Groups Do Not Have Minds. Only Individuals Do.

Chapter 7.3: To suggest otherwise is extremely dangerous.

Why this book | Title Page | Table of Contents
Preface | Introduction
PART 1
Chapter 1 (1.1) (1.2) | Chapter 2 (2.1) (2.2) (2.3) | Chapter 3 (3.1) (3.2) (3.3) (3.4) (3.5) (3.6)
PART 2
Chapter 4 (4.1) (4.2) (4.3) (4.4) (4.5) | Chapter 5 (5.1) (5.2) (5.3) (5.4) (5.5) (5.6) (5.7) (5.8) (5.9)
Chapter 6 (6.1) (6.2) (6.3) (6.4) (6.5)
PART 3
Chapter 7 (7.1) (7.2) (7.3) | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14
PART 4
Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 |
PART 5
Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Conclusion
Appendix | Works Cited

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7.3 — The individual is the base unit of society

• Individuals are individualistic

• Groups have no existence as entities separate from the individuals who comprise them.

• Driving the point home

  • Actually alone…

  • Incarnation, free will, equal creation, salvation, and judgment…

Note: This is an installment of The Freedom Scale: An Accurate Measure of Left and Right. See here for installments of The Distributed Nation: A Plan for Human Independence.

The individual is the base unit of society

Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club?…Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals.

—Alfred Whitney Griswold

Defenders of collectivism (and those who love community and mistake the one for the other) often rest their arguments on the notion that the individual is, by virtue of the most basic facts of our existence, simply inextricable from the group. 

This is entirely understandable. Human groups are an inescapable reality and necessary for anything other than the most meager and miserable of existences. It is difficult indeed to imagine our hero without…

His family, from the act of love that made him to the ongoing care that nurtures him to adulthood,

• The extended family who form a support network and provide many of his first associations beyond his immediate family,

• The community in which he will participate—where he will find friends, colleagues, and a mate to start his own family,

• The broader marketplace, where accumulated human knowledge spares him from having to relearn everything, and where the economic specialization of his fellow man spares him from a life of subsistence-level drudgery.

It is hard to imagine individuals outside of groups, and theories that ask us to do so can feel very…theoretical. But as difficult as it is to imagine our hero without all of that, it is impossible to imagine all that without him. Without individuals, there is no family, no community, no market. No groups at all.

Groups are wonderful things. We need them. A philosophy that understands the individual to be the central figure of society is not anti-group.

I don’t even want to contemplate my life without all of my connections, from the glorious synthesis of marriage and the loving bonds of family to the broadest of human associations. 

But such sentiments do not change the fundamental facts of reality. Groups are divisible. If the individuals who make up a group disband, the group ceases to be, but the individuals remain. Individuals are not divisible. The individual is the base unit of society, and must be treated as such.¹

Individuals are individualistic

Go to any group of people, even one that appears to be acting in concert, and start asking questions of individual members of the group. If you can manage to speak privately with each respondent, such that they can answer free from the pressures of conformity, you will quickly find that even the most unified group is made up of individuals with different personalities, motivations, and preferences. 

Even a group of people who all passionately support a single political candidate will come up with a wide variety of preferences if more candidates are introduced and they are asked to rank their choices in order. Indeed, as analysts have demonstrated, consensus in a group is elusive precisely because when you drill down, you find that the group is formed of individuals with differing opinions and preferences.²

You don’t need to go to a large group to find such diversity. My grandmother, born in 1922, was the oldest of nine children…