roz_anthi's Reviews > Liquid Modernity

"Let there be no mistake: now, as before - in the fluid and light as much as in the solid and heavy stage of modernity - individualization is a fate, not a choice. In the land of the individual freedom of choice the option to escape individualization and to refuse participation in the individualizing game is emphatically not on the agenda.
The individual's self-containment and self-sufficiency may be another illusion: that men and women have no one to blame for their frustrations and troubles does not need now to mean, any more than it did in the past, that they can protect themselves against frustration using their own domestic appliances or pull themselves out of trouble, Baron Munchausen style, by their bootstraps. And yet, if they fall ill, it is assumed that this has happened because they were not resolute and industrious enough in following their health regime; if they stay unemployed, it is because they failed to learn the skills of gaining an interview, or because they did not try hard enough to find a job or because they are, purely and simply, work-shy; if they are not sure about their career prospects and agonize about their future, it is because they are not good enough at winning friends and influencing people and failed to learn and master, as they should have done, the arts of self-expression and impressing others. This is, at any rate, what they are told these days to be the case, and what they have come to believe, so that they now behave as if this was, indeed, the truth of the matter. As Beck aptly and poignantly puts it, 'how one lives becomes a biographical solution to systemic contradictions'."