My background is in anthropology, so I will attempt to give you some points to consider when addressing whether humans can ever truly be individuals.
The first thing that comes to mind is the idea of socialization. Since we are all socialized into the culture we inherit by birth, our worldview (or if you want to sound really smart, Weltanschauung) is formed by those who raise us and the cultural realities we immediately occupy. If we...
My background is in anthropology, so I will attempt to give you some points to consider when addressing whether humans can ever truly be individuals.
The first thing that comes to mind is the idea of socialization. Since we are all socialized into the culture we inherit by birth, our worldview (or if you want to sound really smart, Weltanschauung) is formed by those who raise us and the cultural realities we immediately occupy. If we are taught how to be and think from birth according to our culture (which includes our language, beliefs, manners, and everything else that instructs our interactions and how we conduct ourselves and communicate), we can never really be completely individual.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. To be truly individual you would need to speak your own language that could not be shared by anyone else. You would need to hold beliefs, values and opinions that were also unique to you alone. This, I am sure you can imagine, would be very frustrating and inconvenient to not just yourself but to all those who had to interact with you.
In a sense, no one can really be an individual because the very way we think and process our world is taught to us by others before we are even able to think for ourselves.
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