Only Individuals Think, Choose, Act, and Experience

Chapter 7: Who Are We? The Individual Human Person

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) | 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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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.

Part 3
The Ground on Which We Stand

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Chapter 7

Who Are We?
The Individual Human Person

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Individualism

• The Principle of Individualism

• Opposition to individualism

• 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

Collectivism: dangerous and unnatural

• The Common Good?

• What works better?

• What is more natural?

• The individual is not ‘fiction’

• Enforced order vs. spontaneous order

• Utopianism and the totalitarian temptation

The best of both worlds

• An antidote to racial obsession

• The future belongs to the individual

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7.1 — Individualism

• The Principle of Individualism

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. […]

The power of the Tribe over the individual has become more extended, particular, pontifical, and, using the word in both senses, impertinent, than it has been for many generations. 

—Rudyard Kipling

This is you. 

This is me.

This is each one of us.

If this book were a movie, this little guy would be our hero. He is what each one of us is: an individual.

In a way, it is appropriate that we call him “our hero”—a very Hollywood term—because this particular individual was born in the media capital of the world: sunny Burbank, California.

But whether he was born in a hospital or a hut…a Pleistocene wilderness or a prairie farmhouse…his story is our story. 

Who is he? What does he want? How does he get it? What is his relationship to the world around him? In order to find a unit of measure for a political spectrum, we must understand why things are the way they are. And the first step begins with him. 

We’re calling him our hero—a he— but he could just as easily be a she. And since he’s standing in for each of us, he is also we.

The hero of our story is the individual human person. 

Individualism

❝More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself.

—Albert Camus, 1940

In an effort to clear away the clutter and build a philosophical case from the ground up, many classical-liberal thinkers start with a state-of-nature argument. Simply put, they begin their inquires about government by first attempting to conceive of life without government—either before it existed or in some condition of separation from it. Some strip their analysis down even further and begin with a single individual in isolation from all others.

Let us begin by following their lead. Think about yourself as a person. Just focus on you for a moment. (Yes, it’s okay to do that…just for now.) Imagine that you are all alone. No government, no other people, just you…

This is the moment when the needle scratches across the record and the angry shouts begin:

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