Preliminary Ruminations on the Whole and the Part

It would be ideal if what is best for a society synced perfectly with what is best for an individual. All you would have to do is make yourself the best person you could be and your society would effortlessly be the best that it could be. Of course we have to define all of these “bests” at some point, but even before doing so we have to see that we humans never have lived as though this ideal were so. The larger cultural interests militate against the perfection of the individual and the improvement of the individual comes at the expense of the collective.

I’d rather talk in complex and substantive spiritual terms, but the easiest illustration is economic. I’d be better off if I didn’t pay my taxes—as long as everyone else did. The government has enough money without mine and I could do so much more it I could keep it. My paltry fund—whether it’s a thousand or ten thousand or a million—is literally worth more to me than it is to them. I would not see the difference in value of roads and cops and schools if I did not give my little bit. But I would see the value of a newer, safer car, a bigger house, a brighter garden.

Nonetheless I grudge my taxes less than many. I should think it an honor to pay them—if only I were a better person. But I think of it rather as a responsibility. I may get some spiritual value out of paying them. But then I know a book by Deepak Chopra costs less than I’m paying in taxes. Moreover, I know that my money is being used to buy bombs and tanks and to pay the idiots in congress to undermine education on a national level. We’d all be better off if I donated my taxes to my local school or gave them to a single music teacher. But I pay my taxes. I’m part of the collective and the collective functions better if we all contribute to it.

More important than taxes, and more in line with the history of thought from Nietzsche to Foucault is the spiritual tension between the extractions of culture and the desires of the individual. Power wants docile citizens. Power is corrupting for the state, but a certain degree of humility is valuable for the individual. Spiritually enlightened people create by their passivity corrupt governments.