Made into Consumers · From Kinship to the Individual

In my conversation with Alakh Puri for Inflection Point, I spoke about what came after the colonial exercise broke the civilization state into pieces and set the pieces against each other. Even within those pieces, they broke the pieces into individuals.

The Industrial Revolution produced goods in great quantities, and they had to sell those goods. So they had to create good consumers, and that meant breaking individuals off from their collectives: family, friends and community. They had to do away with the idea of a collective identity.

I see it the other way around: the individual is there to sacrifice self-interest towards the prosperity and survival of his or her collective. That is a point of view of power. Weakness arises out of the idea of the individual.

Subtitles in English, Hindi, Konkani, Serbian and Russian: choose your language with the buttons under the video. The full conversation with Alakh Puri is coming to Inflection Point.