Flowers For Society

Meandering thoughts on individuality, atomization, community, and Miley Cyrus

Did you know that Miley Cyrus released a new album yesterday?

Endless Summer Vacation, by Miley Cyrus. Certainly classier than Wrecking Ball.

Well, neither did I, but it’s what I was greeted with when I opened Spotify this morning. I’ve never really been into pop music, and as such have never really been into Miley Cyrus, but as a cultural figure she’s certainly a household name by now. So on a whim, I clicked into the album and pressed play on the first track, Flowers. The song follows a modern trend in pop music away from the manufactured, glitzy, power-pop style of the 2000’s, and towards a much more low-key and vocal-focused style. It’s still not really my kind of music, but it’s a vast improvement over the insufferable Party in the USA.

What struck me about the song wasn’t it’s melody, instrumentals, or production, which are pretty standard faire, but its lyrics. Here’s the first verse and chorus.

We were good, we were gold
Kinda dream that can't be sold
We were right 'til we weren't
Built a home and watched it burn

Mm, I didn't wanna leave you, I didn't wanna lie
Started to cry, but then remembered I

I can buy myself flowers
Write my name in the sand
Talk to myself for hours
Say things you don't understand
I can take myself dancing
And I can hold my own hand
Yeah, I can love me better than you can
Can love me better, I can love me better, baby
Can love me better, I can love me better, baby

If I had to guess, I’d say that this song was intended to come across as empowering, to use that hated word. But when I listened to it, it just made me sad. Let’s zoom way out for a second to discuss what’s at play here.

One of the core consequences of the enlightenment was the focus on the individual as the fundamental unit of society. Individuals make up families which make up towns/cities which make up states which make up nations, roughly speaking. I’m no expert here, but I imagine before the enlightenment any concept of a “fundamental unit of society” was muddy and inconsistent, at best (or based on a collectivist philosophy at worst). It wasn’t that the concept didn’t exist at all, but with the enlightenment and creation of the United States, the individual right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was made explicit and individualism as we know it was born.

This new emphasis on individuals was a decidedly good thing for society, and paved the way for a truly incredible level of social progress. Slavery was abolished within 100 years of the country’s founding, and women earned the right to participate in the political process in the 1920’s. Then we had the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s, making racial and religious discrimination illegal. Finally, most recently in 2015, the right to same-sex marriage was affirmed by the supreme court. Each of the events I’ve described brings the country closer to fully realizing the ideal described by our nation’s all men are created equal rhetoric.

But take any virtue too far, and it becomes a vice. Ambition, for example, is a pro-social and virtuous quality to have. But take it too far, and it devolves into greed. Justice is another pro-social virtue, and rigid tyranny is its destructive, anti-social face.¹ Individualism is good, but when overemphasized, we get atomization. And nothing reinforces atomization like the modern internet. Freddie DeBoer recently wrote a nostalgic piece about the 1990’s, in which he wrote,

There was a counterculture because there was a culture to be counter to. We hadn’t splintered off into a billion little online niches, which meant that there were shared cultural touchstones like Dawson’s Creek or the whole boy band thing, and it also meant that you could meaningfully oppose that shared culture, stand for something else. There’s nothing to stand against anymore, just endless little covens of people telling each other how valid they are.

A billion little online niches really gets at a particular kind of uniquely modern phenomenon, in which everyone’s online experience is increasingly tailored to them specifically.

Now we can turn our attention back to Miley Cyrus.

I can buy myself flowers
Write my name in the sand
Talk to myself for hours
Say things you don't understand
I can take myself dancing
And I can hold my own hand
Yeah, I can love me better than you can

This is clearly a cry for help from a woman who’s being crushed by our increasingly atomized society. Buying yourself flowers might feel nice once or twice, but if you’re talking to yourself for hours, then you should probably seek professional help. That last remark was me being facetious, but the point I’m making here is that these lyrics paint the picture of someone who’s so thoroughly atomized, so totally and completely self-sufficient that she doesn’t even seem to want a romantic partner. “I can love me better than you can?” Maybe, but that sounds like a lonely prospect to me.

I’ve been writing on Substack for a coming up on half a year now, and reading on Substack for far longer, and a recurring bit of wisdom I keep seeing is that if you want to feel better, help someone else. Feeling depressed? Do something nice for someone. Feeling stuck in your own head? Try to help someone sort through their own troubles. What does this tell us about human nature? It tells us that the solution to the problems of atomization is pro-social community.²

An aside from my own life: I’ve been living for about a year and a half by myself, in a one bedroom apartment in Philadelphia. Don’t get me wrong, living by myself has some serious benefits, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t get lonely sometimes. But a month or so ago, a few friends from college mentioned offhandedly that they were moving to the DC area, and to make a long story short it looks like I’ll be moving in with them at the end of the year. I just had this text exchange as I was writing (using A and B as stand-ins for the names):

Me: … Living by myself was great at first but I'm looking forward to having some roommates again

A: B says the exact same thing

Communities can be based on many different things, but whatever those things are, they have to have real weight and meaning to a community’s members. Religious community feels like the quintessential example here, bound together by a particular supernatural belief and moral system. But there’s another social arrangement that doesn’t get thought of in terms of community as often, and that’s nuclear families. A mother and a father bound together by marriage for the purpose of creating and raising children. What both religious community and nuclear families have in common is that they’re demanding of resources and responsibility, and they constrain future actions. Modern culture might recoil at the adoption of commitment and responsibility, but the truth is that family and spirituality are where individuals derive most of their long-term meaning in life. You don’t do yourself any favors by treating that casually or putting it off longer than you should, especially if you’re motivated by short-term reasoning.

To recap— individualism is a good thing, and has done wonders for society, but when it’s overemphasized you get atomization. The antidote to atomization is genuine community. And the most rewarding forms of community require sacrifice.

At the end of the day, human beings are deeply social creatures. That’s why, as advanced as our civilization has become, tribalism and polarization are still some of our biggest social problems. It’s why solitary confinement is how you punish a prisoner, which is by definition someone who’s already being punished. While Miley Cyrus can pretend that she can meet all her own needs, there’s a reason her lyrics ring hollow. Atomization simply runs counter to human nature. As for the future, I’m hopeful on this front. The fact that atomization is even in our cultural lexicon is a good sign. Time will tell whether Western society wakes up to this fact, and begins creating organic communities to help create well-integrated adults, or goes further and further down the rabbit hole of atomization, and our society crumples into the ashes of history.

1. Thanks to a recent postcard from Barsoom, I’ve had the concept of virtue on the brain for the past few days.

2. Speaking of community, I can’t help but shout out Deimos Station, where I’m fairly active along with several other top-tier Substack writers.