Or at least I hadn't.
Recently I rewatched Samurai Rebellion, a 1967 samurai movie directed by the anti-authoritarian Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi. Of course, SPOILERS AHEAD. The film follows Isaburo Sasahara (Toshiro Mifune) as his family, the servants of a powerful feudal lord, have a concubine forced onto Isaburo's eldest son by that feudal lord after she attacked him. Isaburo, trapped in an unhealthy marriage for the past twenty years, initially opposes the decision. He'd rather find someone who makes his son happy. They are eventually forced to give into the lord's wishes, however. Then the unexpected happens: the concubine ends up being a wonderful woman. She attacked the lord not because she was malicious or unstable, but because he was a gross creep. Isaburo's son and the woman fall in love.
Two years into their marriage, the lord's eldest heir dies. This makes the son that the woman gave the lord the new heir. The lord demands her return in order to save face, as he can't have the mother of his heir living with another man. Long story short, the couple refuses, and Isaburo- the most skilled swordsman in the land- stands with his son's and daughter-in-law's decision. The third act has the three of them (but really just Isaburo, the young couple are killed rather quickly) fight nobly until the end. When Isaburo defeats his greatest rival (and friend) in a badass duel, he is ambushed by a large squadron of riflemen and samurai. He is eventually killed, but not before slowly, ruthlessly taking them out like a demon from the underworld as they shoot and stab at him.
Yeah, I'm definitely not gonna fuck with this guy.
There's a lot that can be said about this movie. For instance, the fact that a concubine is revealed to be a strong, kind, honorable character, something you wouldn't expect to find in basically any movie from the 1960s. It's also a joy to watch Mifune's acting range, as he begins the film as meek and subdued, but ends it with the forceful personality he was associated with during much of his acting career. The movie is beautifully shot, as well as shot in a way that backs up its themes- for instance, the beginning of the movie has mostly sharp edges and neat patterns in the background, while by the end things are much more chaotic.
What I really wanna focus on, though, is the hero meeting a tragic end while standing up against an unjust society. It's the same thing that happens in his most popular samurai film, Harakiri, which stars Tatsuya Nakadai as another badass grizzled samurai who dies fighting against the cruel feudalism of the time. In yet another film- his sweeping, semi-autobiographical Human Condition trilogy, which I wrote about a couple years ago- also stars Tatsuya Nakadai, this time as a pacifist-socialist stuck in World War 2 Japan who tries to stand up to Imperial Japan in whatever way he can. All of of these films, then, feature a rebel who gives their life in a futile, but noble, act of resistance against an unjust system.
The idea of a lone rebel against society is, of course, nothing new. Especially here in the United States, where the myth of the rugged individual is perhaps our most beloved cultural figure. We see our founding as led by rugged settlers setting up their own homes amid the perils of the New World; we imagine the westward expansion of our country as being led by lone cowboys doling out frontier justice; we picture the average American after WW2 working a tough factory job of some sort while mentally preparing to fight Soviet-style communism.
"Support freedom and oppose forced communist conformity!
Do so by adhering to a heterosexual, Christian, segregated suburban family model or else!"
Now, many people reading this are probably (correctly) thinking to themselves how the unstated part of these myths is the ugly underbelly of Native American displacement, the enslavement of African/African descent people, and a whole slew of other ugly truths. This is all true and important, but there's even more to it. In addition to the ignored atrocities, none of these images are based on how things actually happened in the first place, even aside from the atrocities.
Colonization, the expansion of the US frontier, and the Cold War all involved an intimate link between the private and public spheres, which included strong communal bonds. It takes individuals and communities, private and public forces, to make shit happen, whether said shit is good or bad. The Atlantic slave trade, for example, required a combination of the government, the military, the church, private industries, and private citizens to each play their part. All of this was done in an effort to use stolen/forced labor for grueling work that enriched all of the European players, which included both governments and private enterprises.
I could write a book about all of this (and sort of am), but what I really wanna get at in this post is why this matters.
We're in an age of profound loneliness, alienation, disillusionment, and cynicism. People feel disconnected from each other and from their ability to have any sort of effect on the world. It certainly doesn't help that much of the advice we get to deal with these feelings is often predicated on the idea that these issues are problems of the individual, problems to be solved simply by yoga or a gratitude journal (which, to be clear, are awesome things, but not a solution to such deeply entrenched societal ailments by themselves).
"Okay class, our next pose is called Rethinking How We Relate To Each Other As People"
Margaret Thatcher once said that "there is no such thing as society", that we are instead just a bunch of individuals and families whose main obligations are to ourselves. Now, it's obvious this is untrue on a practical level. We all affect each other's lives in too many ways to count- if every firefighter, or teacher, or garbage collector, or retail worker, or steelworker disappeared tomorrow, society would be devastated. We're too interconnected to truly be strictly individual units. But it's also just not true of how we relate to each other on a psychological level. Humans need social interaction. Humans need to feel we belong. Hell, we even need to feel physical touch.
What worries me is that we've internalized Thatcher's hyper-individualistic way of thinking to the point where many of us have no way to diagnose and solve the previously mentioned issues of isolation and disempowerment. Our cultural imagination doesn't allow us to see beyond individualistic understandings of our problems, and our "solutions" stem from that individualistic understanding. It's as if we were all suffering from chronic migraines, but the only medicine our society had available was cold medicine.
To see what I mean, scroll through your social media platform of choice. How many times do you see quotes like "don't walk the path of others, walk your own path" or "get yours, don't worry about others", or something along those lines? Or how about when you see people who you know are lonely post memes that say something like "geniuses are often hated/misunderstood" or "only you are responsible for what happens to you." How many times do you see Self Care(TM) posts about doing something entirely centered around themselves held up as a healthy act of bravery?
"Excuse me, Lois, but buying kryptonite and ambushing Superman was an act of self care!"
Now, those can be solid pieces of advice in certain situations. I'm not saying any of this is bad. Rather, compare how many quotes about walking your own path you see to how many times you see people talking about how we should look to the wisdom of other people who can help us find our path. Compare how many lonely people share "wise words" that further entrench them in their loneliness, instead of a post about the importance of healthy connections. Compare how many people's self care posts are about them buying something for themselves or binging Netflix instead of walking through a park and making a new friend.
Again, this isn't to say you shouldn't do any of those individualistic things, or feel bad about doing them. Many are defense mechanisms that can help someone get through a rough day, or a rough period in their life. Rather, the point is that our culture is so focused on individualism that our imagination is stunted. As the old saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Our way of "fixing" our feelings of isolation is to entrench further into ourselves, to share platitudes about how great it is to be different, to buy ourselves ice cream while binging The Office. All of those things are valid and sometimes necessary ways to alleviate our pain, but they won't cure our problems.
This problem of hyper-individualism relates not just to how we think of our relation to other people, but also to how we understand our relation to society, politics, and historical change. Using the Civil Rights movement as an example for that last part, many people think of the Civil Rights movement as a time when Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and a few other prominent activists rose up against racism and inspired a generation to change the country.
In fact, the civil rights movement really started in force after WW2, after black people sacrificed for the war effort only to come back home to a country still entrenched in white supremacy. Aside from the blatant moral contrast between Americans "fighting fascism to defend freedom" while having segregation at home, WW2 also brought many black Americans together that created social networks that could be used for organizing. It not only highlighted moral reasons to push for anti-racism, but helped created actual conditions to help organize around the cause, because politics is not a spectator sport. It was then a mixture of veteran, labor, church, and other community groups that helped push for an end to institutional racism in this country.
Black Soldiers: "So, we're gonna get GI Bill benefits, right?"
The United States: "uhh, new number who dis"
MLK and other prominent figures absolutely deserve credit for their monumentally important contributions, but they were continuing a legacy of community organizing and activism that'd been going strong since 1945. On top of that, many of these efforts built on top of a legacy of organizing from the first third of the 1900s (the NAACP was founded in 1909, for example), tracing the work leading to the civil rights movement back even further than 1945. Some civil rights leaders even considered the Civil Rights movement to be a sort of sequel to Reconstruction, which was the effort to help challenge white supremacy in the South from 1865-1877 after the Civil War.
In other words, it wasn't just the actions of a few outstanding people. It was the continued efforts of countless people through decades upon decades, even arguably generations upon generations, who put in constant work with each other as part of a large, long-going movement toward a better tomorrow. That's not to say outstanding individuals can't make a huge impact. But part of their very impacts came from their ability to inspire and mobilize scores of people into organized, sustained action, which would've been impossible without the tireless, thankless work of thousands of organizers who will never get a book or documentary dedicated in their honor.
That sounds sad, but the truth is that, while I'm sure many organizers from the Civil Rights movement (or labor, feminist, anti-war, etc movements) would've loved a book deal, their main goal was coming together to create a better world for themselves and others. They did so as part of large networks of people working together toward a common goal, because that's how things have truly changed historically. People working together, despite their flaws and differences and clashes, over long periods of time.
So how did we get here from Samurai Rebellion?
Masaki Kobayashi, the director of Samurai Rebellion, was no stranger to rebellion himself. During World War 2, he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. A leftwing pacifist, he refused to be promoted above the rank of private despite his aptitude as a soldier. He did so as an act of defiance against Japan's aggressive militarism. He was forced to fight against his will, and eventually ended up in an Okinawan POW camp. This had a profound effect on his movies. Though he made movies set both in the distant past and in the (then) present, every movie contained a criticism of the status quo. As he put it: "in any era, I am critical of authoritarian power."
Tatsuya Nakadai's character in the Human Condition trilogy, which is loosely based on Kobayashi himself.
I'm not sure if the failure of each of Kobayashi's heroes comes from Kobayashi purposefully urging people not to take up an individualistic approach of opposition to exploitative power structures, or if their failures represent the deep cynicism of a man whose own individual rebellions against the status quo failed to stop Japan from getting swept up in militaristic authoritarianism. Either way, these movies contain a lesson. The lesson that no one can change the world single-handedly, even if they're as badass as Toshiro Mifune or Tatsuya Nakadai.
A dozen average men can lift more than the world's strongest man.
If this sounds discouraging, it's only because we're so programmed to think in individual terms. We're all powerful. It's just that part of exercising that power involves working with others. Talk to people. Open up to people. Form bonds with people. Build with people. Create a new world with people. I know it's scary. Personally, I'm right on the line between extrovert and introvert. Some days I feel more introverted, and it's hard to even talk to a cashier at a grocery store. But beautiful things can happen if you can push past that.
We are what we are. Maybe there are sentient beings out there who aren't built like us. Maybe there's some type of creature a thousand light years away with our level of self-awareness who is fine going everything alone. For human beings, though, we need each other. Both in a practical way and literal, evolutionary psychology way. Do what you can when you can, and don't feel bad if there are times where you just can't. Reaching out to others is for you, because you deserve to feel wanted, to feel needed, to feel a part of something. And hopefully that something also helps make the world a tiny bit better.
Good luck. Thanks for reading.
