Sarah Coronado

July 4, 2011

A Look at the Members: Collective and/or Individual Identities

In my previous post I focused on leadership and the characteristics of certain leaders who are able to successfully sell the ideas of collectivism. I found this research helped to account for the initial membership of a collective group, but it did not help me understand why membership or belief in the collective ideal waned over time. In this second research post, I aimed my focus onto the people that make up the society in a cult or utopia. I wanted to understand the members of such groups in terms of the identity they adopted and maintained. My assumption was that the assigned collective identities that the members espoused eventually subside and it is at this point that I hypothesized the tightly formed society would begin to unravel.

I wished to specifically study identity within cult and utopian societies because of my belief that how people identify themselves is what motivates them to live or act a certain way. Many of our readings focused on a utopian mindset centered on the collective, not excluding Ayn Rand’s dystopian view in Anthem, in which these same ideals are found in the names of the citizens: “Equality,” “Union,” “Collective,” etc.  In terms of the study of real-life cults, researchers are now focusing on their processes of persuasion that attack individual identity. In their book, Cults in Our Midst, clinical psychologist, Margaret Thaler Singer, and former political cult member turned activist, Janja Lalich, explain that a cult’s influence “is carried out under a variety of guises and conditions – and rarely does it include forced confinement or direct physical coercion. Rather, it is a subtle and powerful psychological process of destabilization and induced dependence” (60). By tearing down the individual identity, these researchers believe that cults are able to instill a new social or collective identity that binds the new recruit to the cult group. “When groups refer to this new identity, they speak of members who are transformed, reborn, enlightened, empowered, rebirthed, or cleared” (77). We saw something similar in Anthem as the new society that Equality 7-2521 inhabits has taken shape only at the “Dawn of the Great Rebirth” (Rand 48). By creating the impression that who they were before is now dead, and that a new, dependent identity has been born, cults evoke an intoxicating image that easily harnesses members to the group. This impression is mere illusion, however, as Singer and Lalich explain, “the vast majority of those who leave such groups drop the cult content, and the cult behavior and attitudes, and painstakingly take up where they left off prior to joining” (78). Through exit counseling for former cult members, psychologists try to “awaken” the dormant individual identity that never really was completely obliterated. What this research into the persuasion of new members and counseling of former members explicitly shows is that the battle for members is one of identity. Thus, this source gave me further confidence that in better understanding people’s identity, we can understand how people could not only join a seemingly utopian group, but also why they would eventually exit from one.

At this point I sought to build a foundation by defining identity. Previously, my own definition for both collective and individual identities was a basic one, viewing a collective mentality as “All for one, and one for all” and an individual mentality as “Leave me the hell alone, I’ll do it myself.” Thankfully British philosopher, A.C. Grayling’s book, Ideas that Matter, allowed me to add a little more depth to these descriptions. Grayling discerns between singular and multiple identities. We can understand a singular identity as one where an individual is locked into or is assigned only one identity. The individual within a cult or utopian community would cling to a singular identity believing that he is nothing, save a member of “X” community or group. Allowing multiple identities, on the other hand, enables the individual to distinguish himself from others and develop an increasingly individualistic mentality. Recall from our studies of the Oneida community the concept of Complex Marriage in which “every man and every woman is married to each other. They could engage in sexual intercourse, but could not be attached to each other” (Hillebrand). A man in Oneida was not allowed to be member of the community as well as husband to “Mrs. -, ” but was member and husband to the entire community, a singular identity that refused differentiation of one man from the next. We can also recall women’s singular identity of mother in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. Everything these women did for each other and for their community centered on accommodating the future race. Cults and utopian communities restrict the range of allowable identities as much as possible so that members become saturated with their singular identities. Grayling coins the term “overriding singular identities” to describe the saturation into a powerful identity “that people are willing to die for.” He gives the example of the wartime solider whose adoption of his homeland identity above all else leads him to see his “potential self-sacrifice for it as glorious” (183). Flag-waving Americans could view this as entirely noble and brave, but when the same overriding singular identity causes 912 people – 276 of whom were children – to drink cyanide-laced FlaVor-Aid as was the case in Jonestown in 1978, it becomes grievously poignant (Singer 251). What Grayling hoped to accomplish with this essay on identity is the recognition that we all encompass multiple identities and that locking ourselves into just one admits the possibility of grave outcomes. Thus, it adds a new element to this research that in the beginning sought only to pit collective and individual identities against one another assuming that only one could prevail. Now we can begin to see a new dimension taking shape, the possibility of multiple identities present at all times.

This theory of multiplicity enabled my research to open up to the claims of Karl E. Scheibe and Dipak K. Gupta who both take this view of multiple identities within man. Scheibe, a Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan University, writes extensively on the self. In his book, Self Studies, he insists, “our conceptions of identity are at once personal, social, and human (53). Gupta, a Professor of Peace Studies at San Diego State University, studies extensively on issues of violence, ethnicity, and collective pathological behavior. In this book, Path to Collective Madness, he seconds this notion by Scheibe adding that the intermingling identities, all found within man, are often in conflict with one another, “the history of human civilization is the story of the dialectic tension between the individual and the collective” (22). The tension, Gupta believes, comes when either identity is pushed to an extreme (similar to the concept of overriding singular identities), “when a society moves to the extreme ends of the identity spectrum, revolutions start … for those in theocratic or communistic nations, the comfort of the collective quickly turns claustrophobic” (xi). Not only does it prove claustrophobic, but it also seems to neglect something important within man. Scheibe argues that collectivist societies are doomed to fail because they are “at odds with human requirements – specifically, the requirement that individual selves be granted recognition and status apart from the political collectivities of which they are a part” (10). Claiming such, Scheibe would imagine Oneida’s complex marriage practices to be “psychological unworkable ... if everyone is my brother or sister, then no one is a special relation to me, and I can claim no specific identity from my relationships” (10). There is vindication for this theory in the multiple traditional marriages that took place among Oneida members as soon as Noyes was compelled to abandon his complex marriage system. These marriages granted specific identities to each singular couple. By rejecting individual recognition and identity-forming relationships, the extreme collective identity, to its detriment, ignores an imperative need in man.

As we continue with Gupta’s argument of extreme identities, however, we see that intense versions of individual identities are just as detrimental, exhibiting “self-absorption, denial of tradition and faith” and a penchant for “pushing the limits of vulgarity and self-indulgence” (31). Furthermore, when all the fun of self-satisfaction is over (or, since we have a tendency of never being fully sated, we at least become bored of constant indulgence) people begin to “look for a cause greater than their personal selves” (xi). In some respects, intense individual identities might actually make people more prone to cults and to extreme collective identities. When one seeks desperately for something greater than the self, they become easy prey to the big, grand ideals extended from cult groups. This illustrates further, that one extremity can often lead to another, neither doing justice to the individual who is slung back and forth.

What Scheibe and Gupta lead this research to is the understanding that the identities of man are both individual and collective and inseparable. We may reason that, if in its extremity, the collective identity ignores the free will of man; the individual identity ignores the beat of his heart. Gupta posits that from this recognition we should strive to develop social and philosophical theories and practices that attempt to merge, or at least accommodate in time, the needs and desires of both identities. Scheibe commits himself to a somewhat more evolutionary rotation between the embedded identities, “perhaps the spirit of an age selects for special prominence the voice which happens to respond most directly to the particular needs of that age” (50). This philosophy rings true in Dr. Leete’s words of the new Bostonian lifestyle, “Public opinion had become fully ripe for it, and the whole mass of the people was behind it” (Bellamy 5.27).

This research assignment has actually allowed me to re-examine my ideas of identity. I feel that it has proven that the collective identity impressed upon members of a cult or utopian group cannot be sustained. But also that an individual identity is not the reigning champion; a combination of the two is. It is with this in mind that I hope to vindicate myself partly from the claim made that I have been too easily won over by the utopian texts we had read this semester (not to mention my respect and admiration for Dr. Leete, making me a fan club of 1 within our class), a surprisingly ironic claim given my personal politics (another factor making me a fan club of 1). However, I feel that in the very least, given this final research post, I can at least defend my love for Bellamy’s Looking Backward by asserting that, of all the fictional utopias we have read this semester, the Boston of 2000 is the only one to truly encompass the needs of both the collective and the individual. The needs of the collective are met in the equality of the labor force and wage, but room is also made within this utopia for the individual. The individual alone determines how his equal wage is spent, be it a fashionable wardrobe, bigger house, or travel abroad and by these means he is able to distinguish himself as an individual.  If it is true what John Donne says, that “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent,” we must at least recognize and respect that the piece of the continent has distinguishable boundaries unique to itself.

Works Cited

            Grayling, A.C. Ideas that Matter: The Concepts that Shape the 21^st Century. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Print

            Gupta, Dipak K. Path to Collective Madness: A Study of Social Order and Political Pathology. Westport: Praeger, 2001. Print.

            Hillebrand, Randall. “The Oneida Community.” New York History Net. New York History Net, 29 April 2003. Web. 4 July 2011. http://www.nyhistory.com/central/oneida.htm

            Scheibe, Karl E. Self Studies: The Psychology of Self and Identity. Westport: Praeger, 1995. Print.

            Singer, Margaret Thaler, and Janja Lalich. Cults in Our Midst. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1995. Print.