 Individualism, a Reader, edited by George H. Smith and Marilyn Moore, narrated by James Foster. 3. From the Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde Originally published in The Fortnightly Review, February 1891, Oscar Fingle O'Flaherty Wilde, 1854-1900, was an Irish essayist, playwright, novelist, and intellectual in Victorian England. In 1895, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency, a result of his love affair with Lord Alfred Bosie Douglas, and was sentenced to two years of hard labour. In the passage excerpted here from The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde argues in stirring prose that individualism is inherent in human nature and should be cultivated to its highest level. Individualism, according to Wilde, is the only foundation on which a true and lasting sympathy for others can be built. It is to be noted also that individualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want because they want it, or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation. In fact, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life and towards which every mode of life quickens. And so individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop individualism out of himself. Man is now so developing individualism. To ask whether individualism is practical is like asking whether evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life and there is no evolution except towards individualism. Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially arrested growth, or of disease, or of death. Individualism will also be unselfish and unaffected. It has been pointed out that one of the results of the extraordinary tyranny of authority is that words are absolutely distorted from their proper and simple meaning and are used to express the obverse of their right signification. What is true about art is true about life. A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation in such matters consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbor, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid. Or a man is called selfish if he lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realization of his own personality, if in fact the primary aim of his life is self-development. But this is the way in which everyone should live. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live, and unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one's neighbor that he should think in the same way and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses. Under individualism people will be quite natural and absolutely unselfish and will know the meaning of the words and realize them in their free, beautiful lives. Nor will men be egotistic as they are now, for the egotist is he who makes claims upon others and the individualist will not desire to do that. It will not give him pleasure. When man has realized individualism he will also realize sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously. Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting too. One should sympathize with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom. The wider sympathy is, of course, the more difficult. It requires more unselfishness. Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature. It requires, in fact, the nature of a true individualist to sympathize with a friend's success. This has been Individualism, a Reader, edited by George H. Smith and Marilyn Moore, narrated by James Foster. Copyright 2015 by the Cato Institute. Production copyright 2015 by the Cato Institute.