Individualism Lies at the Heart of Collectivism
Individualism Lies at the Heart of Collectivism
The ontology of collectivism is the same as the ontology of atomism.
The subject of this article is pretty straightforward. We all know of the great clash of civilizations which is the struggle between individualism and collectivism. As an ideological, sociological, ethical, and ontological category, what collectivism and individualism distinctly emphasize is the fundamentality and/or primacy of the individual or collective entity over and against the other. Under collectivism, it can be that, ontologically, there is something “greater” than the individual person and the individual person is merely an instantiation of the transcendent “collective,” which can be, in Hegelian lingo, the “Weltgeist.”1 It can also be ethically or ideologically conceived, as promoting the primacy of “collective,” “class,” or “proletariat” interests over all others. This is akin to the rhetoric of communism and Marxism, which focuses on the political liberation and empowerment of the working collective (although Marxism definitely implies/includes an ontological collectivism as well). Sociologically and ethically, as well, those students of the Bible with a special interest in background studies/classics/cognitive environment criticism are aware of the “collectivist” characteristics of ancient Mediterranean pagan civilizations, like Rome, Greece, and Babylon,2 although personally I think the term “communitarian” would probably be more appropriate and less welcoming of “academic rhetoric.”3
Whatever the form and with whatever specifications, we know what we’re talking about. What should also not be unfamiliar is that collectivism is becoming the predominant system in modernity, influencing rhetoric, policy, ethics, and even faith (despite the Church being responsible for the ethical and philosophical elevation of the individual)4 on a fundamental and broad scale. The rise of “left-wing” socialism as well as “right-wing” populist-protectionism (perhaps, in American politics, made most apparent in the rise of “Trumpism”) has demonstrated the rise in the acceptance of collectivist predilections in the political and ideological spheres, and as socialist politics continues to accelerate (whether due to the continued infantilization and fragmentation of the Right, the stubborn ignorance of “independents”/nonpartisans, and/or the continued Long March of the leftists) the prominence of ideological collectivism will continue to accelerate and institutionalize as well.
What I want to discuss in this article is, mainly, why collectivism, at least strongly understood (and not in a “we’re-all-in-this-together” sense, which isn’t true collectivism, or is merely the provincial understanding of Marxian politics adopted by college students), is a logical and ontological impossibility, or, at the least, a contradiction. What such an observation ought to lead us to conclude I will discuss later.
First, we begin with a very simple observation: collectives are dependent on individuals. Robinson Crusoe is often the archetypal character used by social scientists/political theorists to discuss theories in abstraction/formulate hypotheticals without too many imposing factors, and I shall do the same here. When Crusoe finds himself isolated on his castaway island, where is the collective? A collective necessarily requires more than one person to constitute it, yet one person can clearly exist on their own. Additionally, for a collective to operate individuals must operate of necessity. Hegel, one of the leading collectivist philosophers, saw the Weltgeist, the animating power behind historical forces, manifest in Napoleon, who he once described as “die Weltseele zu Pferde,” “the World-Spirit on horseback.” However, Napoleon’s success was dependent on the successes of his individual soldiers. The Battle of Austerlitz was won because Napoleon’s near-70,000 soldiers, interacting with billions of interlocking factors (the performance of their comrades, the stability of the French supply lines, the sufficiency of the French supply lines, the performance of their enemies, as well as countless others), were able to overcome their opposition. This isn’t a geist but a fortunate harmonization of countless factors (for Napoleon). In other words, Napoleon, like every ruler, is dependent upon his subjects for his legitimacy. This is most clearly demonstrated by Napoleon’s return to power, which, as deftly demonstrated in Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970), was entirely dependent on Napoleon individually regaining the loyalty of his soldiers. If Napoleon was the Great Man, the supreme instantiation of the World-Spirit, per Hegel, I wonder why his Hundred Days needed to happen, or how he was decisively defeated and sent into lifelong exile to St. Helena after Waterloo. Perhaps Hegel, through his theory of dialectics, could argue that Napoleon was the thesis and the Coalition armies the antithesis, seeking dialectical reconciliation until the famed End of History. If Napoleon enraptured Hegel’s mind so vividly, then we’d expect the End to have come shortly thereafter, but we find Hegel’s prophesying (as well for most dialecticians/millennairans) accordingly undermined by the historical record, for somehow the World-Spirit regained a dialectical imbalance. Fukuyma thought he foresaw the Hegelian End, finally, in the 1990s, but he was, of course, scathingly repudiated by the march of time as well.
What all this demonstrates is that any collectivist formulation of existence is undermined simply by experience. No collective is inalienable from the individuals who make it up. If one has read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, and ruminated on his MacGuffin of “psychohistory,” you get some insight as to why this is the case. As he explained in his posthumous anthology Gold,
I modeled my concept of psychohistory on the kinetic theory of gases… The molecules making up gases moved in an absolutely random fashion in any direction in three dimensions and in a wide range of speeds. Nevertheless, one could fairly describe what those motions would be on the average and work out the gas laws from those average motions with an enormous degree of precision.
In other words, although one couldn’t possibly predict what a single molecule would do, one could accurately predict what umptillions of them would do.
So I applied that notion to human beings. Each individual human being might have “free will,” but a huge mob of them should behave with some sort of predictability, and the analysis of “mob behavior” was my psychohistory.5
In other words, although one couldn’t possibly predict what a single molecule would do, one could quantitatively analyze what the total movement of millions of them given a posteriori statistical probabilities could do. So, even this fictional model is dependent on the activity of individuals, and is further contingent on free will. Free will, of course, is the factor that upsets any predictive activity, whether historically or economically.6 It’s why collectivist and authoritarian systems often ignore it, because it’s such a wild card. It’s not just that each “particle” of mankind is hard to analyze, like the motion of gasses, but each particle is furthermore self-determining and has a unique personality, which is impossible to scrutinize as if it were a specimen under a microscope. While it’s easy for us to look to the past and collect data concerning the behavior and factors of a population (which is statistics), the extrapolation of past data into the future is as foolish as it is impossible and futile.7 Two reasons: first, the future is intrinsically different from the past, for the factors that existed in the past do not and cannot exist in the future (for, if all factors remained the same, then time wouldn’t be a thing, we’d just experience an eternal now), and, second, in the moment that the statistical data were assembled (what was the present at the time) all understood the future to be incredibly uncertain. Do you know what is going to happen in 10 minutes? If all you’re doing is lying in your bed while reading this you may think “I’ll still be laying in my bed,” which may certainly be true, but you can’t be absolutely certain of that prediction, for you don’t know if someone (a courier, a friend, a neighbor) is going to knock on your door in 7 minutes and make you get up, or if you’ll suddenly have to use the bathroom! So, even when the future seems predictable in the present upon further examination we see that isn’t always the case.
This isn’t meant to be a diatribe on the philosophy of time or the metaphysics of free will, but what it does establish is that, even when human populations seem to work harmoniously (as a “collective”), there is immense individuality/spontaneity at work in any such scenario. Again, the collective is inalienable from the individual. When collectivist socialists gather together to protest whatever, they must assemble individual socialists in order for that collective to exist. When collectivist revolutionaries, like the Bolsheviks, gather together to revolt they must assemble individual proletarians to provide the manpower (“the proletariat,” as a gestalt, doesn’t organize itself). The collective only exists as the intellectual abstraction (or fetish) of individuals.
This observation alone I think does away with much of collectivism’s ideological and logical foundations, for it shows that any collective operation, any gestalt, is really just the masquerade put on by a society’s vanguard/oligarchy/elite (as Trotsky observed with Soviet Russia8 and Michels observed with democracy). However, there is another way to approach this, an approach more “metaphysical” in nature. In order to understand where I’m coming from, at least generally, with regards to this argument, as well as this article in total, I recommend to you my article “Communal Ontology: A Primer.”
First, let us, as we did before, assume we are dealing with a strong, or ontological, collectivism, akin to Hegelianism and similar schools, wherein human being is truly, merely, part of the One, the almighty collective. We are merely the surfacing bubbles or froth of the abyssal gestalt/World-Spirit. Let us also presume, despite what I’ve just argued, that the One can in fact logically and ontologically exist. What does this all necessitate? Well, first, let me spell out what exactly collectivism is saying. If there are 1,000 people, which may be referred to as “the nation,” “the proletariat,” “the commune,” or any other manner of collectivist epithet, collectivism says these people all constitute, fundamentally, a single entity. This is obvious. Now, while certain flavors of collectivism make room for some sort of distinction or variety, such as Hegel seeing an especial instantiation of the Geist in Napoleon (and other “Great Men”), or the nigh-collectivistic views of American exceptionalists that see the Founders as unique harbingers of the American Geist, all these varieties (at least the theoretical one we are working with) reduce to a One. Human identities are fundamentally just an (or rather, the) Identity. This is akin to classical monism, such as Neoplatonism, that exalted the supreme “One,” the basic and universal agent of all reality.
Can you see what this means? This means that collectivism fundamentally posits the Supreme Individual. In other words, collectivism is individualistic. Not in any classical or conventional sense, of course, but rather in having all the disparate egos of mankind reduced, inalienably and indistinguishably, into one Super-Ego (not in a Freudian sense). The 1,000 are merely 1, but the 1 isn’t 1,000. It is akin, also, to modalism.9 Individualism is often derided (at times rightly) for being atomistic, but we see here that collectivism actually results in the Supreme Atom, the isolated unit of being that everything ultimately is. Accordingly, collectivism, in its ontological monism, necessitates a self-relational reality, for if all things are the One then that “all” excludes any “other,” meaning only the One exists, only the One can perceive its existence, and only its own existence can it perceive. There is just the “I,” no “Thou.” It’s incredibly perceptive then for my friend Trey Lunot, a chief thinker behind the communal ontology, to refer to Hegelianism as “the logic of sin,” as this is an inherently self-relational (hence, ultimately, hellish) misosophy.
This makes sense of so many elements of collectivism, because in the futile attempt to implement its fundamental monism collectivists run into many logical and practical issues, issues that have manifested in the multitudinous historical wrongs of collectivist regimes. The main reason for this is that this self-relationality undermines ethics, and once ethics is undermined…well…people behave unethically. The reason is that, alienated from any other entities, the only logical goal of ethics is to serve that sole ego’s purposes. When Robison Crusoe arrives on his island absent of anyone but himself (prior to the arrival of Friday) what ethical duties can he possibly have when no other humans (i.e., moral agents) are around? Thus, he can appropriate the trees, lands, fruits, and other resources of the island he is on. Individual/atomistic ethics are, thus, mostly utilitarian, because, since no one other than the “I” is around, there is no other real consideration than what is best for the alienated “I.”10 Since collectivism is untenable, however, as discussed before, and external “Thous” do and must exist, the Super-Ego is inevitably approached by another moral agent (Friday) and must decide how to approach him, always in a way that doesn’t threaten its oneness. The utility of the Super-Ego, the One, is the main focus here, as established, and so only two outcomes exist for the Thou: assimilation, becoming part of the One and not threatening its oneness and supremacy (plus serving its utility), or annihilation, being removed as an obstacle on the One’s eternal path toward its utility. This explains the conduct of collectivist regimes, as recorded in Courtois’ Black Book of Communism, because we live in a world of individuals, and so when faced with internal (counterrevolutionaries and “traitors”) or external (American imperialists) opposition to their oneness they’ve opted to either assimilate or annihilate. Assimilation was international communism, seeking to smooth over the obstacles (and existential threat) that dozens of non-communist nations posed, and annihilation was the Cold War, seeking to snuff out the existential threat of the American enemy through nuclear fury and implement the dialectical End of History through a quasi-millenarianism that’d usher in the Soviet New Man.11 Likewise, this is why such regimes give into personalist totalitarianism, because since, ontologically, individuality does exist, the egos of all the “lesser” must be bound to the Super-Ego of the autocrat, so that all think and behave as the Great Man does, producing a simulacrum of what ontological collectivism/monism would be like.12 Nonconformity (“counterrevolutionary behavior”) is understandably such a threat since it compromises this charade and produces (an) ego(es) combative to the autocratic Super-Ego.
You see what I mean? That which is outside the collective threatens the existence of the collective, and anything outside of the collective identity must be vilified and forcibly assimilated. Proletarian/classist violence makes sense, then, since Marx portrays the bourgeoisie as a tumor on the working class (the true collective) which must be eradicated (either in its very existence or at least in its bourgeois, being integrated into the proletariat through post-revolutionary transformations, like Land Reform or dekulakization). Collectivism creates a monster, not only by tarnishing the ontological reality of the human species but also by undermining the practice of true ethics.
In sum, what we see is that collectivism is actually individualism, a monstrous corruption of it, but a cryptoindividualism all the same. The individual is and always will be the fundamental foundation of reality, and the Church’s historical role in advancing that understanding makes sense of why collectivist ideologies have almost always been antireligious in nature (like Marx calling Christianity an opioid). However, does this mean individualism is all there is? Even if a collectivist wakes up and smells the proverbial coffee does this necessitate that only individualism is the alternative? Only if we can only conceive of the individuals or the collective as our options. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a third way to which we must turn, to the insights of communal ontology. I’m not sure if I can refer to communal ontology as simply an ism, as all the candidates have been taken and have particular connotations (e.g., communalism, communitarianism, communism), but I place it as the legitimate competitor to individualism and collectivist cryptoindividualism. Here’s the reason: community itself implies that individuals are legitimate, actual entities, but that they are nevertheless inseparable from each other. Community, even though this is more of a folk etymology, can be broken down into “com-unity,” “com” coming from the Latin preposition cum, which indicates togetherness. It’s multiple people coming together as one (a unity), but unlike collectivism communal ontology acknowledges this unity is found through and by individuals. The main basis for communal ontology is found in the Trinity, which is understood as a Unity in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.13 and serves as an ontological foundation for seeing all reality as intrinsically relational. There isn’t one Super-Ego, 1,000 being 1, or merely 1,000 all on their own, but, rather, there are 1,000 existing as a community.
Christianity, then, posits a superior alternative to the terror of atomism and of monism, and finds a way for all men to be one without undergoing an annihilation of the self, the formation of some uniform and colorless gestalt blob, or the creation of a discordant sea of ravaging egos all competing with each other, forming and deforming spontaneous bonds like the chaotic primordial soup of early Creation. Instead of a terrifying “tyranny of the Other,” under the Christian vision the Other can be a beloved friend who serves to enrich us through his camaraderie, like a David and Jonathan or a Paul and Timothy. “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend” (Prov. 27:17).
See Murray Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 2, 351-52.
E.g., E. Randolph Richards and Brandon O’Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, 95-112.
I cover my distaste with the modern academic establishment (mainly in terms of “biblical scholarship”) in my essay “The Important Difference Between ‘Bible Scholars’ and ‘Theologians.’” On the disreputable state of the academic establishment see also Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind; cf. Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society. I’ll probably have to return to this issue more fully later.
See Larry Siedentrop, Inventing the Individual.
In fact, as Lucas Engelhardt demonstrates in his article “Central Planning’s Computer Problem,” even when low-balling the matrix of factors that a computer would have to work with to design predictive economic modeling, the sheer computational load such an operation would require (even on a local, let alone global, scale) is limited by unavoidable technological, physical, and logical issues. I.e., no technological singularity will ever surpass the sheer genius of spontaneous order (sorry Gene Rodenberry and Neal Shusterman).
On the relatively unknown but incredibly damning history of the Bolshevik regime as an astroturfed elitist black-op see Antony Sutton’s book Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, which is essential to understanding where socialism came from, how it survived the Cold War, and what the Cold War was really about.
Aren’t these correspondences between ancient heresies and modern “philosophies” interesting? One wonders if the same spirit is behind all of them.
I say mostly because (1) no one actually exists in alienation, (2) utilitarianism still isn’t without its flaws and errors even on an individual level, and (3) one should be virtuous even if alone (like eremitic monks). On the utilitarian ethics of atomistic identities see Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 77-79.
On the millenarian/religious aspects of Marxian/collectivist ideology, see Murray Rothbard’s essay “Karl Max as Religious Eschatologist.”
One can think of the humorous ditty by the turn-of-century cartoon Histeria!, “The Sound of Stalin.”
There is, of course, far more to what binds men together than the Godhead. Humanity isn’t an “octogiginity,” but rather eight billion persons with a common human nature and one telos: eternal communion with God (effected through the Church).