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Humans, Volume 5, Issue 3 (September 2025) – 2 articles

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18 pages, 299 KiB  
Review
Individualism and Affliction: Cultural Responses to Disease
by Shawn M. Phillips and Joanna R. Phillips
Humans 2025, 5(3), 18; https://doi.org/10.3390/humans5030018 - 17 Jul 2025
Viewed by 38
Abstract
This review essay proposes that the influence of individualism, the tendency to prefer individual freedoms over collective obligations, in American society impacted the manner in which the US population responded to the recent global COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, societal rifts were exposed [...] Read more.
This review essay proposes that the influence of individualism, the tendency to prefer individual freedoms over collective obligations, in American society impacted the manner in which the US population responded to the recent global COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, societal rifts were exposed that questioned the infringement on personal freedoms by governmental authority in the effort to protect public health. The essay traces the development of individualism from the Enlightenment through the emergence of the United States, during which individualism entwined with American identity. A review of social science research in the fields sociology, psychology, and anthropology demonstrates the ways in which individualism, in varying degrees from self-centered to collectivist tendencies, can be observed to affect social interaction and perception. With that background, it is possible to use individualism as a lens to investigate cultural responses to affliction. Societal responses to leprosy, syphilis, and COVID-19 are examined, and it is argued that the influence of degrees of individualism greatly impacted the social responses, and the extent to which individual freedoms were lost was notably varied in each case. Full article
20 pages, 267 KiB  
Article
A Systems Thinking Approach to Political Polarization and Encounters of Dysrecognition
by Gregory A. Thompson and Soren Pearce
Humans 2025, 5(3), 17; https://doi.org/10.3390/humans5030017 - 17 Jul 2025
Viewed by 66
Abstract
In this article, we employ a Batesonian systems thinking approach to analyze politically polarized and politically polarizing encounters in the contemporary United States. We bring together Bateson’s concepts of schismogenesis, double binds, metacommunication, and transcontextualism with recent work on recognition and resonance in [...] Read more.
In this article, we employ a Batesonian systems thinking approach to analyze politically polarized and politically polarizing encounters in the contemporary United States. We bring together Bateson’s concepts of schismogenesis, double binds, metacommunication, and transcontextualism with recent work on recognition and resonance in order to show how these encounters create moments of transcontextual double binds that produce mutual dysrecognition. We show how these moments of mutual dysrecognition become both animating forces of political polarization in the moment while also becoming constitutive poetic resonances for making sense of future events. When these moments of dysrecognition are considered alongside the removal of mechanisms that restrain schismogenesis, the United States body politic is becoming increasingly schizophrenic—split in two with both parts incommunicado with the other such that the whole system is veering towards collapse. We close by briefly considering the kind of deutero-learning, to use Bateson’s term, that might help to stave off such a collapse. Full article
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