Here expressed the idea of individualism as engineered and monetised cult, and how Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian revolutionary anarchist and political philosopher, saw it coming centuries before the landing of the smart-phone.

You, as individual man or woman express yourself, that's natural, right? You build and curate your "online" identity. You scroll, you post, you optimise your personal brand. You follow your inner truth. You do the inner shadow work. And yet somehow, at the end of all that radical self-focus, you are one algorithmic update away from feeling completely invisible. One moment of silence away from reaching for the screen again.

Everything Is a Commercial Transaction. Including Your Soul.Everything Is a Commercial Transaction. Including Your Soul.

Every platform you use, every app that "connects" you, every media product that sells you "authenticity" and "self-expression" are commercial arrangements. Someone is proposing that you give your time, your data, your attention, your emotional energy in exchange for a feeling, somehow temporary satisfactory. The feeling of being seen. The feeling of mattering. The feeling of being an individual different from anyone else. That special touch that makes you, and you only.

I sense many of us forgot how it feel to part in a real, reciprocal, face-to-face community who know who they are, who they belong to, the values we stand for mostly because the people around us reflect it back constantly, without a paywall, without that desperate need for dopamine hit given by strangers validating a selfie.

It all started in the late 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency ran a covert programme to promote Abstract Expressionist art across Western Europe and beyond. An operation funnelled through a front organisation called the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), founded in 1950 and not publicly identified as a CIA operation until 1966^[1]. The CCF funded international art exhibitions, literary journals, lecture tours, and cultural events. It worked directly alongside the MOMA in New York and by coincidence its trustees included people with deep roots in the OSS, the CIA's wartime predecessor^[2].

With an explicit and precise goal, the Soviet Union had somehow imposed the idea of Socialist Realism as a clear, collective, didactic art that depicted workers marching together toward a shared future. Art strapped into an ideological straitjacket, as one historian described it^[3].

To counter this, the CIA promoted art that was private, opaque, non-representational, and entirely concerned with the inner world of the individual artist. Jackson Pollock's drip paintings. The gestural abstraction of de Kooning. The raw, private, unsocialised self, exploded onto a canvas.

The message encoded in every exhibition, every grant, every critical essay produced under this apparatus was the same:

Freedom means individualism. Individualism means turning inward. Turning inward means you are Western and free. Collective orientation means Soviet submission.^[4].

Tom Braden, who ran MoMA's executive office before joining the CIA to supervise its cultural operations, was not shy about the results. American art, he wrote, won more international goodwill than a hundred diplomatic speeches^[5].

Now think about what was actually being exported. Not art. Not freedom. A definition of freedom. One that located liberation exclusively inside the individual self, away from the community structures that alone could generate real political power.

The Older Game: How Religion Atomised the Soul FirstThe Older Game: How Religion Atomised the Soul First

Mikhail Bakunin was a nineteenth century Russian anarchist philosopher, author of God and the State (1871). Spent his life identifying the mechanisms by which power reproduces itself through ideology^[6]. One of his best quotes

The state and organised religion are a single system. And their shared project, for centuries, has been to prevent human beings from recognising their collective power.

From his perspective, Monotheism tough each person that their most important relationship is a vertical one. Between the solitary self and God. You face the divine alone. You are judged alone. You are saved or damned alone. Conscience is individual. Sin is individual. Salvation is individual^[7]. ~Christianity was the first to bring this ideas up, and still doing so today. The community of believers exists, yes, as an aggregate of separately-accountable souls. Now think about what that does to political consciousness.

"People are humanised and liberated by the society they live in, existing outside society would deprive people of these benefits. Humans can liberate themselves from the constraints of the external world only through collective work"^[8]. When you train human brains for centuries to locate freedom in the condition of the individual soul, you produce people who are ideologically disarmed against collective action. THere's the concep of hierarchy, there's the ideas of authority. Responsibility for the community is something we forgot long time ago.

Hunger for liberation is real. It gets redirected. Inward. Toward private virtue. Private wealth. Private salvation. Private expression. And away from the solidarity that might actually threaten the structures of power. This is what Bakunin called the manufacture of individualism. Religion performs it theologically. The state reinforces it politically.

The CIA aestheticised it. Replace God with the Unconscious. Replace private prayer with therapy. Replace personal salvation with self-actualisation. You have performed the same fundamental operation on human consciousness. You have ensured that the most urgent question a person can ask How can I be free? is answered by looking inward rather than outward at the social conditions that produce the suffering.

Now fast forward. The "cult of the self" that once required access to elite institutions, the right galleries, the right literary magazines, the right critical apparatus have been democratised by social media^[9].

Every person now has their own exhibition space. Their own publication platform. Their own therapeutic archive of curated self-presentation. The dream of modernism has been fulfilled: the self is everywhere, exhaustively displayed.

And the consequence is depression. Anxiety. Loneliness. Epidemic...

Suicide rates have risen in near-perfect correlation with the rise of platforms specifically engineered around individual self-expression and social comparison^[10]. The more people express themselves in isolation, the worse they feel. The more they perform individuality, the more hollow the performance becomes.

Here is the business model: a lonely person is an infinitely monetisable person. They need the platform more than a connected person does. They consume more. They are easier to target. They are more susceptible to the identity products, the supplements, the courses, the communities you pay to join with that promise to fill the gap that community used to fill. The isolated individual is the perfect consumer unit. They have no collective bargaining power. They have no solidarity network. They have only their own choices, their own preferences, their own scrolling thumb.

"In every State, the government is nothing but a permanent conspiracy on the part of the minority against the majority, which it enslaves and fleeces"^[11].
Bakunin wrote that in 1873.

Now swap "government" for "platform" and the sentence does not require a single edit.

The Paradox They Sold YouThe Paradox They Sold You

There is a real freedom in the inner life. The freedom to think, to create, to refuse. Suppressing them is a genuine atrocity against the human spirit. The people running those CIA programmes knew that artistic freedom matters. In contrast, Bakunin's precise point is that individual freedom and collective freedom are conditions for each other to exist^[12].

The liberal notion of freedom, to own, to express, to be left alone, is only available to people with the material resources to exercise it. It leaves the fundamental structures of domination completely untouched. A painter can be entirely free to paint whatever he likes while the institutions that determine which paintings get shown, funded, and celebrated remain rigidly controlled by people with inherited power and intelligence connections.

The capacity for people, together and through voluntary association, to govern their own lives without the mediation of any hierarchy. The freedom given by contributing to a solidary horizontal community^[13].

"The only grand and omnipotent authority, at once natural and rational, the only one which we may respect, will be that of the collective and public spirit of a society founded on equality and solidarity and the mutual human respect of all its members"^[14].

The CIA promoted individualism and called it freedom. With support evidence of the last seventy years, Bakunin would say that what they promoted was a very sophisticated form of unfreedom. One that feels like liberation until you notice that nothing in the structures of power has moved an inch. Related to this, is the important gab of misunderstanding between freedom and liberty.

Bakunin was suspicious of programmes, he knew too well that programmes become institutions, institutions become hierarchies, hierarchies become new forms of domination^[15].

His answer was a principle: the self only flourishes within a community of genuine solidarity.

Not the community you pay to join. Not the online tribe that validates your identity politics. A real, reciprocal, non-transactional community where your freedom and someone else's are genuinely entangled, where collective decision-making is not a threat to your individuality but its actual precondition.

This is, in the end, older than Bakunin. Older than capitalism. Older than the state. It was already there in the communities that existed before monotheism arrived to separate each soul from the divine through the terror of a jealous, individualising God.

It remains, despite everything, stubbornly true.

You are free when you are genuinely, accountably, vulnerably together. The revolution that power most fears is the one organised quietly, in trust, by people who have decided they are worth more than the sum of their engagement metrics.

Ask yourself: Am I consuming this, or is this consuming me?

FootnotesFootnotes

1. Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded 1950, CIA funding confirmed 1966. See Wikipedia: Congress for Cultural Freedom. Full narrative in Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Granta Books, 1999). ↩

2. Jennifer Dasal, ArtCurious (Penguin Books, 2020), excerpt: "How MoMA and the CIA Conspired to Use Unwitting Artists to Promote American Propaganda During the Cold War" in ArtNet News. ↩

3. "Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op?" JSTOR Daily. Primary source on the CCF's 1952 "Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century" festival in Paris and the explicit framing against Soviet aesthetic doctrine. ↩

4. Alfred H. Barr Jr., "Is Modern Art Communistic?" New York Times Magazine, 1952. Discussed and cited in: "Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op?" by @Celina101, which provides the most thorough secondary synthesis of primary sources on the CCF/MoMA operation. ↩

5. Thomas W. Braden, "I'm Glad the CIA Is 'Immoral'," Saturday Evening Post, 1967. Cited and discussed in full context at JSTOR Daily and Bunk History. ↩

6. Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1871, posthumously published 1882). Full text freely available at Project Gutenberg and Libcom.org. ↩

7. Wikipedia, "God and the State": Bakunin elaborated his view that "governmental and religious institutions had always collaborated to subjugate humanity" and that "throughout civilisation, belief in the divine was used to uphold state institutions and class stratification." ↩

8. Bakunin on social solidarity and collective liberation, cited in tutor2u Politics Reference: "Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)". ↩

9. Philopedia, "Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin" (2025): "Bakunin rejected liberal notions of isolated, purely juridical freedom, insisting that individuals become truly free only within solidary communities and egalitarian social relations." The parallel to social media's pseudo-individualisation is the essay author's own extrapolation. ↩

10. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024). Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide among adolescents more than doubled on many measures following the adoption of smartphone-based social platforms from 2012 onward. See: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book and Wikipedia summary. ↩

11. Mikhail Bakunin, The Immorality of the State, cited in Vaia: "Mikhail Bakunin: Biography, Beliefs & Anarchism". ↩

12. Philopedia, "Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin": "Central to Bakunin's thought is a theory of human freedom as both individual and social... For Bakunin, any durable hierarchy (whether political, economic, or religious) inevitably corrupts both rulers and ruled." ↩

13. Bookey summary of God and the State: "God and the State by Mikhail Bakunin". Bakunin envisions a society "where individuals and communities freely associate and work collectively for the common good," with collective decision-making as "the ultimate expression" of individual freedom, not its negation. ↩

14. Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, as quoted on Goodreads: the only legitimate authority is "the collective and public spirit of a society founded on equality and solidarity and the mutual human respect of all its members." ↩

15. Britannica, "Mikhail Bakunin": Bakunin "rejected political control, centralization, and subordination to authority" and his lifelong conflict with Marx centred on the conviction that a revolutionary state replaces one hierarchy with another. That programmes become institutions become new forms of domination. ↩