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By Evan Clark
Having read the short story “The Egg” by Andy Weir and most of the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, I have noticed intriguing parallels and differences between their portrayals of the concepts of the individual versus the collective. My fellow seniors in the McConnell Scholars Program and I have been reading the Zamyatin’s dystopian novel throughout this semester. While the novel’s immensely unreliable narrator, D-503, begins to question the worldview propagated by the theoretically all-powerful One State, he nevertheless writes propaganda for the One State throughout much of the book, at one point describing the individual as insignificant compared to the collective. This perspective of the One State reveals the assumption that there is a dichotomy between the individual and the whole, and that the collective must triumph over the allegedly puny and expendable individual. On page 102 of We, D-503 writes, “On one side is the ‘I,’ on the other is the ‘We,’ the One State. Isn’t it clear? Assuming that ‘I’ has the same ‘rights’ compared to the State is exactly the same thing as assuming that a gram can counterbalance a ton. Here is the distribution: a ton has rights, a gram has duties. And this is the natural path from insignificance to greatness: forget that you are a gram, and feel as though you are a millionth part of the ton.”
I find this mindset, tied as it is to the One State’s collectivist ideology, to be intriguingly distinct from the way the short story “The Egg” portrays the notions of the individual and the whole. For those of you who have not read “The Egg,” the scenario in the story concerns a middle-aged man whose family life was falling apart and who has just died in a car accident. He finds himself in an afterlife, speaking with a divine figure who explains to him that he will be reincarnated and that all the reincarnated human souls that have ever existed are really just one soul. In other words, in the universe of “The Egg,” the individual human – as a separate entity from other humans – is an illusion, for all people throughout all time are really just one self, which in the case of “The Egg” is gradually preparing to hatch and perhaps become a divine being as well. While the premise of this story – the notion of only one human existing throughout all time, living all lives in preparation for maturity – likely seems far-fetched to you, it raises interesting questions about our notions of the individual and the collective. If the scenario of “The Egg” were true, the collective of humanity and the individual human are one and the same, as opposed to the One State’s propaganda in We. In “The Egg,” when one interacts with another person, he or she is interacting with the whole and the self simultaneously. At the material level, we’re all composed of the same kinds of molecules and the same subatomic particles, and those particles are recycled perpetually throughout the duration of the universe. Thus, on the one hand, we are all cut from the same fabric, yet on the other hand we still have individual consciousnesses and experiences. Therefore, we can discern the individual and the collective to be in a state of continuous duality, and neither exists without the other.
While I do not adhere to the idea that we share the same consciousness, as presented in “The Egg,” the short story has helped me to discern better that the divide between our experiences and those of others is more porous than we typically assume. We are inseparably linked from each other and from the rest of what exists, so when we interact with each other, we should always keep in mind that we form parts of a common system. Thus, when we harm others, we are harming ourselves, and when we harm ourselves, we are harming others, not because we literally are one another in consciousness, but because we are inherently interconnected with others and our environment. The consequences of our actions may not appear to have a direct or immediate effect on ourselves or others, but we can always count on them to affect unexpected parties in unforeseen ways because there is no foolproof way to delineate the universe and its contents. Even when our decisions may seem inconsequential and completely unknown to the outside world, their effects can add up to the point where any number of slight changes to these decisions could have produced radical differences in one’s relationships and personal growth. Thus, each of us, as individual components of the whole universal system, are not inconsequential compared to the whole, as D-503 writes on behalf of the One State in the novel We. Rather, the individual and the collective cannot exist without the other, and only when the individual’s vitality is cultivated and fulfills its role in the overarching system can the whole maintain its vitality. You cannot build a truly strong state – or any institution or endeavor, for that matter – when its individual members are weak and out of joint with one another. Likewise, the vitality of the whole applies what the individual members desire, so the benefits flow both toward the collective and the individual.
With this point in mind, I am reminded of admonitions against ideological thinking, which especially should be avoided as it regards the concepts of the collective and the individual. Valuing the collective over the individual or the individual over the collective not only gives us an incentive to harm others and ourselves, but also clouds our understanding of how the universe really operates, providing us a false – and thus ultimately dangerous – outlook on existence. I recognize we humans do not divvy up our affections equally, so a mindset of complete equality of value for the individual and the collective is not quite achievable, even if it is desirable. Nevertheless, my readings of “The Egg” and We have led me to the view that, to the best of our ability, we should strive to not value the collective or the individual over the other, for they cannot exist without each other and are only as strong as each other.
Evan Clark is a McConnell Scholar in the Class of 2020. He is studying Spanish, history, and political science at the University of Louisville.