One fish, two fish, Friends help you (ish?)

So today I was dragged to a musical where, of the two main characters, one was condemned by his own family for spreading radical ideas and the other was nearly sentenced before a prejudiced jury of his peers as crazy simply because he believed that some persons who others though of as inferior were just as much people as all the rest.

Can you guess which musical? If you guessed Wicked, you would be wrong. It was actually Seussical the Musical.

But anyways, it got me thinking of the common theme between the two musicals. Both accentuate individuality and how society drags us down. (Although Seussical moderates this very Ayn Randish idea with some implication that there are some people in the universe who will actually help you.)

And then I played a game of Munchkin (for those of you who don't know it, it's a satirical board game revolving around a group of RPG adventurers constantly backstabbing each other so they can get to level 10 before the others) and that seemed to hammer in that other people drag you down.

Isn't that a very contradictory idea to the way human society has developed? We, as humans, have created groups, tribes, based on the ideas of difference and conformity. Even if I may not like it, there is something that connects me with every single God-loving gun-toting gay-hating Texan, just the fact that we are both American. Even if there might be someone much more my temperament living in Egypt, we are still different simply because he's an Egyptian national. Humanity loves groups.

Yet at the same time, in America especially, we constantly hammer in the idea that an individual can do great things. In capitalism, one person with an idea can make millions. The idea of the self-made man, the man who gets no help from any of his friends or his background, is prevalent in our country.

Yet, nothing grows in a vacuum. We are all the product of our friends and our families. They shape us more than we ourselves do, envelop us like a mold around clay. The question seems to be, is the enveloping more of a blanket, keeping us warm in the cold nights, or a straitjacket?

I don't have an answer for that. I think society does weigh us down in some ways. I also know that I love my friends and my family, and, even if I could go farther without them, it's not because they're dragging me down but because I enjoy walking slower if it means I'll be with them longer.

I guess the lesson is, if you have awesome friends, life is much better with them than without. But that's not much of a lesson is it?