Nice try, Joe,

"They have individual attitudes and feelings, just like you."
Thanks for the patronisation, perhaps you might learn to debate one day without resorting to that particular tactic. : )

I'm not attempting to "squeeze" Aboriginal people into any paradigm - other than the human one.

Like it or not, when they participate fully in mainstream society they (or individuals from any culture) are taking part in a collective waltz. They jettison their distinctiveness with every step they take.
Individuality and collectivity are dual qualities that merge to make society. As a culture, you can't maintain distinctiveness while merging with another more encompassing than your own. Things alter and little bits are continually shed by the wayside.

: )

Well Poirot, it's horses for courses: it depends who you are with, and who brung you. If I could modify your quote: 'They jettison their [public] distinctiveness with every step they take.' But it depends who somebody's 'public' is: for Aboriginal people, it is highly likely to be other Aboriginal people, most of the time. And when it isn't, people can easily put on their public persona, or a particular public persona, if you like, without losing their other persona/s. We all do it, it's part of our social skills.

So I wouldn't call it necessarily a 'collective' waltz: more like an associative one, for particular purposes at a particular time. After all, even when you are dancing with someone, you still have to think about your own feet. Well, I certainly do, to little avail.

Joe

*It seems to me, like all societies, to behave as a collective organism. It moves forward in step. It's extremely psychologically challenging to go against the herd...I know because I'm a homeschooler. Psychologically, I have to constantly look outside the square to justify my stance*

That really depends on you, Poirot, and your need to belong to
your particular "tribe". Which is really the people in your phone
register.

Take a closer look in most cities and you'll find that people of
similar minds hang out together, but they are quite different
from other groups or tribes. The religious hang out together,
the yachties and other sports types hang out together, the surfers
do their own thing, the list goes on.

You can even head for Nimbin and become a full time dope smoking
hippie and be well accepted by that group.

The thing is in our society people do in fact have choices, its
when behaviour becomes compulsory that there is a problem.

In fact people in our society who ignore society completely and
do their own thing, are often huge winners. Richard Branson is
a great example. Its common behaviour for all sorts of entrepreneurs.

Yabby,

I know you think you know "my type", but none of the people in my "phone register" homeschool. It truly was a decision I came to by myself. I've met people since who do it, but they are not part of my "tribe" even though we obviously have things in common. It's just that it was particularly difficult to okay it with myself because as a member of society I felt compelled to conform - to send my kid to school...

But I do agree that vying for a modicum of individualism is rewarding - sort of liberating in its way....but even people who manage to grab a bit of individualism are still, for the most part, tethered to the mainstays of their culture.
It's difficult to ignore the model set up in your head, as I found when I first thought of home education. I found I had to look at "education" itself in a whole new light.

Exactly, Poirot ! We are all individuals, no matter how much we may have common with other people. As you say about home-schoolers (who have all manner of idiosyncratic reasons for home-schooling), "... they are not part of my "tribe" even though we obviously have things in common."

But clearly, you didn't conform to some diktat. You thought for yourself. You made your own decisions. Would you want it any other way ?

Of course, we are all constrained by many factors, not least the right of others to as much freedom and choice as we have: one person's freedom of action is bound to abutt up against that of somebody else, or of society's in general. Isaiah Berlin's 'negative freedom' describes precisely these necessary limits on our freedom, that in a liberal society, everyone - at least formally - has similar limits on their freedom, i.e. not to intrude on somebody else's equal right to their freedom, and vice versa.

But we don't 'solve' or get around those constraints by submerging ourselves in some collective soup, and forgoing any individual choice at all. We can't solve the problem of constraint, if you like, by abolishing the very foundations on which we make our individual, and constrained, choices. I guess this in one of my beefs with Marx, that there are limits to the rights of the collective, as well as those of the individual. One can't abolish one by granting supreme power to the other.

To be fair, even Marx noted this ultimate primacy for the individual, in his description of what sounded to him like the ideal life: eight hours work, eight hours sleep, and eight hours to go fishing, or read, or sit under a tree and do nothing. Not much room there for the collective: so in his view, we work in co-operation, but what we do in our leisure time is our own business. Sounds fair enough.

Joe

Joe,

I think "culture" and individuality and collectivity are wide-ranging in scope and meaning.
My point was that in choosing to homeschool, I was acting way outside the prescribed paradigm. It took much psychological effort on my part to realise that I actually was in possession of such freedom.
I probably do most other things within the canon of accepted cultural conduct. It's the culture in which I'm embedded which dictates the norm. Many people in the world would think one nuts to shut a child in a room all day to "educate" them - because their culture is different and a child is educated in the things s/he needs to know in other ways.

I deviated from the norm - most people don't.