Conversation

With respect to collectivists who can only see the world through their lens and who create an internalized ideal man in that image, they only think you can make your life better through the collective, and so they can only judge themselves by every sin in the universe that still exists because the collective has failed to act in a godly manner, and because they judge themselves as an avatar of the collective the failure of the collective is the failure of themselves and so they can never truly do good because the collective has failed to bring utopia, and so the only righteous act is further revolution because surely if the all-good collective has not achieved utopia surely it is only because not enough of everything under the sun has been brought into their collective yet.

Class Socialism as an ideology once covered most of the planet. It was dominant in Asia, controlled much of Europe, existed in Africa and South America, and was represented in small parts of North America. It had all kinds of people, white and black, asian and indigenous American. Most of the population of humanity. Yet, if you talk to the people who still subscribe to it as to why it failed, it's because they didn't have enough -- They just needed that slice of europe, they just needed the rest of North America, they just needed those people included in their collective and then utopia would have finally taken place.

This collectivist viewpoint bent on always expanding the collective and not considering individual merit a virtue and considering individual striving for achievement to be a vice against the collective since that could mean there are different classes of people.

Such an ideology can be likened to the dot com bubble's failing businesses: "We lose money on every sale, but we make up for it on volume". Already with most of the world's population, already with most of the world's landmass, but if they just have a little more then they'll be ok.

By contrast, seeking individual virtue is something that you can't rely on anyone else for, you have to do it yourself. If you aren't succeeding, then you have to work harder, to be better. You'll never live in a utopia, but you have a very real chance of finding personal happiness and fulfillment. People succeed in this regard every day.

Of course, extreme individualism has its own problems -- human beings are social creatures and so you can't just sit in your basement pumping iron every day and hope to be successful -- but the key here in my view isn't being anti-social, but rather putting responsibility for your personal happiness and success on yourself rather than on everybody else.

On the other hand, if you have a business that makes money on each sale and you scale it up, then you can become rich. In the same way, you can build a community of individuals who each take personal responsibility for their own success, and in so doing have a community that works on its own without having to take over the entire world and all her people.

Individuals who have their own power usually can't change the entire earth, but they can change their part of it for sure. A good man can become a good husband to his wife, and a good father to his son or daughter. A good woman can become a good wife to her husband, and a good mother to her son or daughter. That unit alone, producing good children thereby, is a unit in and of itself, a self-contained center where happiness is found by a lot of people. Then perhaps you have a neighborhood with some good families, and some good neighborhoods in a good community, and before you know it you've got a good place to live. That place is not created by conquering and subjugating everything around them, but by strong individuals using their personal agency to make the world in front of them worth living in.

There are a lot of people who will not pick a piece of litter off the ground in front of them, but hubristically expect to conquer global climate change. If you can't even pick up a piece of litter to make your own community a tiny bit better at nearly no cost to yourself, how do you expect to change the climate of the entire earth? It's absurd. There are people who argue that a starving person in Africa is of the same moral substance as someone starving right in front of you right now, and so the person in front of you has no particular reason to be helped while the person on the other side of the world also remains unhelped. This too is absurd -- if you can't even help your own community, what do you think you'll do on another continent? It's orders of magnitude more effort to help someone who isn't even in front of you.

In my view, that's how you actually change the world: Make yourself strong, make your family strong, you might then get a chance to make your neighborhood strong, and perhaps even your city, your state, your nation, and if you become someone who has done so much good, then and only then can you actually change the world. Skipping steps only shows your personal hubris.

It should be self-evident -- how does one make the world better if they've failed to even make themselves any better? Obviously they can't. If you take failure and multiply it by a thousand, you have a thousand times the failure. However, as I mentioned at the beginning, it's part of the ideology -- imagine that someone else, someone somewhere in the collective, will save you if only you submit to it. And in so doing your submissive impotence becomes virtuous and utopian, and anyone who refuses to submit, anyone who wants to find their own strength, is a threat to the collective, and a threat to utopia.

Besides the honest outcomes, I think there's also a dishonest hidden truth: By outsourcing competence to the collective, you aren't responsible for seeking to be virtuous, and so you don't have to. By aiming at changing the entire earth and refusing to compromise, you're never responsible when you inevitably fail. Why try to raise a child, or feed the hungry, or clean litter, and face potential failure for something mundane, when you can aim to change the climate of the entire earth and if you inevitably fail you're just failing to do the impossible? The former makes you a pathetic loser, the latter a noble visionary who just happened to come up short. Moreover, pretending you are fighting to change the entire globe gives you a noble excuse not to even try to do the inglorious, boring, tedious things that make up doing the right thing in your personal life.

A couple things to be careful of reading the above: Obviously I'm not attacking all forms of collectivist thought. I'm attacking a specific type of thought, while implicitly supporting another. Second, I'm not calling for perfect individualism, but rather that people ought to follow a certain trajectory where they take personal responsibility for their competence and virtue before trying to contribute to a collective whole rather than jumping into a collective and thinking that doing so will inherently solve problems.

I think many philosophies and religions follow a similar idea. Individuals must find Christ, must follow God's commandments, must work to improve themselves. Individuals must try to reach nirvana. Individuals must work to be worthy of their station in life. However, that does not mean individuals are not doing so alone. There is often still a church, a temple, a society, some collective it's implied that individual is working within.

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