The encounter with the other

Much talk is devoted today to address the great concerns of our time, individualism and the fragmentation of social life, above all in the great metropolises of the world. The cities create ‘lonely crowds’, isolated individuals deprived of their ability to communicate and, as a result, suffering under conditions of anomie in which mass conformism and manipulation structure all social life. Metropolitan culture, it is reported, is narcissistic; it produces people who relate only to themselves, people in search of personal well-being but unable to establish meaningful relationships with others. While we can agree with much in this description, in our everyday lives we nevertheless encounter others in important ways that are not immediately visible; consequently, the texture of our relationships is far richer than what the accounts of social atomization would have us believe.

Individualism is an attribution that usually defines in a negative sense processes and behaviours which disguise other meanings. In our daily lives, in fact, we know that the variety and abundance of the stimuli we encounter at any given moment often have the effect of expanding the individual dimension of our action, in the sense of increasing our awareness of what we do. In present-day society, we have unparalleled resources at our disposal with which to affirm ourselves and recognize ourselves as individuals. First, education and the circulation of information offer us hitherto unknown opportunities for knowledge-acquisition and action.