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Why is individualism a bad thing? (hexbear.net)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Everytime I here individualism brought up by someone from Hexbear or Lemmygrad, it gets talked about as if it's categorically bad and wrong. Why is that?

This goes against everything I've learned in the states, where we consider individualism a necessary part of being a responsible and moral person, whereas collectivism strips us of our humanity and turns us into subhuman insectoid creatures incapable of thought.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago

aimixin:

"Collectivist" and "individualist" are nonsensical false dichotomies. "Individualists" love to criticize the "collectivists" for wanting to "sacrifice the individual for the collective" and insist that "the individual is more important than the collective". These nonsensical phrases see the individual as an "island unto themselves", that the individual is separate from society, and therefore you can speak of the individual and society as distinct entities.

Yet, this is just objectively not true, the individual is part of that very same collective. If you sacrifice the collective, you also sacrifice the individual, as the collective is merely the totality of individuals.

And, in practice, this is how all "individualists" behave in the real world. They advocate in favor of the sacrificing of the vast majority of individuals in order to promote the individuality of a very few number of individuals.

The most "individually free" society conceivable would be a dictatorship as the dictator would be individually free to dictate whatever he want without any hindrance, but this comes at the sacrifice of the collective's individuality.

The self-contradictory incoherent nature of "individualism" causes so-called "individualists" to advocate directly in favor of the enslavement of the vast majority of individuals to a few. It's an incoherent ideology as "collectivism" and "individualism" are inseparable, the individual is part of the collective, and you cannot sacrifice the collective without sacrificing the individual.

Take the issue of private property, for example. Marxists point out that capitalist societies deprive the vast majority of individuals of the means of production and destine them to work for others for their entire lives, so they advocate for collective control over the means of production so that individuals can actually have control in the economy.

"Individualists" respond to this by saying that this is "sacrificing the individual for the collective" and vehemently defend the massively unequal ownership of the majority of the economy by a small handful of oligarchs because to them, their individual right to be an oligarch is more important than the individuality of the millions of people underneath that oligarch.