Can Individualism be Considered a Myth?

The relationship between individual and society is very closely related since they balance each other out. They both have one thing in common and that is practices, people practice their daily needs to survive through life. Practices like communication or religion is very important for everyone to understand and connect with one another. All these practices puts us in a category that define each individual, whether they like that label upon themselves or not. Society can’t coexist without individuality because the lives of people act within the society, but it serves the people that live in society.

Language is something that defines where that person is from and will not vanish because generations after generations will learn how to connect and communicate with it. As long as language lives on, so will the name system. These two important factors are a way for people to tell the difference between each other or things. The naming system is the first method for people to differentiate one thing or person from one another. In the natural process of life, every child will be assigned to a name from their parents and that name will be apart of their lives forever. Since the name identifies the child, he or she belongs to a particular group in society. Therefore, names identify each individuals as a member of the group and themselves. Without these practices, people won’t know how humans act and how they interact with one another. Every society has a system with names and labels, and all of them have something in common. That one thing they all have in common is history, history explains the reason for why something or someone is named and it can tell us about the historical events that happened during your birth year.

Underneath it all, the moment Emma became Emma, and the minute they received their names, as well. It has became progressively clear that in today’s times, names carry an abundance of information about the environment people live in: where their ancestors came from, where their family came from, the past and the present. Knowing that, makes everyone apart of something that’s bigger. On the Social Security Administration’s name website, my name “Christine” actually tells me a lot about what happened during the most popular year that it was chosen. The year when my name was the most popular was in 1970, there were a lot of wars and scandals happening in the world, politically. One of them was our U.S President Richard Nixon, who ordered an invasion of Cambodia, which widen the war in Vietnam. My name Christine is mainly for females and it means “follower of Christ”. In 1970, the people that lived in this country and out of it needed hope, so they turned to God and prayed for better days. While many endured hardships and sadness, some were giving birth to babies. In that year, the number of births is 16061, which represents 0.877 percent of total female births in 1970. My name was chosen because of a social trend that represented hopelessness to everyone and they wanted something that will give them hope.

Sociologists view individualism as a myth because everything is not the way it seems. People can’t assume the worse of a situation when they don’t know the whole picture. People’s individualism is different, which is why it’s unique. With that uniqueness, it can be interpreted the wrong way. Everyone has a religion they believe in, a culture that they live by, and a tradition that they celebrate, but other people who don’t live the same life as you, may see something as “weird” or “wrong”. Individualism is a myth because it uses that uniqueness and differences in each other to build a society that is diverse. With that diversity, a piece of everyone’s differences are intact into the bigger picture of society. This way, people’s interpersonal network and skills will be used more connect or sympathize with one another when having confidential conversations. If every individual are willing to be open to critique and revision, there will be less indivuSocieSociadualist assumptions. 

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