Long live individualism.

Now, once individualism has grown this strong, what kind of social movements will we see?

Will a vibrant society arrive in which individuals build their careers independently and freely? Will individuals contribute more to the economy by flexibly using private time to develop networks and skills not bound to any company?

No—I think individuals will start telling companies, “Take better care of us.”

Why? Because this is an already-proven template of what happens between the state and the individual. As the individual is emphasized, the group weakens, and the group loses the motivation to contribute to individuals. As a result, the group stops functioning as a foundation supporting the individual. 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 couldn’t even use a soldering iron properly. I was a useless egghead. My practical knowledge of components was hopelessly 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 grizzled veterans taught me all kinds of things. That is the strength of the group. Shift the viewpoint to individual life, and this is the same as the beautiful, supportive row-house world in which a toddling baby is looked after by relatives and neighbors alike. Unfortunately, that world has already been lost. Because of this, raising children has grown harder. And to fill that gap, we now demand solutions at the national and municipal level—child allowances, municipal daycare, free after-hours childcare at kindergartens, and so on. These were originally things smaller groups could have solved. This is proof that groups have weakened.

It’s a perfect match. The same thing happens.

As individualism strengthens, companies will demand results more strongly from individuals. They will value outcomes over process (since process can no longer be monitored anyway, outcomes are all that’s left to look at). Individuals will demand compensation commensurate with results from the company. The company will raise the workload accordingly. Individuals’ private time will shrink. There will be no time left for skill development or network building. Individuals will start demanding some kind of guarantee from the company. On the company’s side, with its sense of holding onto employees weakening, about all it can do is offer some temporary financial benefit. It will demand results commensurate with that compensation. The workload rises. Time runs out. Individuals demand some kind of response from the company. The company says, sure, we can do that, but we’ll cut your pay accordingly, okay? Individuals grit their teeth and endure 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 lower pay.

This is a vicious cycle.

Of course, some people won’t care about this kind of negative spiral. I might be one of them. We’re a highly resilient breed who never had any other idea than to carve out our own career from the start. Job changes, layoffs—bring it on; company bankruptcy—bring it on. We’re tenacious gorillas who believe there is always a way out as long as we ourselves stay solid.

I suddenly recall an experience from America. I was once called into a meeting billed as, “We’ve decided to bring in an HR service, so let’s hear an explanation from that company.” An HR service basically means employee benefits. I went in with zero motivation, thinking, “Right, I remember getting an explanation about vacation facilities and discount tickets when I joined some company before too (no interest whatsoever),” and quickly noticed that everyone else’s enthusiasm was unusually high. (Even T, a guy who almost never shows his face at the office, was there!) Why was that? The reason is medical costs. Medical costs in America are high. And there’s no universal national health insurance system equivalent to Japan’s. So the role of covering that gap falls to the company. More precisely, it’s an insurance system the company joins by pooling collective benefits. During my five years in America, there was a period when, technically, I was unemployed (to be clear, I wasn’t undocumented). The cost of medical care truly made my eyes pop. At least a quarter, and as much as nearly a third, of your income gets taken. Add another third in taxes and you’re down to just a third remaining. On top of that, rent is also high. That leaves nothing. All you can do is eat into savings. Because that period was very short for me, I was able to endure it, but it made clear that living as a completely regular freelancer in America takes real resolve. By the way, if you can belong to a large company, insurance premiums drop to less than a tenth of what they are when unemployed. At that level, 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. America is already full of people whose lives fall apart unless they demand a great deal from their company. Except for a wealthy few, most people fall into this category. I suspect many Americans consider this normal. And once you realize how much the company you belong to, and that company’s policies, matter, you also start to see a situation in which your very survival can be gripped by something as large-scale as corporate policy (something an individual, especially at a large company, has no control over at all). It’s not hard to imagine that in America, everyone sits at their office desk perpetually half out of their seat. (Ready to quit at any moment.)

Does the rise of individualism actually make people happy? There’s not much point thinking about that. There’s almost no escaping a society in which individualism is rising.

So the choice is a simple binary.

Either live tenaciously within a society where individualism is rising, or build an entirely different, small-scale society.

Global capitalism never misses a chance to advance rationality and profit. 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 complete realization of utilitarianism.

If you don’t like that, the only option is to say NO to the overall increase in utility. Fighting as a small group should let you put up a far better fight than fighting alone. Whether that group takes the form of a village, a city, or some corporate organizational structure— that, to me, looks like exactly the area where the innovation most needed going forward will be cultivated.

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