Scale Of Individualism

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Many people look at their government and how it affects them on a day to day basis, but do not see what it does to everyone at once. The government’s total authority over a country from place to place, but they all make laws and rules that constrict their citizens in some way. Sometimes those laws can either have positive or negative consequences, which is dependent on the government’s views on how to run the country. Those consequences lead the country into on of two categories – individual or collective. The government sets boundaries for individualism because of the laws they put in place for its citizens, which ties them to either side of the spectrum of individuality and conformity.
To begin with, understanding the scale of individualism …show more content…
The laws country sets in place can have varying degrees of extremity, which directly affects its citizens. Specifically, it affects what lengths people have to go to in order to avoid running into trouble. For example, America has its first amendment, which guarantees a person’s freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, and the right to petition. Because the U.S. has those laws, its citizens have more freedom to voice opinions and have it result in no government interaction. So, individuality is seen more in countries like the U.S. because of how many rights citizens are given without being prosecuted, which in turn gives room for those citizens to voice their opinions and separate themselves. In contrast, a country like North Korea looks the opposite. In a documentary called “Inside North Korea”, a reporter goes into the country and gathers information about how people there live. It shows the rules citizens must live by and their daily customs. Punishments for failing to abide by these rules scare its citizens into following them. As a result, the country becomes heavily conformed. In these examples, it is clear that the laws a country sets have a large impact on how much its citizens must do to avoid being directly noticed by governments …show more content…
Looking at Anthem is helpful when trying to prove this point. In Anthem, the government imposes so many boundaries and rules that it is impossible to have any sense of individuality without breaking them. For example, a law in their society is that person must be assigned to one job and they are not allowed to want another. This shows that the more rules a society places, the more detailed they must be. Details controlling a government leads to more conformity, since they are more focused on one topic. Essentially, Anthem hyper-focuses on a single area so much that conformity is inescapable. However, only replacing old laws with more detailed ones would have different effects than just adding more on top of what already existed. Replacing broad rules with more specifics wouldn't change a placement as much as simply adding new ones. This is because having more laws would scare citizens into following rules that might not even be there. As a result, people would become more collective. Because of these reasons, having more laws can change a place's standing on the spectrum due to increasing details and overwhelming
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