People who are feeling like they ought to be doing something, but don't know what; who feel like things are falling apart around them or the world is heading to a scary place; who feel like the amount of evil or pain or destructiveness in the world is increasing; why *not* focus on the self first? Why not be a darkworker? (Other than not liking the evil-sounding unsexy name).
It is far more likely for you to make a difference in your own life then in the multitudes of others. If everybody who was doing nothing instead decided to improve themselves a small amount, it would make a huge difference globally, all without worrying about the collective.
I think the bias against self-motivation is actually the bias against un-enlightened self-motivation, which I think some have touched on. Nearly all collective lifeforms, like bodies, are comprised of cell-like strucutres that really, honestly, *don't care* about the group. They do what they need to improve their own self-interests.
Everybody who constantly talks about feeling the power of the collective race of humanity, I wonder about, because the model in nature is for collective intelligences to not be generally available to the quanta in the model. Hive intelligence is only available at the hive level. Individuals in the swarm don't comprehend the goals of the swarm because the requirement to think like a swarm is to be as complex as the swarm, which individual elements are not. It feels nice to imagine you can 'tap in' to the swarm's overmind, but its not very likely - at least not in the power of nature.
In an ecosystem, the individual elements are *entirely* selfish. they don't get out of control (some would say evil) by checks and balances and competition from other elements - not because animals or nature are somehow "good".
I personally think that the feeling of overwhelm people get because 'something is wrong' with the collective is people thinking they should be moving a huge mass with their single strength, and because of overwhelm doing nothing. Instead, if people did their best to improve things from the skin in, which is far more manageable, and follow the way the collective model works in nature, we'd see far more changes for the better.
And, before someone asks, I do believe an individual can improve the lives of millions. I'm just saying that a stategy that works for the average person will be far better leveraged by the mass of average people than a strategy that can only be performed by a very small percentage of 'enlightened' folks.  |