The Final Solution: Crowd Sourcing

The fun of collective activity is lost on determined individualists. Trump’s base is a collectivity and they enjoy it. The huge opposition to the Trump agenda is a collectivity who suffer from the repeal of a progressive global agenda, but they secretly also enjoy their shared purpose and agenda. Without the opposition to Trump they wouldn’t have each other. So why can’t everyone enjoy the feeling of belonging and the strength that comes in numbers? Part of the answer may go back to kindergarten. Some people just never fit in. They’re quirky in a way that either they don’t want everybody or nobody wants them. The famous Groucho Marx quip, “I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member," later appropriated by Woody Allen actually explains the ethos of this ever dwindling group of outcasts, misfits and on the positive side eccentrically colorful characters, who had a brief heyday during the late l9th century in the world of the dandy, boulevardier and flaneur, in the 50s with Beats like Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs and in the early 70s following the decline of the love generation when there was a brief spike in the presence of self-invented Edwardian dandies who inhabited the club scene. Thomas Mann apotheosized this kind of romantic individualism in his famous character Tonio Kroger, a citation itself which has itself become rarified in our current aspirational world. Fascism and Communism are the epitomes of collectivities—though there's the curious anomaly that the dictatorship of the proletariat, for example, is actually the dictatorship of Lenin, Stalin and other party apparatchiks. The pie-eyed individualist is going to walk away from any mob. He or she will refuse to be lifted up and will actually scowl from the sidelines, despite the occasional longing to belong.