Column

Defend diversity against rampant individualism

What’s the link between Bill Gates and Maori psychiatry? The question seems bizarre but its answer has massive social implications.

Bill Gates wants to include a desktop shortcut to Internet Explorer (Microsoft’s web browser) in the hugely popular Windows operating system. If he succeeds he is likely to wipe out Netscape, his only serious rival. Netscape has taken legal action, accusing Gates of unfair commercial practice.

There is no word for ‘psychiatry’ in Maori culture, though there are a handful of Maori psychiatrists. There is a word for health — but it doesn’t mean what it does in the West, where we habitually associate health with medical treatment for individuals.

Maori take a less simplistic view. One way to explain their idea is to think of a house with four walls (Te whare tapa wha). One wall is physical health, another spiritual health, another mental health and the other family or community (whanau). Only if all walls are in balance can a person be healthy.

If a person is ‘depressed’ (there is no Maori word for depression either) then a traditional Maori health worker will not reach for a bottle of chemicals; rather, he will try to solve the problem by studying the extended family and investigating the person’s spiritual life, physical condition and sense of belonging. A Maori health worker will try to discover the imbalance and work with the person and his whanau — but never with the person alone — to restore harmony.

Maori are a colonised people. Though better off than most invaded civilizations they must obey white man’s rules. To have influence their only option is to adopt Western ways. To practice at all Maori psychiatrists have to use Western notions and techniques or be expelled as incompetent.

What’s the link? Gates’ supremacy means Netscape faces extermination — it simply cannot survive in a system where Internet Explorer has all the power. In the same way, the global expansion of Western culture is causing the Maori nation to become extinct.

But though genocide looms, there is still hope. Many individualists reckon Gates has gone too far. They complain that Microsoft is stifling competition, reducing choice and extinguishing creativity. Free choice, growth through competition, disparate ways of living rather than ‘nanny state’ conformity. This is the individualist creed — so they can’t let Gates get away with it.

If it is possible for individualists to believe that you can get too big and if you do that collective controls should be imposed on you, then lovers of free enterprise have a fundamental moral issue to ponder. Individualism leads inexorably to a situation where a few wealthy, largely anonymous, democratically unaccountable business people restrict the ways citizens can live. Individualism imposes increasing monotony on the social environment: the same fast food outlets pollute every city in the world, global corporations dictate what we read and watch — they even want to interfere with national governments’ right to govern.

Even if you are as far to the right as you can get, if you disapprove of Gates wiping out Netscape you must also be opposed to the vastly more serious social consequences of individualism’s evolution. In order to prevent neo-feudalism — the stage after individualism — you must be against an uncontrolled free-for-all in other aspects of life — and so you must be for doing everything you can to ensure that alternative choices flourish.

Logically, Western individualists — from small business people to the owners of multinational corporations — must preserve cultures fighting to stay alive. If they believe what they say they should work tirelessly to empower endangered social systems to regenerate, and as a first step this means assisting them to use their own social concepts for their own ends. If you are opposed to Gates you have to be for helping indigenous peoples work for their mental health their way.