Only the Individual is Real

If you have ever visited a ghost town or any ancient site you probably saw a lot of visible remains, though not one person living there. There could've been tons of artifacts and other material structures left behind but the Society had disappeared.

The individuals who lived in such places were the component parts of what made up the whole of their Society. Without them, Society wouldn't of existed; you can't have a whole without it's components.

The concept of Society came about as a form of convenience, a general impression to describe a given group of people that shared some observable similarities.

If you are part of a community where vast amount of people mingle and spend time on the beach, you have a beach culture society. If everyone works in factories or warehouses, you have a industrial society; and so on. Apart from noticing these patterns among various individuals there's not much else one can say with any certainty about them.

Now, just because we can observe similar patterns and features a group of people may share doesn't make it a real entity. For something to be real, not just a mere abstraction, is must be based on identification and limitation. The term Society has the danger of being personified as something real and living which can then be used in an infinite amount of ways against individuals, regardless if each one fits the criteria.

Take a look at any example of this sort of personification done by any totalitarian regime including more recently by the imperial United States. Governments have infamously used various propaganda efforts to enemize a faction of people deemed dangerous toward their own power.

When the United States talks about the threat from "Islamic extremists" or "Syrians" they have thrown a blanket statement over any individual that might be Muslim or live in the geographical region called Syria. They are turning a vague generalization into a fact.

This is the danger of turning a generalized grouping into an entity like a real person; it assumes characteristics about a large amount of people which can't be possibly true for each person.

While general statements might be useful in a convenient sense, as a sort of aesthetic impression perhaps, it has fatal results if you let your imagination pretend it's something otherwise. All war, genocides, and other forms of criminality done by governments have it's root in this collectivist mindset.

Nevertheless, the solution is simple as well as a big labor savor—remember that the only real identity is the individual.

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