INDIVIDUAL FIRST, BROTHER SECOND

My instinct as an individualist and artist has always warned me most urgently against this capacity of men for becoming drunk on collective suffering, collective pride, collective hatred, and collective honour. When this morbid exaltation becomes perceptible in a room, a hall, a village, a city, or a country, I grow cold and distrustful; a shudder comes over me, for already, while most of my fellow men are still weeping with rapture and enthusiasm, still cheering and venting protestations of brotherhood, I see blood flowing and cities going up in flames.

—Hermann Hesse

The economy has shifted along such drastic faultlines that young people today are often in their 30s before they actually live on their own outside a group house situation. Nothing inherently wrong with that arrangement, but it does color one's youthful political thinking reflected across other crucial issues still unfamiliar to them in any personal way.