To act collectively we need brave individuals

Wanted: people to reject the groupthink of individualism

“You’re all individuals!”, shouts Brian despairingly at the crowd in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. “Yes, we’re all individuals”, chants the crowd in unison. “I’m not”, mutters one.

Fast forward 2,000 years (or 47 years from the making of the film, if you prefer) and we find a similar puzzle in Britain today.

Individually, we often recognise the importance of collective factors (like being born into wealth or poverty) in influencing life chances and outcomes, but collectively, we tend to maintain the fiction that whether people end up rich or poor is mostly down to individual characteristics and choices.

Just as we labour under a collective delusion that we live in a meritocracy, we suffer from a collective misperception that most other people are overwhelmingly individualistic.

This dynamic of collective individualism is a problem in public life. Politicians and media commentators love to celebrate ‘rags to riches’ stories that seem to support the idea that ‘you can make it if you try’, that success is down to individual talent and hard work. This idea legitimises inequality and undermines actions to tackle it, including government policies to share wealth across society and to reduce the negative impacts of wealth inequality.

Rags to riches thinking has concrete impacts in a range of policy areas. For example:

• It helps the wealth defence industry to push back against any efforts to tax wealth more by marshalling the flimsiest evidence conceivable to suggest that such changes will lead to an exodus of ‘golden geese’ upon whom our economy supposedly relies

• It weakens calls for action to improve pay, conditions and job security for millions of low-paid workers (and to restrain the excesses of executive pay, at the other end of the spectrum)

• It skews the debate about social security by diverting attention away from the many ways in which poverty and disadvantage act as barriers to people maximising their potential

• It undermines progress on improving people’s health (and especially on addressing health inequalities) by playing into the idea that individual lifestyles and choices have a bigger impact on health than ‘social determinants’ like housing, jobs and socio-economic status

A collective bias towards thinking about individuals rather than about systems is also an issue in the private sector, through:

• Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), where the groupthink says that we should focus on helping individuals from disadvantaged groups (based on their socioeconomic status, race, gender, region, disability and so on) to access elite institutions, even as many companies oppose policy proposals that would help to address the inequalities that affect those groups in the first place

• Environmental, social and governance (ESG), which focuses on how individual companies can minimise their harms to society and the environment (or sell products and services that help others to do so), but tends to underplay the need for a 'whole of economy’ transition that would achieve genuine systemic change

To help to unpick some of these problems across the public and private sectors, we need more people who are willing to break from the herd and to challenge the collective presumption towards individualism. Ironically, we need brave individual leaders and thinkers - including more otroverts, people born with a tendency to resist groupthink and a disinclination towards joining in - to focus our attention on structural problems and solutions in our society and economy.

If some of these people are ‘unexpected messengers’, so much the better. It would be wonderful to see successful people - people who are assumed to view their status in life as the result of individual hard graft and talent - speaking out in public to recognise the role that luck has played in their lives.