Everywhere we look, there are structural symbols and codes that combine to create a dominant presence of material homogeneity amongst people within society. In the Western world, at least, we have become engulfed in capitalist paradigms and societal agendas that create uniformities of fashion and codes that individuals reflect from their inner life to the external realm; if the world is will and representation, the will seems to have become the underlying desire to achieve acceptance within an increasingly pluralist society, and the representation is that of an aesthetic, linear formulation of patterns amongst people and behaviours, or more precisely, a submission to the social norms of conventionality, whether consciously or subconsciously.
This need to achieve acceptance within a given society is undeniably a sui generis aspect of anthropological behaviour amongst humans within the narrative of implicit social contracts and covenants; we have reached a point in our evolution that carries a de facto requirement of living semi-harmoniously with one another, creating a social psychology of negotiation between one’s desire for individual self-realisation and the homogeneity of societal structures; the need for reification and self-acknowledgement transcends the phenomenological fundamentals of both sociality and sociability. When Sartre posited that hell is other people, he was making an essentially modern assertion; that rapport between one’s hunger for self-actualisation and the exercising of individual freedom risks being stifled by the dominant entity of the general psychological will of modernity, one that produces linearity between persons as a corollary of its nature. Mill’s circumscription of the individual in On Liberty subtly pre-empted this modern narrative in his exploration of the ‘tyranny of the people’ as a threat to the individual voice in the formulation of opinion and behaviour; where uniform customs have emerged, the ability to develop individual characteristics and uniqueness has certainly become an inferior requisite of development in the eyes of many.
Inevitably, some of us will be aware this evolutionary pattern more than others. Those groups on the margins of society will tend to feel those structural forces more markedly. The predominance of the white middle-class in positions of power is perhaps a frustrating theme for persons of minority ethnic lineage, for example. Writing from the perspective of somebody of British, Irish, Scottish and Jamaican-Chinese descent, I am probably more aware of the lived experience of societal homogeneity that I have delineated above. Establishing one’s place and negotiating one’s identity as a member of an ethnic minority within a society that – as contentious as it may be to assert – remains disappointingly stagnant where minority ethnic representation is concerned, at least in such contexts as Parliament and the Bar. Of course, the narrative of under-representation also extends to the position of the female in society’s frameworks; we have a woman at the head of the UK government, yet there remains a huge amount of inequality in the workplace and in incomes between the sexes.
As we enter a new era of political and sociocultural change in an increasingly globalised world, the relationship between the individual and society is rapidly evolving; what will be the dominant cultural and structural themes that emerge in the years to come? This is an essential question at the heart of the negotiation between the realm of the self and the realm of the group. The challenge to overcome stifling conventions and the agenda-setting themes that dominate will become increasingly important for the individual, as global hegemony and globalisation continue to act as the main vehicles of the world’s political drivers.