The question of the individual within society is an old one. Should the individual be put before the good of the community as a whole is a difficult one. Society is a place where people live together, but isn't society made up from hundreds and thousands of individuals just like you and me, and not some great collective of people who are all identical in both behaviour, looks and thought.
No, the good of the community - society - must surely come before the welfare of the individual. But then there's the question of the individual and his involvement in society. The individual must live, so must society. But society can survive without any one individual, but the individual cannot survive without society.
No.6 is an individual, one who does not conform, he rejects the society of the village. So on that basis has it been in the past correct for an individual who appreciates the Prisoner to go out and subscribe to a society which supports that appreciation? To join like minded individuals in various activities, to discuss and debate such an enigmatic series? After all, would No.6 join such a society, I wonder? I think if No.6 was to join any such Prisoner appreciation society, that he would be a disruptive influence on that society. Just look what happened when he attended one meeting of the social group during the episode of ‘A Change of Mind.’ He disrupted the social group to such an extent, that those attending simply walked away!
By nature man is a social animal, just like the doctor-No.14 of ‘A B and C.’ And in so being, contact with others is a necessity. No.6 is something of a lone-wolf in A Change of Mind, but then the citizens and society had turned upon him, and you can see how that hurts in his face as he looks up to the flocking Cormorants in the sky.
True individualism, is I think, is unobtainable because of influences, to a greater or lesser degree, with others who we meet. Perhaps the true individual is he who turns his back totally on society, he, or she who can live totally alone. Self-sufficient, who need no company but theirs alone...... in other words a Hermit.
After all are we all not alone as each of us, all individuals, each and everyone of us who have contact with others because they want to be friends because they are drawn to other like-minded people but remain unaffected, as we maintain out individuality.
Be seeing you
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