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" Every night, millions of Americans spend their free hours watching television rather than engaging in any form of social interaction. What are they watching? In recent years we have seen reality television become the most popular form of television programming. To discover the nature of our current “reality,” we might consider examples such as Survivor, the series that helped spawn the reality TV revolution. Every week tens of millions of viewers watched as a group of ordinary people stranded in some isolated place struggled to meet various challenges and endure harsh conditions. Ah, one might think, here we will see people working cooperatively, like our ancient ancestors, working cooperatively in order to “win”! But the “reality” was very different. The conditions of the game were arranged so that, yes, they had to work cooperatively, but the alliances by nature were only temporary and conditional, as the contestants plotted and schemed against one another to win the game and walk off with the Grand Prize: a million dollars! The objective was to banish contestants one by one from the deserted island through a group vote, eliminating every other contestant until only a lone individual remained—the “sole survivor.” The end game was the ultimate American fantasy in our Age of Individualism: to be left completely alone, sitting on a mountain of cash!
While Survivor was an overt example of our individualistic orientation, it certainly was not unique in its glorification of rugged individualists on American television. Even commercial breaks provide equally compelling examples, with advertisers such as Burger King, proclaiming, HAVE IT YOUR WAY! The message? America, the land where not only every man and every woman is an individual but also where every hamburger is an individual!
Human beings do not live in a vacuum; we live in a society. Thus it is important to look at the values promoted and celebrated in a given society and measure what effect this conditioning has on our sense of independence or of interdependence "
― Dalai Lama XIV , The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World
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" I was just thinking … I was thinking that the difference between the Tibetan language and English might possibly suggest a basic difference of perspectives. In Tibetan, the word we use for ‘I’ and ‘me’ is ‘nga’ and the word we use for ‘us’ and ‘we’ is ‘ngatso.’ So on the basic level of the words themselves there is, in the Tibetan language, an intimate connection between ‘I’ as an individual and ‘we’ as the collective. ‘Ngatso,’ the word for ‘we,’ literally means something like ‘a collection of “I”s’ or ‘many “I”s.’ So it’s like multiple selves, this kind of idea. So when you are identifying with a wider group, becoming part of that group, it’s like extending the individual sense of self, rather than losing it. Whereas the English terms ‘we’ and ‘I’ seem to be completely unrelated, the roots of the words are different, they are not related…. "
― Dalai Lama XIV , The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World
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" So, in my own personal dealings with people, for instance, whether the other person is a president or a big business person, or an ordinary householder, or even a beggar, or someone suffering from AIDS, the immediate connection with the individual is our fundamental humanity, our common humanity.” He concluded by saying, “This is the level on which I try to relate to the other person. That’s what enables me to feel deeply "
― Dalai Lama XIV , The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World
