Imagine a large series of overlapping circles: a Venn diagram reflecting all human beings. The full set of mankind exists within the rectangle. Draw a circle around Christians. Now narrow it to Protestants. Draw a circle around Anglo-Saxons. Draw a circle around North Americans. Draw a circle around all those whose ancestors lived in Tennessee in 1861. Draw a circle around fathers. Draw a circle around intellectuals. Continue doing this and eventually you’re going to get down to a very specific person like myself.
Wipe away the circles and do this for yourself: draw a series of Venn circles until you are able to zero in on you and you alone. Only use circles which relate to your identity, are definitive of yourself, and are valid throughout your life; don’t use your address, office number, or irrelevant facts which change like belt size.
Now read the list of circles that you created. You probably have religion, ethnicity, sex, and profession as circles. You might have sociopolitical identities. You might have circles with something to do with your ancestors and your descendants, if any. You may have circles representing your home town, high school, or regional identity. In order to make a Venn diagram which only includes yourself and excludes every other person on earth, you probably need a very complex interaction of multiple variables. If any one of these variables were removed, the diagram would no longer represent you.
The purpose of this thought experiment is an attempt to formulate a new, sustainable, non-atomistic understanding of the concept of individualism. Modern individualism, as a product of the Enlightenment, has the function of isolating and alienating individuals from God, society, and eventually even from themselves. From Putnam’s Bowling Alone to the transgender movement, modernity loudly proclaims the inability of people to belong, even to themselves. It instead offers a vision of individualism, in which the person creates themselves in their own image, as if Adam were to form himself in the Garden.