George Ayittey Quotes

For traditional societies … the collective, the group, is more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society.

There is a number among us, young and old, of all sorts almost among us, that swarm up and down towns, and woods, and fields, whose care and work hitherto hath been like bees, only to get honey to their own hive.

I'm a big fan of community, and I think independence is over-rated.

In Afghanistan, you don't understand yourself solely as an individual. You understand yourself as a son, a brother, a cousin to somebody, an uncle to somebody. You are part of something bigger than yourself.

Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.

The Chinese began with the assumption that the group is the fundamental unit of reality. Individuals? Sure, we can factor them out from their groups, but let us not think that they as individuals have any viability apart from their group.

President Obama is casting his lot in the middle of a debate as old as America itself: Are we rugged individualists pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps? Or are we a nation of community, all connected and counting on one another?

Ants can live together in solidarity and forget themselves in the community. In a normative capitalist society, everyone is an egoist. In the ants' civilization, you are part of the group; you don't live for yourself alone.

There is always the danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient.... It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone -- an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remedial suffering of the world

Ours is an individualistic society, indeed, and the state must do for the individual what the family does for the older civilizations.

Americans are so individualistic, they do not realize their individualism is a communally derived value.

There is no such thing as society…There are individuals, men and women, and there are families.

Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies. People spend their lives in or near the place where they were born, and they remain surrounded by relatives and childhood companions.

Following World War II, the world mostly shared values about human rights, democracy and so forth. Many believed then that Western liberal ideas would be universal. But today it is not the case that we share the same values. If you look at Russia, China, Turkey—and even inside our societies—people have different concepts about how to organize big societies. Typically in Western society, the individual is protected against the collective. But increasingly, the collective is protected against the individual. And even inside our own society, the question arises more and more about how much should you defend the collective against the individual? What is the right balance?

People are seeking more power in the individual and less in government and institutions; they want more cooperation and less competition.

America always pivots between collective responsibility and the idea that the individual can pull himself up by his bootstraps.

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the 'we' rather than the 'I.'

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

If you calculate every single thing you could possibly need in your life, you would need no more than 200 people to keep all that afloat: a doctor, food, wine, cheese-eating friends, the person who makes paper, the shoemaker.

We're into an age of excessive individuals, all right. We're into the age were independence, autonomy, convenience, sometimes selfishness. The new trinity of me, myself and I, seems to dominate. We know that's contrary to the very nature of the human person. The very nature of the human person needs God and needs other people.

I don't see any independent position that I'm in; it's rather inter-dependent.

Any group or "collective", large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.

I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.

I'm interested in the ongoing war between the individual and community. That inner dissent against whatever group is surrounding you. No one wants to cede their selfhood to a group, right? And yet no one can exactly live outside the group, either. Even the most obstinate survivalist probably lives in some telepathic communion with all the other obstinate survivalists out there in the woods.

Indian culture is essentially much more of a we culture. It's a communal culture where you do what's best for the community - you procreate.