https://t.co/LXMj1pRHP8:
"The epitaph of the United States may be that the idea of the rugged individualist was a lie, there never were any, and in the age of air travel and medicine we’re all very connected, our well-being depends on other people’s well-being."

@davewiner John Wesley Powell tried to expose the lie in the late 1870s. Wallace Stegner wrote about it, at length, in "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian". Recommended.
"...individual initiative and individual labor and individual capital were inadequate to develop the irrigation works needed on an arid-belt farm unless the farm were located high on the headwaters of a small stream..."
"The inflexible fact of aridity lay like a fence along the 100th meridian. From approximately that line on, more than individual initiative was needed to break the wilderness."
"Powell’s way was a way tested by New England barn raisings and corn huskings ... tested even more fully by the Mormon experience of thirty years and the New Mexican experience of ten generations."
Quoting John Wesley Powell from 1885:
"By the division of labor men have become interdependent, so that every man works for some other man... But during all my life I have worked for other men, and thus I am every man’s servant;"
"so are we all — servants to many masters and master of many servants... Thus the enmity of man to man is appeased, and men live and labor for one another; individualism is transmuted into socialism, ..."
The first time this passage made any impression on me, it was because of its use of "socialism". I'd only ever seen "socialism" used as another word for Soviet-style "communism".
But here it was, free of cold-war trappings, being contrasted with (rugged) individualism. It was striking to see this in a book about the American West, copyrighted in McCarthy-era 1953.

More from News

Durham County Council has upheld my complaint that Councillor David Boyes breached its Code of Conduct for communications in respect of Travellers. This would appear to be the first time in England that a councillor has been so held to account for such communications. [1/16]


The grounds for the complaint are already set out by me: https://t.co/0MDqO6dyja. In summary: on 7 May 2020, Cllr Boyes posted on a Facebook site he shared with another councillor a video of scorch damage from barbeque trays and littering on and around a picnic table.
[2/16]


The table was in a picnic area in a nature reserve in the Easington constituency which Cllr Boyes represents. The video was accompanied by a comment from Cllr Boyes linking the ‘state’ of the tables with Travellers. That post attracted a number of comments which he liked.
[3/16]

Those liked comments included:

▪️ ‘scum should be f**k*ng shot oxygen thieves’ [edited]

▪️ ‘And they wonder why many people do not welcome them’.

[4/16]

Cllr Boyes accepted at the hearing that he did not have proof that Travellers caused the damage and that it was wrong for him to so implicate Travellers.
[5/16]

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