I have long stood in awe of the myth we tell ourselves – that man is a solitary, sovereign architect of his destiny, a being untouched by the pull of social currents or the weight of history. It is a comforting delusion, but a delusion nonetheless. Heidegger, with his piercing insight into the nature of being, shows us that we are thrown into this world, not as detached agents but as beings shaped by the frameworks of time and place, of culture and language, of ideologies and institutions. But we confront an even deeper truth: our individuality is not existentially absolute; it is intersubjective, forged in the crucible of relationships with others as Levinas contended. To imagine otherwise is to deny the undeniable, as Merleau-Ponty asserts that every thought we think, every decision we make, is situated in a shared and overlapping fabric of existence.
Why does this matter? Because this illusion of autonomy does more than distort our understanding of self – it scaffolds the tyranny of meritocracy. Modernity, as Marcuse warns, is a one-dimensional world that privileges Pragmatic utility for human existence over inherent human essence, reducing the infinite richness of human life to narrow metrics of productivity and achievement. It teaches us that success is earned solely by effort and ability, while erasing the labyrinth of structural and intergenerational injustices that determines the outcomes for many long before they begin. Bourdieu unmasks the hypocrisy here: we call it fairness when the rules of the game are rigged, when systems of wealth, race, and power create barriers that no amount of hard work can transcend. My point of contention is that postmodern man has been deemed as individuated entity which is fallacious ontological reductionism. Man does have essential individuality but does not have existential individuality. Because man’s actions as well as its corresponding results are not only deliberated by his will and it’s efficacy, but determined by being situated in social fabric.
And yet, society has the audacity to locate blame in the victim. What greater cruelty exists than to fail someone and then call them a failure? Fanon, in his critique of colonial oppression, shows how deeply these injustices penetrate, by manifesting those denied access to opportunity are also forced to bear the stigma of their exclusion. Failure, under this paradigm, is not the absence of effort but the culmination of structural violence. Butler’s work on power reminds us how profoundly these forces infiltrate our sense of self, internalising systemic barriers as personal shortcomings. This is what injustice does: it rewrites the truth, making the oppressed carry the shame of conditions created by others.
Consider Žižek’s vision of late capitalism, a machine that thrives on contradiction. The system produces the failure it needs to sustain itself, turning individuals into scapegoats for inequalities it refuses to acknowledge. Baudrillard offers no comfort here either. He reveals how our culture masks systemic dysfunction by romanticising personal success and villainising personal failure. What results is not just disillusionment – it is the mass erasure of responsibility from systems of oppression, leaving the individual alone to answer for forces they did not create. Success thus defined as achieving pragmatic utility is narrow worldview that incapacitate man on one side by putting him in structural injustice and imposing an unjustified accountability on him on the other hand. Failure is then failing in producing that pragmatic utility in spite of being a victim of that structural injustice.
To cling to the enchantment of man as a sovereign individual is to perpetuate the most sophisticated violence: the invisibility of systemic injustice. To revere success as pragmatic utility is to celebrate an axiological distortion, where human beings are valued not for their inherent dignity but for their being a useful mean within an inhumane economy. And to brand failure as individual weakness is to close our eyes to the wounds society has inflicted, shifting guilt and shame onto those who have suffered most. The failed man thus is not a reflection of his own inadequacies but the inevitable product of structural and intergenerational injustices. His struggle is rooted in the wounds of history – perpetual exclusion, denied opportunities, and systemic inequities passed down through time. The myth of individual sovereignty obscures these truths, shifting the weight of blame onto those burdened by forces beyond their control.
What emerges from these critiques – whether from Fraser’s call for redistributive justice or deBeauvoir’s indictment of the oppressive cycles of exclusion – is a plea for honesty and responsibility. Man is not free-standing; he is embedded. Success is not merely personal; it is enabled – or denied – by systems far larger than the man himself. Failure is not weakness; it is a symptom of the profound inequities baked into the structures of our world.
I offer an alternative to rethink interconnectedness as the condition of existence of humanity, to redefine worth beyond utility, and to see failure as an indictment of injustice, not the individual, a demand for a world where man can be seen, finally, as a being more than biological, a possessor of inherent dignity and an unbreakable ties (khalaf) of stewardship.
I would like to revive that notion which is considered to be one of the purposes of human existence in terms of Iqbalian injunction here, where he says:ZindaRakhti Hai Zamane Ko Hararat Teri/ Koukab-e-Qismat-e-Imkan Hai Khilafat Teri / Aqal Hai Teri Sipar, Ishq Hai Shamsheer Teri / Mere Darvaish! Khilafat Hai Jahangeer Teri. (Jawab-e-Shikwa, Stanza31.2,36)