無 / 有 – Sungwon Peter Choe Online

Individual and Socio-Cultural Environment in Synergy

Individual and Environment

An individual’s thoughts and actions shape her environment. The environment in turn shapes the individual. We have a simple feedback system. 

The individual shapes the environment and vice versa.

This seems like a simple and obvious truth, but many misunderstandings arise when the context of this simple model is forgotten. 

For example, if your English is good enough to be reading this blog than you’ve probably inherited many of the values and frames of the Western Neo-Liberal culture as I have. One of these frames is that society (the Environment) is bad. Bad society, bad! Society is blamed for, well, society’s ills (hehe) in everything from middle school student essays to mainstream media news outlets. But we as individuals are all integral parts of the society. Someone like Krishnamurti would goes as far as to say that the individual is the society and the society is the individual.

The Inner and Outer of Politics

At the risk of complicating our simple model, let’s introduce Ken Wilber’s AQAL model. Basically, if we split the individual into an interior and exterior component, we get the top two quadrants in AQAL (I = thoughts, feelings and It = body, behavior). Likewise, if we split the environment into an interior and exterior component we get the bottom quadrants (We = culture and Its = systems, society). These four basic perspectives are available to us in any given moment, though we usually are only aware of one.

The Four Quadrants of Integral Theory (source: gaia.com)

Ken Wilber has pointed out that politics in America are largely dominated by Democrats focusing on the exterior quadrants and Republicans on the interior. Let’s take the plight of the inner city youth coming of age in a low-income community. Why does he not get a job? A Republican would say that it’s the individual’s responsibility to be proactive and make his own opportunities. The Democrat would say that the socio-economic conditions facing the individual are near insurmountable. To allow the individual to get a decent job, we have to first improve the socio-economic structure. 

Hey wait, seems like Republicans are blaming the individual, not society! That’s true. But they do also blame the culture. Why isn’t Joe the Unempolyed being proactive? He doesn’t have the right “family” (i.e. cultural) values. The AQAL model distinguishes between culture (”we”, an inner quadrant) and society (”its”, an outer), two concepts that are often confused (in every sense of the word). Thus, Republicans also take on the anti-environment bias of the Neo-liberal tradition but in its inner form as culture (damn that Hollywood, Marilyn Manson and those video games!). 

Psychosis and Society

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand presented in so many words her dystopian vision of a totalitarian society where the justification for all kinds of horrible things is the greater good of society, usually at the expense of the individual. Rand points out that society is in fact made up of individuals, claiming that working for the good of one’s own individual self will actually lead to a better society overall (”rational selfishness”).  

The antagonists in Atlas Shrugged disassociate the individual from her role as an integral member of society. We know from Psychology that elements of the psyche that are disassociated and repressed live on in the shadow (i.e. the unconscious). In Rand’s dystopia, the individual thus becomes repressed and demonized. Atlas Shrugged clearly resonates with the libertarian ideals of the United States as it reasserts the importance and autonomy of the individual in combatting this kind of disassociation.

However, disassociation goes both ways. In the U.S., the individual is put up on a pedestal and it is society (or culture) that is often demonized. This seems to have manifested in popular consciousness as a kind of narcissistic self-deprecation of one’s own American culture. 

Cultural Differences

After becoming conscious of this frame in myself, I began noticing it in many other ex-pats living here in Korea, as well as in American popular culture. Ironically, this disdain for and disassociation from mainstream American culture identifies oneself clearly as being a product of that culture just as much as espousing the values of the supposed mainstream.

Of course, it is not just Americans who are prone to overemphasizing one or the other of these synergistic elements. It’s interesting to see that Koreans who are well-versed in the English language and and hip to American culture also often adopt these kinds of anti-mainstream values and frames. 

In conversations with other Koreans not as well-versed in American culture, they often credit my less constrained lifestyle (polyamorous, no plans to work for a company or get married, taking on several roles at a time: grad student, rocker, spiritual practioner, etc.) to having been brought up in American society and culture. (While there is a lot of truth to that perspective in that my upbringing was an undeniable formative influence, my values and lifestyle are also the result of having the freedom to reflect on who I am and what my relationship is to society by being outside of my home culture in a foreign country.) I often hear: “Yeah, I’d like to do that, too, but I can’t because I’m Korean.” While it is true that Korean culture imposes more rigid social expectations that are harder to avoid, that self-disqualification also neglects the fact that the individual is an integral part of the society. Society and culture changes with the shifting tides of individual values and behaviors. And vice versa. 

Interestingly, however, supposedly open-minded Westerners are often befuddled by Koreans who are more inclined to follow their own paths (i.e. who are on the leading edge of societal change). A good friend of mine is often told by such Westerners that she is “not like other Koreans” implying somehow that she is not authentically Korean because she stretches the confines of her social roles. This turns out to be a common psychological device, by the way, according to Psychology Professor Dovidio:

“Even when presented with multiple exceptions to the stereotype, we often keep the broad category and simply create a subtype.” [New York Times,  My friend's blog excerpt of the same article has much more entertaining pictures.]

Games for the Lazy

The bias that society, or more generally an individual’s environment itself, is a hindrance to the individual pervades even the Computer Science research community.

A currently hot area of research is Ubiquitous (or Pervasive) Computing. One of the projects in my lab has to do with designing ubiquitous games to make boring life tasks more fun. At first I didn’t want to join this research project because of the assumptions and approaches that, as a limited and focused research paper, it must make (I later joined to help with the conference paper writing). One such assumption is that technology should change the environment to suit the individual.

There is nothing wrong with that in of itself (in fact it is a part of the history of human technology and society), but the narrow focus of research paper-writing leads to short-sighted design approaches that only focus on the technology and how it can be used to shape the environment. Such approaches don’t take into account the individual’s level of development or potential for growth. As a result, many such design approaches do away with “good pain” that can lead to personal growth as well as “bad pain” that is just plain pain. But that is a subject for another article.