Mr. Skinner's voice is loud and clear when he declares: "To be for oneself is to be almost nothing." (P. 123.) As proof, he revives another ancient saw: the capacity of the human species to transmit knowledge deprives man of any claim to individuality (or to individual achievement) because he has to start by learning from others. "The great individualists so often cited to show the value of personal freedom have owed their successes to earlier social environments. The involuntary individualism of a Robinson Crusoe and the voluntary individualism of a Henry David Thoreau show obvious debts to society. If Crusoe had reached the island as a baby, and if Thoreau had grown up unattended on the shores of Walden Pond, their stories would have been different. We must all begin as babies, and no degree of self-determination, self-sufficiency, or self-reliance will make us individuals in any sense beyond that of single members of the human species. (Pp. 123-124.)
This means: we all begin as babies and remain in that state; since a baby is not self-sufficient, neither is an adult; nothing has happened in between. Observe also the same method of setting up a straw man that was used in regard to volition: setting it up outside of reality. E.g., in order to be an individual, Thomas A. Edison would have had to appear in the jungle by parthenogenesis, as an infant without human parents, then rediscover, all by himself, the entire course of the science of physics, from the first fire to the electric light bulb. Since no one has done this, there is no such thing as individualism.
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