Individuality

This is one of our society's highest values. How can you tell? Look at how we swear. There are several categories, Casual swearing, where we throw out expletives to add seasoning or expression to our speech, and we don't usually think of others being offended. For the average American, words like "Crap" "God" and "Oops" fall into this category. The next category is Vulgar. These are words we use with the intention of offense. The side effect is that when a person agrees with you on your words you affirm one another's values, and in strengthens relationships. This is where most commonly considered "curse words" fall including F*** S*** and D***. The last category is the True Offense category. These words are not generally considered curses by society, and they rarely consist of unique words. They are an idea that people find offensive to the degree that these curses become unutterable. The values these True Offense curses offend are our highest and most dear values, an example is "the 'N' word" which will ruin your career. It reminds our country of slavery, an idea and value we've been so deeply taught to be ashamed of that we don't even mention of it. In fact my guess is that by social standards it has been trained to bring more shame in African Americans than it does in white people, because their society highly values respect and action, two values which were stripped from them during slavery and possibly were instilled in them upon emancipation. So from a society viewpoint it's okay for African Americans to call one another "Niggers" because it is perceived culturally to be an admonishment to be proactive, be respectful, or it is used as a jest to one who is so successful that the idea of them being stripped of their respect and power is laughable. However when a white person who has been presented as the aggressor in the slavery debacle, uses "the 'N' word" it is culturally perceived as a threat of oppression and furthermore often seen as an active stripping of power and respect from the target.

However, even worse than "the 'N' word" are slanders against our individuality. It is socially unacceptable in our culture to reject a person regardless of their personal qualities unless they have committed a sin which strips others of their individuality. For a church to hold a view that people who do not believe in Jesus will go to hell is unmentionably offensive in our society. If you don't believe me I ask you, when was the last time when religion was brought up did you point out that unbelievers are not heaven-bound which through compassion is the believers primary motive for evangelism? You'll notice that even my culturally trained language patterns lead me to say "not heaven-bound" rather than "going to hell" We simultaneously try to hide our cultural insecurities by placing the direct terms somewhere between Casual Cursing and Vulgarities. When told to go to hell people do not take it seriously at all, they may be offended by the minor rejection or laugh about it if it is between friends used as jest, but if the topic were ever seriously approached, the offense would be so deep and swift it would justify nearly any retaliatory act. In fact the more culturally "individual" the person whose individuality is slandered, the more harsh the penalty.

We have a cultural scale of individuality that values difference from the perceived normal, which is actually a call into our quasi-Judeo Christian roots. People who are more "normal" have less individuality and are therefore fair game. People who are less "normal" (minorities, differing religions, varying lifestyles) are highly individualized according to our culture, and therefore merit special protection. There is a traditional threshold for the individuality at the point of legality. Our legal system is built on the solid values that we articulate loudly, so when a persons individuality crosses the point of legality, we have a cultural agreement that these people are to be ostracized. What I've observed, however, is that as laws have begun to be created to protect individuality (hate crimes, for example) the legitimacy of our solid values degrades, because our values openly conflict. A person who has sex with others of his own gender is deserving of special protection, but a person who has sex with animals is an offender. Their individuality is expressed in the same realm: their sexuality, and they can claim the same rationale for their personal choices, but one is deemed legally protected and the other is legally offensive.

The thing that makes individuality corrosive is that every person can perceive themselves as an individual, and everyone can defend themselves against their sins. If they tie their sins to their person-hood, they can leverage your own individuality against you: "how can you persecute me for the way I am? it would be like someone putting you in jail because you have brown eyes!"

Since affordance leads us to only consider options presented to us, we say "That is offensive! How insensitive of me!" When we could respond "My brown eyes are not a part of who I am, they are a trait I have. If it was a sin to have brown eyes, I could have them removed, replaced, or cover them with contact lenses" The charge of offense against individuality becomes even less certain when it becomes based on traits or qualities you have a choice about, if they tried to leverage your weight, you don't even have to sacrifice a sense in order to rectify the issue. Often the complaint against being called fat is that it is genetics, and we have all been taught by "science" that genetics make us who we are. Our DNA is the physical embodiment of our individuality! Yet even this is not scientifically true. Our choices actually modify our DNA, the things we choose to expose ourselves to can actually turn certain traits on and off, and finally, we have programmed into all of our DNA the option to deny our natural cravings in order to benefit us. Evolutions should herald this fact as it is one of the best adaptations the human animal has: That when hungry we can choose to not take the meat out of the trap, that we can walk by and wait to find a different food source to avoid harm. And our DNA is not who we are! It determines our bodies, perhaps even plays a large role in our demeanor, but we are not just our physical bodies or our demeanors.

What is further interesting to me is when you get engulfed deeply into a unified group with common values, the group as a whole becomes an individual. Looking at the roots of the word literally, Individual means a unit that cannot be further divided. A unified church that agrees and truly believes their doctrine is, as a whole, an individual. So each person can tolerate offenses against the individual when made by people with no ability to threaten their organization, because they return to the individual they are a part of and they have healing and support, yet when the group as a whole is threatened, they have the resources of hundreds or thousands of people to stage a defense of their values.

This is the great benefit of nationalism, and it's a benefit that we mostly miss out on as Americans because we have divided ourselves to such a large degree that we need the support of other single people who consider themselves autonomous from us to survive. So in order to survive, we separate our morality from our individuality, because if we can "tolerate" their drug use, and they can "tolerate" our lifestyle choices, then we can work together even though we are two separated entities. We can mimic the benefit of a group without actually becoming a true believer of anything. The problem is that this social contract breaks down when more than a few people become involved.

In the end we have forgotten (or rather, refuse to teach) that individuality is a decision. We are made who we are by our choices even moreso than by our propensity to this action or that action. We further fail to teach that there is a pattern of person we are supposed to be, that we were purpose-built to perform a task, and that there are qualities that lend themselves to this task better than others. Since we've forgotten our task, and our purpose, we believe all qualities are the same, and so we tie the qualities and habits we find convenient into our definition of "self" and use a false excuse that "you have no individuality in organized religion" when the fact of the matter is you have a bigger individuality in organized religion, and when that religion is based around a relationship, your purpose becomes your self and from then on dictates every quality that is useful and every quality that is unuseful to you.

The endgame of this affirming self-giving relationship is that it ultimately defines you and brings you a personal security you could not find as a single individual, and sharing what you love with others is highly affordable within the complete love relationship with Jesus. While everyone else is quibbling about offending individuality, we ought to be filled with compassion and a desire to present the love-relationship with Jesus to everyone so they can unify their individuality around the security of self found in living out our purpose of loving the only God.

When we talk about Jesus, we are not concentrating on heaven and hell and offending their individuality, our goal is to bring them into the bigger individual: the body of Christ, and share the awesome gift we have in order to bring purpose peace and security to them in their obvious state of purposeless personally-divided insecurity which forces them to accept things they would abhor if their survival didn't depend on it.