No, the Individual Is Not ‘Fiction’

Chapter 7.5: Collectivism: Dangerous and Unnatural, cont'd

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) (7.4) (7.5) | 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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7.5 — Collectivism: dangerous and unnatural

• The individual is not ‘fiction’

• Enforced order vs. spontaneous order

• Utopianism and the totalitarian temptation

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.

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The individual is not ‘fiction’

Most humans have (or can easily give in to) a strong sense of group loyalty. Cultures around the world place different levels of emphasis on values such as duty and sacrifice, but they are present throughout human society.

Literature often portrays the conflict. The hero has two paths before him: go his own way or follow the path of loyalty to the family, the tribe, the village. Will he follow his heart or abjure his personal desires in favor of duty, honor, or in-group allegiance? But here’s the rub: even when the hero chooses group loyalty over personal desire, and his decision is portrayed as a noble sacrifice, the story is still recognizing that individuals are individuals—separate people with separate desires who choose, of their own free will, to surrender those desires to a “larger” purpose.

Such stories reinforce the fact that we do not have a hive mind. There is no unanimity in any group or culture. There is no one set of goals, dreams, desires, aspirations, opinions, or beliefs. Even in Germany—a nineteenth-century incubator and twentieth-century hotbed of collectivist philosophy and activity—there was a time when members of the intelligentsia were more inclined toward classical-liberal principles.¹ Individuals, even when members of the same groups, are very different from one another.

Still, collectivism’s siren call can easily draw us to the rocks. “There is a life higher than the individual life,” we are told—“the life of the people and the life of the state, and it is the purpose of the individual to sacrifice himself for that higher life.”²

Many a heart has quickened at such words. The nobility of sacrifice…the exhilaration of joining with others in a collective endeavor…the feeling of honor in a higher purpose—these emotions can stir people’s souls. Even when they take an explicitly dark turn, statements of collectivist thinking arouse in some a desire to participate in a new “heroic culture.”

Being a classical liberal, I find it disturbing when I am told that, “The state is neither founded nor formed by individuals, nor an aggregate of individuals, nor is its purpose to serve any interest of individuals. It is a Volksgemeinschaft in which the individual has no rights but only duties.”³ Yet such stark statements were met by throngs of people ready to devote themselves to the idea of a brave future in which the “fiction of the individual” is finally discarded in favor of the elevated life of a unified society.