Prompt: Does the success of a community—whether it is a class, a team, a family, a nation, or any other group—depend upon people’s willingness to limit their personal interests?
Today’s society witnesses an increasing shift towards individualism, ironically as the world becomes more connected and interlinked via improved technologies. Yet this poses a daunting problem because a community, by definition, hinges on the cooperation of its components. The success of a community crucially depends upon people’s willingness to act altruistically. Examples of the pejorative outcome of selfishness on communities are found in literature.
The consequence of Mr. Kurtz’s avaricious actions delineate this effect in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Working in the tenebrous, physically and morally, Congo, Kurtz gives in to the primeval urges surrounding him, without forethought. This unreflecting submission to his desires drives him mad, and this madness almost leads to the collapse of his Trading Company. The Company depends upon him, as all communities depend on their inhabitants, but Kurtz is willing to deny his communal responsibility in favor of individual success, thus shaking the Company to its core and almost fully eclipsing its success. Thus, the importance of individual altruism in order to elicit communal success is shown.
Similar to Kurtz’s failure to limit his greed and its effect on his trading company, Tom Wingfield’s inexorable thirst for adventure destroys his family in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. Tom is the youngest of the family, but he’s also left as its provider following his father’s absconding. Tom struggles with his familial duty to be abstemious in the realization of his need for adventure. But, like Kurtz, Tom yields to this desire—his inherited love of distances—and leaves his family alone and dependent. But unlike Kurtz, who escapes the guilt of abandoning his community through death, Tom goes on to wander through cities, haunted by the tinkling memory of fragile sister. The outcome of the Wingfield family is never addressed, but its undeniable that at least a degree of failure must have befallen the jobless women. The family community thus fell as a consequence of Tom’s lack of familial altruism.
Thus, Kurtz’s and Tom’s selfishness and submission to greed and the destructive effect of these actions on their respective communities illustrates the dependency of communities on individual altruism.