A private selfhood ideology actively undermines the formation of binding solidarity.

Evidence

Country-westerners wanted to leave references to the wider world behind and just appreciate each other as human beings, pure and simple, in a community of equals, with no one rewarded for having a better job, being richer or smarter or more charitable or more patriotic, nor for having any particular loyalties or attachments, exceptional eloquence, skill, or any exceptional qualities: just people. They wanted to avoid the kind of constraints, judgments, and obligations that theorists describe. They were private people; they believed that what really matters is what is ‘‘inside’’; that the tender, flickering ‘‘real self’’ can almost never be expressed in words, and certainly does not brazenly display itself in group contexts. Their unjudgmental ideal of friendship rested on an anti-institutional and anti-conventional feeling that anything larger than that hidden sliver of real selfhood was less real, and probably tainted, so participants tried to create a sense of etiquette that kept the wider world and its stuffy, confining, annoying, contaminated conventions as far away as possible. Shared humor and a shared taste for country-western styles seemed to members to offer togetherness without constraint, very loosely binding a fragile and precious sense of voluntary community without having to intrude on anyone’s very private sense of self. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 645

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the privacy-centered critique of American civic decline; resonates with Tocqueville’s individualism and with bell hooks’ writing on community. — connects to: Neoliberal market discipline deliberately breaks political subjectivity and weakens solidarity. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 334; Ideology defines the self by stigmatising the Other — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 833; Influencer labor manufactures the self as a commodity whose worthlessness prevents class solidarity. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 28 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal market discipline deliberately breaks political subjectivity and weakens solidarity. #corroborates (0.92) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 334
• Ideology masks class by fragmenting people into individuals bound as consumers and citizens #expands (0.90)
• Influencer labor manufactures the self as a commodity whose worthlessness prevents class solidarity. #exemplifies (0.85) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 28
• Convivial relations carry radical openness that undermines fixed and reified identity. #qualifies (0.80) — Farhan Samanani, Conviviality and its others, 23
• Ideology defines the self by stigmatising the Other #complicates (0.78) — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 833
• Secularism’s private-religion demand is undermined by the state regulating all of life. #exemplifies (0.75)
• Political movements require private indignation to coalesce into collective identity #complicates (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 20