An Ode to Individuality

Most of this blog is an argument for groups. I argue for direct democracy, for decisions made by everyone instead of by a few, and against the idea that any single person should be trusted with power. I am not going to retract any of that. But there is a fact I want to set beside it, because it is true and because I think it is under-appreciated by people who, like me, think in terms of systems and populations. The greatest things human beings have ever done were done by individuals. So were the worst.

The Record

Look at the arts first, because the pattern is cleanest there.

Jazz was the work of a handful of people who each, personally, changed what the music was. Louis Armstrong turned it into a soloist's art. Charlie Parker rebuilt its harmony. Miles Davis reinvented it at least three times and John Coltrane took it somewhere nobody has quite followed. There is no committee anywhere in that story. Each of those men stood in front of a band and played something that did not exist until he played it.

Painting is the same. Giotto, Caravaggio, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso: each one is a break in the line, and the break has a single name on it. The schools and movements that art history likes to talk about are mostly the people who came afterwards and copied.

Literature does not even pretend otherwise. A novel is one mind, sustained over years, and the greatest ones, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, are unmistakably one mind each. No one has ever written a great novel by committee and no one ever will.

Musical composition is the purest case. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony deaf. The whole structure, every voice, existed inside one skull before anyone else heard a note.

Science is supposed to be the collective enterprise, and in its day-to-day operation it is. But the leaps are not. Newton worked out mechanics and the calculus largely alone, in a house in Lincolnshire during a plague year. Darwin thought for twenty years in his study. Einstein produced special relativity in a patent office with no collaborators and no laboratory, and general relativity ten years later in nearly the same solitude. Gödel, Turing, Ramanujan. The institutions of science are superb at checking, extending and applying. The founding insight, over and over, came from one person who saw something that nobody around them could see.

And then the disasters. The twentieth century's great catastrophes were not the product of mobs or committees either. They had names: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Each of them bent an entire nation around the contents of one head. Remove the individual and the catastrophe does not happen in the same form, perhaps not at all. The variance of human affairs, in both directions, is driven by individuals.

Why It Is Individuals

I do not think this is a mystery. A really new thing has to be held whole, in one place, while it is being built, and the only place that can hold an unfinished idea whole is a single mind. A group can hold a finished idea, can test it, improve it and propagate it. A group cannot hold a half-formed one, because a half-formed idea cannot yet be communicated; the moment it can be communicated it is no longer half-formed. The lonely stretch, the part where the thing exists only as a hunch and the world would, if asked, vote it down, is necessarily walked alone.

This is also why the disasters are individual. A group averages. Put a hundred people in a room and the policy that emerges will be somewhere near the middle of what the hundred believe, which is boring and usually survivable. The extremes, the genuinely new good and the genuinely new evil, are off in the tails, and a single person can live in the tails in a way a group never can.

I have argued that art teaches the wrong way to think about mass phenomena, because it sees everything through one protagonist. I still think so. But that is a point about explanation, about how to understand a famine or an epidemic. It is not a point about creation. When the question is where the new thing came from, the protagonist is usually the right answer.

The Amendment

Here is where I want to complicate the ode, because the record has a second pattern in it that is almost as strong as the first.

The very greatest things frequently came not from one individual but from two or three who could talk to each other. Lennon and McCartney wrote better songs together than either wrote apart, and both wrote for decades apart, so the comparison is not hypothetical. Watson and Crick. The Wright brothers. Kahneman and Tversky, who said that the thinking happened in the conversation and neither could reproduce it alone. Jobs and Wozniak. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Gilbert and Sullivan, who could not stand each other and were useless separately.

This is not a return to the committee. Two is not a group; two is the smallest arrangement in which an idea can leave one head and survive the trip. What these pairs had was not a process or a structure but an extraordinary quality of communication: each could hand the other a half-formed thing and get it back improved, without it being averaged into mush along the way. That is rare. It is rare enough that it is nearly as remarkable as individual genius, and it may be the one way that individual genius gets to be more than it is.

So the amendment to the ode is this. If we want more of the great things, the answer is not to dissolve individuals into teams, which produces the reliable mediocrity of everything designed by a large organisation. It is to find the ways in which two or three individuals can communicate well enough to be, briefly, one mind with more than one person's capacity. Nobody knows how to manufacture that. But we could at least stop designing institutions that prevent it.

Where This Leaves the Groups

None of this is in tension with the rest of this blog, though it looks like it should be. Groups and individuals are good at different things, and the error is in letting either do the other's job.

Individuals create. They should be left alone to do it, given the room and the solitude it needs, and protected from the committee that would, if consulted at the right moment, vote every great thing down. But individuals should not decide for everyone else what to do with what has been created, because the same quality that puts one person in the right tail puts another in the wrong one, and from the outside you cannot tell which is which until it is far too late. That is the job of the group, and it is the job direct democracy is for: not to make the new things, but to choose, by everyone, which of the new things we are going to live with.

Let the individual compose the symphony. Let all of us decide whether to build the concert hall.