Large-scale systems enable rather than merely threaten individual self-actualisation
Evidence
Yet he is wrong to say that “both person and planet are threatened by the same enemy—the bigness of things.” What is at issue is the interlacing of distance and proximity, of the personal and the large-scale mechanisms of globalisation. “Bigness” is not in itself either an enemy of the person or a phenomenon to be overcome in life politics. Instead, it is the coordination of individual benefit and planetary organisation that has to be the focus of concern. Global connections of many kinds are the very condition of forms of individual self-actualisation, including those that act to minimise high-consequence risks. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 371
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Luhmann’s system trust: the reader’s thesis is exactly that institutional systems make individual self-actualisation possible — yet here Giddens inverts the fatalism by stressing that global connections are the very condition of self-actualisation, not its enemy. This nuances the novel’s premise: Stevens’s devotion enabled his self-actualisation as head butler, not merely his abdication. — connects to: Modernity transforms both global interconnection and the most intimate personal life — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 24; Self-identity is now a reflexive project conducted amid abstract systems — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 295; Disembedding mechanisms remove control from individuals and create collective risk — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 310 (+14 more)
- QUESTION: If global systems are the condition of self-actualisation, what distinguishes enabling modernist institutions from Darlington’s morally empty one? Giddens gestures at ‘minimising high-consequence risks’ — the criterion of moral grounding Stevens’s institution lacked.
Related
- Modernity’s globalising tendencies connect individuals to large-scale systems (similarity 0.82)
- Self-fulfilment can positively appropriate globalised influences rather than retreat (similarity 0.81)
- Self-identity is now a reflexive project conducted amid abstract systems (similarity 0.79)
- Impersonal modern systems paradoxically enable reembedding of local personal life (similarity 0.79)
- Abstract systems do not colonise the life-world but interact dialectically with it (similarity 0.78)