Individualism is bad.... REALLY???

Sometimes, I just get knocked for a loop. Maybe I’m just gullible, but is it really just me and a half dozen hillbillies that think the best and most honorable way to go through life is to do all you are able to do for yourself and your family before you ask for help from someone else? Be responsible for yourself. Seems to me to be a fundamental part of what I was taught by family, school, church, and friends for the last 54 years.

Make that 53 years and 11 months.

No, make it less than that. This is not the first time this has come up in message board conversations with folks who identify themselves as liberals.

The last time, I attributed it to the fact that the person who argued so starkly that there was no such thing as individualism was a strong union supporter. The fundamental basis of union existence is that no one person can change anything, but a large group can. Ergo, the individual loses significance and importance, and only the union has importance. Soon, it gets to the place that the person who decides to represent himself, rather than trade company control of his work for union control of his work, is seen as the bad guy, the wrong guy, the guy not to be trusted. Solely because he wanted to stand on his own two feet, not have the union prop him up.

However, perhaps it’s not that isolated. I’ve just been in a conversation on a message board with a fairly intelligent person, in all other respects. This person (I flipped a coin, I’ll designate as “she” but don’t take it for anything but a flipped coin), is a medical professional, so I’m on fair ground, I think, to estimate that she is intelligent. Throughout this whole conversation, it’s been mostly about how useless and insignificant the individual is and how important and supreme the collective is.

I’ve tried telling her that “individualism” as used by normal everyday people on the street means “I’ll do all I can within my power to provide for me and mine, before I ask for help, and I’ll take responsibility for myself and my family.” At one point, she said she would do the same. At another point, she ridiculed the idea.

Anyway, while thinking about this, wondering what would cause an otherwise intelligent person to oppose the idea of personal responsibility and taking care of oneself as much as possible, it occurred to me that this argument is not really about individuals vs groups.

It’s about absolute right and wrong vs relative right and wrong.

You see, if an individual’s action can be of any value, if it can have any impact, that individual had to have made that decision on his/her own, individually. If it is a good impact, then that individual, by definition, is able to determine right from wrong without the input of the rest of society. There must be, therefore, an objective right and wrong, because the individual determined right without any input from any other human. Perhaps there was input in the past, but that establishes understandings upon which our person of the day makes that decision. If that individual is allowed to be recognized as right, apart from society confirming his/her “rightness” then there must be an absolute right and wrong.

On the other hand, if only groups can have impact or do good things, then only groups can be right, and it becomes much easier to set aside the concept of objective right and wrong in favor of the majority opinion of the group. Ergo, the idea that the collective is always and forever better than an individual is actually a retreat from the concept of objective right and wrong. It is believing that no individual person can determine right, but that a group of individuals can. How on earth can 10 people do what one person cannot do, when the question is a mental one, determining right from wrong? It has to become a physical act to make that come to pass, and that physical act is indicating a preference, and if more than half of the group indicates the same preference, then that preference becomes “right.”

Think about that. Right and wrong. Cardinal concepts upon which all of civilization rises and falls, now determined (supposedly) by a vote of a group. “Wait, wait,” you say, “that is the basis of American voting. We vote and that decides it.” Really? Do we vote on what is right and what is wrong, or do we vote on who we want to go to that office and (hopefully) do right and avoid wrong? This idea that the moral compass can be voted on by a group and the outcome of that vote has more significance than an individual’s conscience is the silliness that replaces what generations have known. Mankind has a conscience, but only on an individual level. When that conscience speaks, wise humans listen, and carnal humans rebel. That is where that argument comes from, I firmly believe. It is the exact same argument as the child that comes to his/her parents and says “but all my friends get to go to this movie” and the child expects that group “power” to have some effect rather than the objective truth of whether or not Mom and Dad consider the movie appropriate for that child.   Now, as you read this, those kids are the adults who make this argument that numbers make right, and they still expect it to have some effect when time-tested, conscience-driven right and wrong is the parent.

Sadly, I think the kids are winning.



Liberty for the Brave.

Al