The Puzzle of Individuality

I have just finished reading a popular French short story ('Un Boule de Suif') as part of my French work. If you haven't heard of it before, its about society's condemnation and judgement of prostitutes during the late 1800s, the one in the story termed 'Boule de Suif', literally meaning 'a ball of fat.' Boule de Suif, throughout the story is ultimately used by the so-called aristocratic people and then tossed aside and treated with contempt once she could no longer be of use. This completely reverses all common ideas we have of the class system, so I thought it would be interesting to consider society's judgemental attitudes towards others and how this is a fault or an error we have not really evolved away from. It was present in the 1800s, and arguably it is even more present now.

We seem to be very extreme today with our prejudices. Everyone, we feel, has to belong to some sort of clique, and the way they express themselves determines exactly which one they belong to. There is no room anymore to be individual, since even being individual is a clique itself! As every aspect of our personality is linked, i.e. the way we dress suggests how we might act, or what we do with our spare time, there is not really any room to be your own person, we all become prototypes of one idea or another. People therefore have a tendency to notice one aspect of you and, wrongly, assume all the others. A teenage smoker, for example, may be viewed as rebellious and unconcerned about their future. This after all is the way our minds work, we like to see patterns and come up with logical resolutions. Can we really limit people, however, to some sort of logical code, where everything follow a certain pattern?

I'm at University. The primary time when people learn to develop the personality they want to have, and learn to express that personality. Every day there is such a vast range of appearances and personalities that I come across, despite everyone belonging to the same age group. If there's one thing the past few months have taught me, its that appearance and self-expression does not directly correlate to the personality underneath. The problem is, everyone just wants an easy way of working people out. I disagree when people say you shouldn't judge others. Judging is an essential part of human nature, we need to judge to form opinions, and if we don't form opinions we become passive beings who merely pass through life. So I think the problem in the 1800s and equally today, is people being limited by these judgements. It is fine to judge and even to make assumptions up to a certain point, so long as you are ready to adapt and even overthrow these preliminary thoughts once you have more knowledge.

People are not straight-edged and so cannot fit into a box. I think its true that there is not much that's original these days, perhaps no one has a trait that is truly original, one that hasn't been seen in anyone in the world before, but that doesn't stop us from being individual. We are all different collections of these unoriginal pieces. Okay, so we reuse the same bits, but who is to say that different puzzles can't be put together with the same pieces?