Individualism and Income Sharing

by Raven

We live in a society dominated by individualism. This is pretty well known.  We canonize our heroes (the Great Man or, occasionally, the Great Woman), we prize those that make it on their own, particularly if they make it big, and we often scorn those that we see as ‘needy’, those that can’t make it on their own.

Capitalism thrives on individualism.  If you are struggling to make it on your own, this is very good for capitalism since if you need a lot, this makes you a prime consumer.  Sharing stuff, of course, is discouraged, because then you wouldn’t need to buy so many products.

What’s interesting to me is how prevalent the individualist attitude is, even within the communities movement.  There are very few income sharing communities.  What’s popular on the community scene is cohousing, where everyone has their own private home and they just share the land and a few common buildings.  Now I’m not saying that cohousing is bad.  It’s an important first step in this individualist society to even do that amount of sharing. But it’s not an accident that these communities are popping up all over the place while the few communes that there are, are struggling to survive.

I also see the interest in ‘tiny houses’ as also a part of individualism.  The latest issue of Communities magazine has an article entitled, “Do You Really Need All That Space? Tiny Houses as Appropriate Technology.”  Yes, I suppose that if you really need to live by yourself or with just one other person, a tiny house might be better than utilizing a big place for so few people.  But Alexis from Living Energy Farm points out that ‘a slob’ (his words) in an apartment building in Brooklyn actually has a lower carbon footprint than someone living in a tiny house.

Tiny houses

I have no desire to live in a tiny house.  What I really want to do is to live in a big old house–and cram it full of people. And yes, living that closely with a lot of people can be hard and messy, but it also can be very satisfying.

Sharing seems very hard to do for many people and I think that the biggest reason is that this society, very deliberately it seems, makes it hard.  Income sharing is radical sharing and it flies in the face of individualism.  In community we take care of each other and in communes, in income sharing communities, we not only care for each other but we are tied together.  If the solution to “the long loneliness” is community (to paraphrase Dorothy Day), I’m also convinced that the antidote to individualism is income-sharing.