In response to some of the foolishness taking place around the country on tax day today, I offer a very un-GenX take on the subject of the individual and the community, reposted from my old Emphasis Added blog from 2003:

The concept of  the “rugged individual” is intimately bound up with contemporary conservatism. He (because the ideal is always a male in this theory) is a solitary actor who makes decisions based on principles, takes responsibility for the consequences of his actions, follows his dreams and leads his family as he sees fit. The nobility of this creature is such that he must be categorically free from all constraints of state and community to pursue his personal, economic and ideological interests.

Conservatives see the rugged individual as the foundation of society. Empowering him means empowering the whole bulwark of capitalism –  risk, innovation, competition – with the resulting benefits of a robust free market to enrich and improve society at large. In the ideal, the entire field of play must be open to his ambition. This means that the potential rewards of success must be entirely uncapped, and the pitfalls of failure entirely unmitigated.

The allure of this unconstrained state of nature has a powerful grip on the male American imagination (as well as on the occasional female, such as the writer Ayn Rand). It first appeared as a national meme (self-replicating idea) in the early years of the 20^th century, almost precisely at the moment when the American continent had been fully settled. To frustrated frontiersman like Teddy Roosevelt, the ideal of rugged individualism as an abstract political-economic theory compensated for the lost opportunity to actually prove oneself against the rigors that had distinguished preceding generations of Americans in the taming of a wild land.

It is this sense of frustration over the need for compromise that continues to make the purity of the rugged individual idea so attractive to certain kinds of men today. Faced with unprecedented competition from women, devaluation of traditionally masculine skills such as physical strength, and a society that increasingly denies them the privileges and preferential opportunities that previous generations of men enjoyed, certain men today cling to the rugged individual idea with a fierceness that approaches religious belief, because it is all that they have left. Since it is intimately tied to a conservative political viewpoint, this too becomes tightly bound into the psychological makeup of the individual to the point where he loses the ability to rationally process experiences and information that contradict the myth.

Time for some full disclosure here. I am a rugged individual. I own my own business. I have not taken a corporate or government paycheck since I was 24 years old, and it is my career ambition to never take one again until the day I retire. I am religiously unaffiliated. I am 36 and unmarried with no kids (though have sustained a committed relationship for 12+  (now 18!) mostly-wonderful years ). My partner and I maintain separate residences in adjacent buildings, less than 200 feet apart (alas, no longer - we share one big place). As my friends and former business associates will be happy to tell you, I have an almost pathological resistance to formal relationships and forced camaraderie, although I do my best to honor informal and meaningful friendships to the best of my ability. I have made it this far in life making relatively few meaningful compromises, partly because I am exceedingly willing to make as many small compromises as are necessary to achieve my larger goals.

Because I have a relatively high degree of control over important things in my life, I am acutely aware of the things I can’t control. Some of my circumstances are due to my own talent and accomplishments, but little of it would have been possible without the benefits of a supportive and stable homelife, excellent schooling and an incredible amount of luck and good timing – none of which I can claim any credit for. Likewise, it is exceedingly clear from my position that business success and a rewarding lifestyle are impossible without a vibrant external community and infrastructure of services (some governmental, some private). This external superstructure contributes a great deal, and yet demands from me only money in the form of taxes and various costs and fees.

For all individuals, rugged or otherwise, once you reach a certain point in life, some things are out of your control. I have seen several men who were much more accomplished and successful at my age than I am meet with devastating reversals of fortune later in life, when they had exhausted the resources and energy of their youth and found the opportunities were no longer there for them. This is the terrifying downside of rugged individualism – the part that is rarely romanticized or discussed by the wanna-bes and ideologues. One day, the phone stops ringing, the skills decline, the flame of ambition fades. Even those fortunate enough to avoid this fate will someday see their strength and health give way to age and disease. This is simply a certainty of life.

If you are actually in the situation where you must consider these things on a daily basis – precisely because you have denied yourself the reliable comforts of a conventional lifestyle – the prospect of depending on your community for certain services is not some kind of dreadful prospect, but rather a critical benefit. Maybe you will get lucky and be one of the few who really can take care of himself from cradle to grave. But the numbers are not encouraging.

Unlike the romantic ideologues and wanna-bes, real rugged individuals recognize the limits of their own ability to control their lives, even with careful planning. I carry my own health insurance and save aggressively for retirement and to cover slow patches in my business cycle, but that’s not the same as a guarantee. Investments go bad, insurance companies refuse to pay – all for reasons well outside the control of any single person. The negative consequences when those support systems fail are so great that I am personally willing to give up a certain degree of reward and efficiency to reduce the risk to zero. In plain English, that means I enthusiastically support state-mandated health care and retirement programs because it’s the only way those services can be truly be guaranteed. I am happy, eager and proud to contribute what I can now in taxes and resources because I know that there will be a time when I will need the benefits.

It’s not surprising to me that people with less control over their lives project on the archetype of the rugged individual all the ideals and aspirations that are, for whatever reason, not available to them. Unfortunately, this very potent myth has been appropriated by some very clever and ruthless people to marshal support for irrationally-motivated and catastrophically short-sighted political agendas. And it has no relationship to the reality faced by most people who choose the individualist path.

Take it from a real-life rugged individual small-businessman entrepreneur: you can’t disconnect the decisions and skills of the individual from the numerous familial, communitarian and public factors that enable their success. If we really want to empower the rugged individual, we need to support and bolster those supporting structures through aggressive investment, and we need to soften the downside of risk from factors beyond any individual’s control. Maybe it imposes a financial burden today, but both of those objectives are worth the short-term costs.