The Crises of the Contemporary American Individual, or, "Pardon Me, I Seem to Have Misplaced My Freedom"

Abstract

The author presents five philosophical essays inspired by the ideas found in the writing of Daniel Bell, Robert Bellah, Allan Bloom, Christopher Lasch, Niel Postman, and Alan Wolfe, and constructed in the style Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The author writes that the crisis of the American individual is rooted in the most unsuspected of places; our idea of individualism itself. The crisis is, essentially, a result of our inability to find a larger context in which to understand our actions. This is a result of the paradoxical state of our modern society, which places individuals in a double bind between the irrational calls of the market and rational obligations to society. On a deeper level, it is a problem of pluralism: 300 million unique, individual voices are in reality all saying the same thing. Essays address issues of citizenship, the impact of information technology, and environmental problems.