Avery Grant

1. The Cult of the Individual

The Cult of the Individual, a term coined by Emile Durkheim, is the idea that the
culture of modern society wherein people worship at “the altar of themselves”
and the idea of individualism. According to Durkheim, the cult of the individual
is “Modern society’s inherent sickness.” Meaning, it is natural, built into modern
society and there cannot be a modern society without also having the cult of the
individual. The idea of, “My point of view is completely and totally unique
different disconnected I am the center of my own world. Only other people that
are in this exact same social location could understand what I’m experiencing.”
The causes of the cult of the individual are due to the highly specialized,
irreplaceable jobs and the hidden interdependence we have on one another in
modern society. The consequences are positives like creativity, motivation,
ambition, and imagination within people. It ensures that society has people
willing to do the work to fulfill the need for specialized jobs in the division of
labor. A negative consequence is that individual thoughts, opinions, and values,
things that are not factual, come to be seen as religious truth. This then leads to
disagreements and a society that is perpetually at war with itself, evidently
leading to social collapse. Modern society requires people to think that they're
special so they fill specialized roles in the division of labor. However, this all
comes at a cost because we are all worship at the altar of ourselves and have a
hard time recognizing the difference between our opinions and truth.

2. Anomic Suicide
Emile Durkheim’s theory of the typology of functions uses the concept of anomie,
a society lacking in consistent social norms, to explain why modern society is
getting more complex. Anomie is when an institution, anything that promotes
collective behavior, is at odds with itself. Specifically, when what an institution is
designed to do, its manifest function, contradicts what it actually does, latent
functions, in practice. Anomic suicide refers to this idea. When anomie exists
within the social system, people feel betrayed, let down, or cheated by society and
as a consequence, kill themselves. This includes people with high expectations
and people who believe society should work for them but aren’t seeing the results
they were expecting. An example of this could be a student with high grades in
high school going to a top university, only to not find a job after college
graduation. That idea contradicts the “norm” that going to a top school will
guarantee a successful life. Another example, school shootings committed by
people who have everything but feel betrayed because people don’t want to hang
out with them or their prom date said no. They are experiencing some type of
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contradiction to what they think they deserve. Durkheim predicted that “the
dominant group in all modern societies will always have the highest rate of
suicide because they are most likely to feel betrayed or let down by society when
things don’t go right.” In modern society, white men between the ages of 45 and
65 working middle class, professional white-collar jobs, are more likely to commit
anomic suicide than any other group because they are the dominant group.
Minorities, like members of the LGBTQ+ community or people of color, are not
as likely to commit anomic suicide because they don’t get that same feeling of
betrayal from society because their expectations aren’t as high.

3. Collective Effervescence
According to Durkheim, the largest social problem modern society faces is the
exclusion, disconnection, and isolation created by the cult of the individual. The
solution to this is inclusion, integration, and connection with one another
through formal institutions. Collective effervescence is the feeling of
connectedness that people experience when an institution briefly fulfills its
manifest function, what the institution was designed to do. It is a transcendent,
almost religious, fleeting moment that Durkheim claims one can get high from it.
It is similar to a moment at a concert when one sees people and society together
and despite differences, they’re part of a group.

4. Inequality
Inequality is the most important concept in conflict theory. Every conflict theory
(race, class, feminism, etc), focuses on inequality. Inequality is the disparities in
the distribution of resources between haves and have nots. It has how much of a
given resource haves possess relative to have notes. Inequality between two
groups means that the group that has the power is able to tell the other group
how they live their lives and dictate what they do. This is seen with gender
inequality, men telling women what they can and can’t do with their bodies
because they have the power. Roe vs Wade is currently being attacked and
women’s bodies are up to debate and there is a power dynamic of men dictating if
women can get an abortion.. Another example is the dynamic between parents
and their children. Since parents are the ones will all the resources (house,
money, pay for bills, etc) they can control the resources their kids use and take
part of, tell them what to do. However, this only works for as long as the parents
have more resources than their children. Once the kids grow up and gain more
resources, the parents’ control over them lessens as the inequality in resources
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grows smaller. When we have tremendous inequality, there is a group of people

that have less agency and control of their own lives and that is why it is
problematic. The greater the inequality, the more power and authority haves
possess to tell have notes how to live.

5. Mode of Production
The mode of production is part of the political economist Karl Marx’s equation.
The equation was developed to answer the question, where does our imagination
come from? It is set up between three different parts, the means of production,
the mode of production. Whatever the means of production are plus the relations
of production equal the mode of production. The mode of production is the
boundaries/limitations of our species-being (imagination) and style of how people
will produce “the material world.” In modern society, the mode of production is
capitalism, and the obsession with commodities, shown through commodity
fetishisms, the intense obsession with commodities, and gaining more. Because
of inequality, and the competition between the haves and have nots, haves having
power over the have nots creates capitalism. In traditional society, the mode of
production was feudalism and the obsession with pleasing God and accepting the
status quo. These modes of production were created from automated machinery
and natural resources, the relationship or machine operators and owners, and the
noble order to give a greater understanding of how the resources we have and the
relationship we have to those resources create the world around us and shows
how the world got to be how it is. It is significant because the equation answers
Marx’s question of how did we use our species being to create such a nightmare
reality. Our imagination is limited to our resources.

6. Labor Power
Labor power is the products people make, the uncompensated fruit of their labor.
People get paid for their time working, not what their imagination, species-being,
creates and that is why it’s uncompensated. The machine owner sells the
embodiment of their operators, their humanity, their species-being. The machine
owners receive their operator’s time and products and this robs the operators of
their species-being. Operators try to buy back the very goods they’re creating to
try to fill that void that creates the culture of capitalism, commodity fetishism.
Humanity being stolen makes us obsessed with getting it back which he calls
commodity fetishism. We become obsessed with consumption, material goods,
buying our species-being back that is stolen from us at work.
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7. Alienation
Alienation was one of Karl Marx’s philosophical critiques of capitalism that he
noted in one of his early works The German Ideology. Alienation is the feeling of
resentment and anger that people experience at the work they do. The idea that
the products people make, the fruit of their labor is being stolen every day at
work. People feel oppressed by themselves and thus start to hate the product they
produced, the essence of their imagination, their species-being. It is significant
because it explains why over time, people in modern societies become miserable
in their lives and it explains why people would ever hate themselves or become
resentful over a life they once loved. They feel alienated and oppressed from
society because their species-being is stolen.