Trust Individuals. Do Not Trust ‘Mankind’

The goal is not to convince everyone. The goal is to leave. (DN 4.13)

To place the following exploration in context and not bury the lede, these are the arguments I am making in this piece:

1. We are better off taking a cautious, constrained view of mankind in the aggregate,

2. It is still possible to love and enjoy people in spite of that cautious view, and

3. The divergent opinions of, and threat posed by, other human beings is one more reason to stop trying to change “the system,” and to build our own instead.

“There are two types of people in the world: those who think the government is here to help, and those who are right.”

—George Carlin

“There are two types of people…” formulations are overgeneralizing, but they can serve a valuable purpose in a search for truth. For example, we can identify two diametrically opposed outlooks, one or the other of which is held (to varying degrees) by many people:

1. A rosy view of mankind in the abstract, but alienation from and skepticism about actual individuals

2. Fondness for actual individuals, but a distrust of humanity in the abstract.

Love Mankind

Among most famous avatars of the former view is the brilliant, bizarre, and emotionally unbalanced Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While he never actually said the frequently (mis)attributed “I love mankind; as for men, I know them not,” it is a reasonably accurate summation of views he expressed in his Confessions, Emile, and elsewhere.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky sums up the outlook quite plainly:

The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.…I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.

Outlook #1 manifests in Rousseau’s political prescription that any individuals who resist the “general will” of the collective must be “forced to be free.” (Who, exactly, gets to interpret and actuate that general will?) It is also found in Marx's belief that individual rights are a bourgeois pretense, and that humans can only be actualized as members of the group. (So then, where do rights come from, and who gets to decide what they are?)

And then, of course, the people of the world got to suffer through Robespierre's attempt to put these ideas into practice in France, and Lenin's attempt in Russia. More's the pity.

Love Individuals

The latter view—a general skepticism of mankind in the abstract—is exemplified by a Winston Churchill quote that expressed the exact opposite sentiment from Rousseau’s:

I am fond of people. It’s mankind I can’t stand.

Here too, the origins of the quote are debated, but the sentiment accurately reflects Churchill's views. William F. Buckley shared this outlook, expressing fondness for individuals, coupled with skepticism toward utopian collectivism and the intellectual elites who so often espouse it:

I’d rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University.

Unconstrained

In his A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell identifies these as aspects of the broader “unconstrained” and “constrained” visions of mankind.

In the unconstrained vision, humans are naturally good, and social problems are the result of flawed institutions rather than flawed human nature. The condition of mankind can, with the proper application of power and social solutions, be continually improved—a view that communists, socialists, and collectivists of all stripes have been attempting to actuate in the modern era since the 1790s.

In this view, people are perfectible. All that is needed to make the “new socialist man” is the right institutions and the right amount of force.

“If we can just crack enough individual eggs, eventually we'll get that collective omelet juuuuust right.”

Constrained

In the constrained vision, by contrast, people are naturally flawed and limited. No amount of force, nor any utopian scheme, can undo this reality. Humans, in the constrained view, are simply not perfectible.

Just as the unconstrained view is recognizably leftist, the constrained is clearly conservative, in its preference for tradition, prudence, incremental change, and accumulated human wisdom. Yet it is also recognizably libertarian, in that it sees the emergent order of the free market as the most effective way to mitigate the worst aspects of human nature while maximizing the best.

Bucking the trend

For many people, personality traits precede ideological alignment. So, for example (as has been made famous by Jordan Peterson), people who are higher in the Big-Five trait of conscientiousness are more likely to become conservatives, and those who are higher in openness are more likely to incline leftward. As described above, the same goes for the constrained and unconstrained visions.

Yet some of us don't exactly follow the pattern.

Though I was raised on the left, I began moving away from leftism in my teens. The process was slow at first, but by my early 20s—horrified by what I was learning about the left’s history (and what I was seeing from individuals lefties)—I was backing away from leftism like Homer Simpson receding into the bushes. I ended up a conservative, and then, through steady study of first principles, I became increasingly libertarian, and ultimately an anarchist.

However, even though I found myself a conservative early on in my adult life, I never really had what one could call the constrained vision. I would not say I was fully unconstrained either, but I definitely had a rosier outlook of humankind than most conservatives do.

Covid cured me of that…

People are a threat

I entered 2020 believing that people—especially Americans—have a natural preference for freedom. I believed they would resist totalitarianism when it arrived. Hoo boy, was I wrong.

Some resisted, of course. If I know my readers, there is a good chance that you resisted, or at least did what you could without martyring yourself. But most did not.

Most complied with whatever they were told to do. Most believed lies—including lies that withered under the most basic logical scrutiny.

Some slithered right into their roles as official enforcers of the regime. Others deputized themselves as the unofficial brownshirt version. Many just played their part as unthinking cogs, in the phenomenon Czech dissident Vaclav Havel identified as the “automatism of the system.”

Some were afraid to stand up to the regime—and understandably so, since doing so meant risking jail time, social ostracism, one's livelihood, and more. But far more were not only willing to comply, they were eager to. And it happened just as much in the democracies of the West as anywhere else.

Tragically, this is the normal pattern. People generally don't resist tyranny, and a sizable number of them eagerly abet it. As Michael Malice has repeatedly explained, by the time the Berlin Wall fell, fully one out of every three East Germans were snitching on not only on their neighbors, but also on their lovers, friends, and family.

The secret police didn’t even need to threaten them. They did it because they were bored. They did it because they were low-status individuals who wanted to feel important. They did it because many people simply cannot be relied on to do the right thing…but they can be relied on to wallow in craven submission to whoever has the power. (Notwithstanding people’s gauzy fantasies, the world is filled with far more toadies than heroes. For every one Eomer, there are a hundred Wormtongues.)

The architects of tyranny are always few in number, but it never matters. The system is there to be controlled, and nearly everyone falls into line. Dissidents are rare.

Lesson: In exigent circumstances, most people are a threat.

Love individuals anyway

This all makes it sound like I dislike people. I don’t.

I am highly extroverted. I love talking to people. I am bubbly, warm, and friendly. Jacqueline Rendell once called me “the human equivalent of an orange car.” (My wife added, “with polka dots.”) I smile at complete strangers and sometimes engage them in deep conversation. I make friends quickly, and I try to sympathize with where others are coming from. I like people. I really do.

I hope you do too.

But I no longer have any illusions about them, and neither should you. People become dangerous in groups. People become dangerous when the totalitarian train rolls into town.

The conclusions of Mattias Desmet and Gustave LeBon are unmistakable. We have Asch, Milgram¹, and Stanford, and we have plenty of real-world examples from history to justify the belief that in exigent circumstances, most people are either unreliable or downright dangerous.

Implications for our distributed nation

We have recently been covering different aspects of one important directive: to stop caring so much about what other people think.

We don’t all need to live under a single system. We shouldn’t let the opinions of others extinguish our personal flame. And we certainly don’t want to be the sort of people who desperately seek shallow social esteem.

Another aspect of this issue is the persistent desire to convince others of the rightness of our views.

Some of this desire is rooted in fear. If someone else is coming to different conclusions about the same set of facts, what does that say about our own sense-making? If we can convince others that our interpretation is correct, it makes us feel better about our interpretation.

Some of it is rooted in a more noble desire to share and impart truth, with a view to improving the world. Some of it is good and necessary.

I spend my days trying to convince people of things, so I can hardly claim it is not a worthwhile endeavor. But it has its limits, and these limits are something we must accept.

Some people will not be convinced. People have different incentives, different experiences, and wildly divergent opinions on everything.

Some people pose a threat, either directly or indirectly. Others are simply useless in any pursuit of freedom or resistance to tyranny.

We want to win people over if we can, but that quest cannot be open-ended. We have a tendency to believe that we must convince everyone—that we cannot act until we have consensus. We must resist that tendency.

If you are imagining and hoping for a future in which everyone just gets it—stop. That future is a distracting illusion.

Instead, imagine a future in which we leave. A future in which we slowly build our own world and attract those who wish to join us.

The goal is not to force our way of life on anyone, nor is it to wait until everyone accepts it. The goal is increasing freedom and independence for those who want it.

Ultimately, ours is a human movement. Our principles are rooted in the sovereignty and consent of the human person. We will one day issue a declaration of human independence. We will devise a constitution that we believe would be a good blueprint for humans to follow. The nation we are building can and will be diverse and worldwide.

But this has to begin with the people who want it. We can set an example, but we are not here to force a way of life.

Have your conversations. Convince all you can. But at the end of the day, we must act. So find your people, make your tribe, and help us exit and build.

Many tribes, one nation.

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15 | 1.16 | 1.17 | 1.18 | 1.19 | 1.20 | 1.21 |1.22

(Part II) What: 2.0 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 2.7 | 2.8 | 2.9 | 2.10 I 2.11 | 2.12 | 2.13 | 2.14 | 2.15 | 2.16 | 2.17 | 2.XX | 2.18 | 2.19 | 2.20 | 2.21 | | Where: 3.0 | 3.1 | 3.2 | 3.3 | 3.4 | 3.5 | 3.6 | 3.7 | 3.8 | 3.9 | 3.10 | 3.11 | 3.12 | 3.13 || Who: 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.XX | 4.XY | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.8 | 4.9 | 4.10 | 4.11 | 4.12 | 4.XZ | 4.13 |

1. Someone recently shared this with me, to question the conclusions of Milgram https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/why-almost-everything-you-know-about-milgram-wrong The problem is, even if we must reduce the number of people who will shock a stranger to death because an authority figure tells them to from 65 percent to 40 percent or even lower, it doesn’t matter. Totalitarianism doesn’t need majority involvement. A small percentage of people can do a lot of damage.