There are many ways to grapple with collectivist thinking and puzzle over man’s strange attraction to it. A novel one that’s planted roots in my mind recently, in hand with a shift toward focus on the longer term that’s brought me both new insights and greater calm, is looking at it from an evolutionary perspective.
Think of the long history of human beings struggling to survive on this Earth — battling nature and beast and one another, and given hope of improving our condition and living to see future days only by our capacity to gain new capabilities. When, I ask myself, has it ever made sense for us to make ourselves weak, subservient, and dependent on a centralized authority that promises us our livelihood? Is that really a possible or reasonable end state for the long arc of human evolution? All that struggling and striving to get better, stronger, smarter, more agile and adaptable, only to conclude we don’t need any of it and should just throw in the towel?
Seen from this perspective, the idea seems absurd on its face. Yet weak subservience is exactly what the Left is selling: obedience to a state that will provide us with our education, healthcare, retirement, protection, and in so doing ultimately make us helplessly dependent as we lose the ability to do things for ourselves, up to and including thinking. (In reality, the state will do all of these things very poorly, but by then the siren song of the sales pitch will have done its job.)
This seems like an interesting line of argument to use with a member of the self-described “science-based community”. I look forward to having the opportunity to see where that goes, and I wonder if any of you have given this general perspective some thought already, or maybe used similar kinds of arguments in discussion with friends on the Left.
14 replies on “A Collectivist End State for the Human Race? (Really?)”
Collectivism is built into the biology at the most fundamental level. Family, tribe, clan, nation, empire, are all collectives. On the business level, partnerships, corporations, also forms of collectives. Humans have never been simply individuals and they never will be.
True, but as we know there is a key difference between voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit and coerced collectivism — a difference that seems to always be lost on the Left. We don’t live best and most fulfilling lives as solitary individuals, but neither are we herd animals or hive insects. The argument on the Left seems to be that simply because cooperation is good, we should institutionalize it as mandatory and bypass that small detail of allowing for individual agency and self-determination.
You have to recognize that individuals form groups and groups are made of individuals. Sometimes the individual has to yield to the group and sometimes the group has to yield to the individual. Any ideological determination to destroy the individual in favor of the group or to destroy the group in favor of the individual will ultimately fail catastrophically.
Oh, and “as we know”? You trying to dragoon me into your collective? 🙂
LOL! Yes, you will be One of Us!
I guess I’m supposing that most of us here have an appreciation for the basic distinction between coerced action and voluntary action, even as one can argue that the line isn’t always clearly drawn in some particular case. (e.g. I voluntarily comply with our laws when I believe them to be just and grounded in a sane and reasonable moral code. Does that mean I’m being coerced into not robbing or murdering my fellow citizens?)
I agree with what I take to be your key point: that we are not purely individualists or collectivists. Those are asymptotes that help to frame the spectrum of possibilities. But I do find them useful to talk about as overall philosophical centers that we can gravitate toward. I think most of the time we use the terms in this looser sense. I can say I’m a more of an “individualist” without meaning to imply that I act and exist entirely on my own and separate from others. I value the ability of each individual to choose to work collectively or individually on a case-by-case basis at their option. Groups do have rules and principles and obligations for good reason as part of what defines them and makes them effective and meaningful ways of choosing to organize ourselves. As long as a person is free to choose not to participate in a particular group (potentially at a substantial cost they must bear as the rational consequence), I’m OK with that model of [voluntary] “collectivism”. 🙂
Some humans are individuals. It is a small percentage. Most of the time, it is these that pull civilization forward in great leaps.
You sure you want to go with the great leap forward?
LOL! If you mean China and Mao, I forgot that one because a) it wasn’t very great, b) it wasn’t forward.
The better, stronger, smarter evolutionary trend probably went into reverse after the transition from hunter-gatherer to city-dweller.
The anonymizing effect of urban life does seem to play into this in a significant way. When we pack ourselves together by the millions in densely populated cities, many having left the families and communities they grew up in behind to move in search of work, it seems we’re much more likely to see the state as our inevitable caretaker, and less likely to worry about where the magic money comes from.
I’m afraid too many on the left are able to live in a cognitive dissonance and embrace both the “party of science” and reject vaccinations, support transgenderism, look for amoeba life on other planets but not find it in the womb, believe the Gaia-faith of human caused global warming but reject evidence from reduced sunspot activity and readings on Mars.
Too many adherents follow without thought and believe what they were never talked into that they cannot be talked out of via thinking and reason.
An excellent point. I do think application of reason can guide one away from irrational or purely emotionally-based beliefs. But that of course requires one to start to embrace and value reason.
There are many seeming contradictions in play, as you point out. It’s for that reason that I think of being on the Left as a position of “unstable equilibrium”: any small displacement away seems to produce continued acceleration away, rather than a restoring force. Maybe it’s our job to help seed those first small displacements in discussion and debate, as Martin described doing.
I’m working on slowly trying to turn a friend from an NPC cliche into a free thinker. I forget the conversation the other day but at one point we touched on freedom of speech and “hate speech” which he was prevaricating about. I think I hit an actual brain cell though when I asked him “well, do you believe in freedom of thought?” which he immediately agreed with. “So, do you not see that if you don’t have the freedom to write and say what’s in your head then you don’t really have freedom of thought.” As usual, as soon as the argument was won he went off on some unrelated tangent to change the subject, but for a moment there I got the feeling I had gotten through to him.
That hasty change of subject seems a likely sign that you both hit a nerve and planted a seed, Martin. The general belief on the Left is that some ideas should not be allowed to be expressed because they are hurtful, but it seems only a matter of time before a person encounters a subject on which he thinks differently than the herd, realizes he’d better keep quiet for fear of being attacked and ostracized, and starts to think about how wrongly precarious his position is in the shackles of such orthodoxy. General values like freedom of speech and action seem like good avenues to pursue. I hope your friend will start to come around and see the light, bit by bit.
When it becomes “hurtful” to them, it’s harmful to the one because we all know “they eat their own”.