The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
In this essay, I will argue that the philosophy of individualism, which prioritizes the moral importance of the individual before all else, is false. Individualism is the basis for much of modern political thought, and is upheld by liberalism, both in its libertarian and egalitarian forms. Rarely is individualism contested, however. In this essay, I will argue that individualism is false for the following reasons:
1) The individual cannot exist without society.
This is a "well, duh" objection on the face of it, but it's surprising how many individualists do not consider it. People are born weak and dependent on their parents for survival. From then on, they are dependent on other people in the society to flourish as human beings. Even if they decide to leave this society and live by themselves in the jungle, Robinson Crusoe-style, they will still be forever colored by the society that left them.
Okay, the individualist says, but human beings are more than just their social classes though. Sure, but to what extent? Human beings are thrown into this world colored by various social orders (ethnicity, sex, class, culture, family, etc.) that they do not consent to. Their identities are only made intelligible by participating in these social orders. The individual devoid of these social orders is a mere abstraction. In the words of reactionary philosopher Julius Evola, to place value on the individual over their social orders "is the same as regarding as paramount the bronze found in many statues, rather than seeing each one as the expression of distinct ideas, to which bronze (in our case, the generic human quality) has supplied the working matter (Men Among the Ruins, p. 135). So not only can people not exist without previous societies, not only are people forever colored by the societies they inhabit, their very identities are unintelligible without the societies in question.
2) Private goods aren't the only thing that matter.
The idea of the common good is derided by modern individualists. As this poorly-written essay sums up, "the idea of the “common good” has always served as the moral justification for virtually every form of tyranny throughout history." This is is because, he claims, it cannot be defined. "There is no such thing as the “common good” unless one means the sum of the interests of all men and women in a particular society," he claims. Nothing, however, can be further from the truth.
But what is the common good? The common good is the good of a society, in contrast with private goods, which are the goods of individuals. Individualism holds the private goods of individuals are paramount while denying that any common goods actually exist. But surely, the individualist cannot deny that the common good of a sports team is winning the game, right? Surely, the individualist cannot deny that the common good of an army is to achieve victory in war, right? And surely, the individualist cannot deny that the common good of political society is the maintenance and moral uplift of a community, right?
The problem with individualists is that they assume that common goods do not apply to individuals. To the contrary, common goods are the goods of individuals, but they are goods that are shared by all members of the community equally without diminishing their value, yet can only be achieved collectively. Certainly, one soldier cannot win a war. And common goods must trump private goods, as the good of all is greater than the good of an individual, or even many individuals. This is different from utilitarianism because common good is truly the good of everyone in the community, not the good of a majority of individuals. And contrary to what libertarian moralizers claim, this doesn't necessitate some form of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism subsumes the lesser orders of society into a centralized state, and this is definitely not good for the individual (as we'll see below).
Individualists may respond that egoistic individual actions can create aggregate good without collective action, but the evidence for such an invisible hand being at work is questionable at best. For instance, mainstream neoclassical economic theory holds that the invisible hand of the free market only works when all the actors in a market are more or less omniscient, which has occurred precisely never. Arguments for the existence of the invisible hand are seriously lacking in evidence.
3) Individualism leads to tyranny.
One of the central reasons why people in the modern day support individualism is as a bulwark against tyranny. The libertarian thinker Ludwig von Mises best sums up this vision of the individualist state as one "devoted exclusively to the task of protecting the individual’s life, health, and property against violent and fraudulent aggression." However, when one looks at history, we see a very different story.
The Neo-Absolutist C. A. Bond's book Nemesis: The Jouvenelian vs. the Liberal Model of Human Orders goes into great detail outlining the history of the individual as a creation of absolute monarchy. Following the Jouvenelian model of human orders, he divides society into three parts:
This was how it went: in response to the invocations of Plenitudo Potestatis by the Catholic papacy against secular authorities, the idea of Divine Right of Kings was developed as a counter-justification by the secular princes. In response, the Papacy promoted the likes of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine who asserted the consensual nature of monarchy. Bellarmine's argument was challenged by Sir Robert Fillmore and the British Tories. In response to that, the Whig oligarchs of England promoted John Locke, who defended St. Bellarmine's idea of "consent of the governed." The rest, as they say, is history.
In fact, throughout European history, we see how various dissidents were raised up by the princes of Europe against the Church: the Duke of Lancaster promoted John Wycliffe; the Bohemian royalty promoted the Hussites; the Elector of Saxony, Frederick III promoted Martin Luther; and Michael of Cesena promoted William of Ockham. All of these dissidents would be used to smash the Catholic Church's authority while the liberalizing monarchy smashed feudalism to create a more absolute state centered on themselves. At the end of this process, once the king had destroyed the power of these Subsidiaries, the Whig oligarchy would take his power for themselves. At the end of the day, you had a powerful state and a bunch of "freemen."
The sociologist Robert Nisbet saw this process as being what led to the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century. He argued that there were two central elements of totalitarianism: the existence of the masses and the ideology of political community. "What is crucial in the formation of the masses," he writes "is the atomization of all social and cultural relationships within which human beings gain their normal sense of membership in society. The mass is an aggregate of individuals who are insecure, basically lonely, and ground down, either through decree or historical circumstance, into mere particles of social dust. Within the mass all ordinary relationships and authorities seem devoid of institutional function and psychological meaning. Worse, such relationships and authorities come to seem positively hostile; in them the individual can find not security but despair." Masses are not united by any common consciousness, so they can be easily manipulated and swayed by any power-hungry political ideology. And, wouldn't you know it, we have a very powerful state right there, waiting for the right people to take it over.
Libertarians might respond that they support "negative rights" against the state, so they can't be for a powerful state! But the liberal state, in order to enforce negative individual rights, has to 1) be powerful enough to prevent any individual with more coercive capital than another individual from violating the other individual's rights and 2) has to be powerful enough to destroy Subsidiaries such as the Church, aristocracy and other privileged groups, such as corporations chartered by the state, independent towns, banks, and guilds. That modern people don't realize how powerful these groups were in their time is a testament to how thoroughly destroyed they were by the emerging liberal state. Even something as basic as your right to bear arms or your right to freedom of speech requires a higher authority (e.g. the federal government) forcing a lower authority (e.g. some state official) to respect your rights, which is necessarily involving the Center of Power in your private life!
This necessary violence against the Subsidiaries to defend the individuals leads me to my next and final point:
4) Individualism is necessarily anti-social.
The individualist sees themselves as they are as the center of attention, with as many qualifications as possible obscured. Individualists define themselves in opposition to the various institutions and dependencies that surround them. The more against them you are, the more self-actualized you are as individual. "Don't look at me as a _____, look at me as an individual!" Individualists are necessarily in a perpetual state of mutiny against whatever form of order threatens to define them as something other than an individual.
"What's the problem with this?" The individualist may ask. Certainly, we don't feel like we're in a constant violent mutiny because we are so habituated to it in our modern day climate. We don't have any feudal lords or guilds or Churches that can stand up to the individualizing state, though we are always on the lookout for them. But what would happen if we were able to become consistently individualistic? What if we were to define ourselves indiscriminately against every social dependency - against your friends, your families, your colleagues, your acquaintances, etc. - and sought to free ourselves from them? Such behavior would be psychopathic. The individualistic society is, therefore, a society that promotes a mild form of psychopathy. It's no wonder, then, that mental illness is so rife in our society!
In short, these are the reasons why individualism is, I believe, a necessarily false belief. It calls for rights against the State while simultaneously empowering the State. It promotes egoism by denying that any higher good than the private good exists and psychopathy by denying the importance of social orders. It is rife with contradictions. I have no doubt that it is at the heart of the problems of our society. Only by rooting it out will we have a chance of restoring sanity.
1) The individual cannot exist without society.
This is a "well, duh" objection on the face of it, but it's surprising how many individualists do not consider it. People are born weak and dependent on their parents for survival. From then on, they are dependent on other people in the society to flourish as human beings. Even if they decide to leave this society and live by themselves in the jungle, Robinson Crusoe-style, they will still be forever colored by the society that left them.
Okay, the individualist says, but human beings are more than just their social classes though. Sure, but to what extent? Human beings are thrown into this world colored by various social orders (ethnicity, sex, class, culture, family, etc.) that they do not consent to. Their identities are only made intelligible by participating in these social orders. The individual devoid of these social orders is a mere abstraction. In the words of reactionary philosopher Julius Evola, to place value on the individual over their social orders "is the same as regarding as paramount the bronze found in many statues, rather than seeing each one as the expression of distinct ideas, to which bronze (in our case, the generic human quality) has supplied the working matter (Men Among the Ruins, p. 135). So not only can people not exist without previous societies, not only are people forever colored by the societies they inhabit, their very identities are unintelligible without the societies in question.
2) Private goods aren't the only thing that matter.
The idea of the common good is derided by modern individualists. As this poorly-written essay sums up, "the idea of the “common good” has always served as the moral justification for virtually every form of tyranny throughout history." This is is because, he claims, it cannot be defined. "There is no such thing as the “common good” unless one means the sum of the interests of all men and women in a particular society," he claims. Nothing, however, can be further from the truth.
But what is the common good? The common good is the good of a society, in contrast with private goods, which are the goods of individuals. Individualism holds the private goods of individuals are paramount while denying that any common goods actually exist. But surely, the individualist cannot deny that the common good of a sports team is winning the game, right? Surely, the individualist cannot deny that the common good of an army is to achieve victory in war, right? And surely, the individualist cannot deny that the common good of political society is the maintenance and moral uplift of a community, right?
The problem with individualists is that they assume that common goods do not apply to individuals. To the contrary, common goods are the goods of individuals, but they are goods that are shared by all members of the community equally without diminishing their value, yet can only be achieved collectively. Certainly, one soldier cannot win a war. And common goods must trump private goods, as the good of all is greater than the good of an individual, or even many individuals. This is different from utilitarianism because common good is truly the good of everyone in the community, not the good of a majority of individuals. And contrary to what libertarian moralizers claim, this doesn't necessitate some form of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism subsumes the lesser orders of society into a centralized state, and this is definitely not good for the individual (as we'll see below).
Individualists may respond that egoistic individual actions can create aggregate good without collective action, but the evidence for such an invisible hand being at work is questionable at best. For instance, mainstream neoclassical economic theory holds that the invisible hand of the free market only works when all the actors in a market are more or less omniscient, which has occurred precisely never. Arguments for the existence of the invisible hand are seriously lacking in evidence.
3) Individualism leads to tyranny.
One of the central reasons why people in the modern day support individualism is as a bulwark against tyranny. The libertarian thinker Ludwig von Mises best sums up this vision of the individualist state as one "devoted exclusively to the task of protecting the individual’s life, health, and property against violent and fraudulent aggression." However, when one looks at history, we see a very different story.
The Neo-Absolutist C. A. Bond's book Nemesis: The Jouvenelian vs. the Liberal Model of Human Orders goes into great detail outlining the history of the individual as a creation of absolute monarchy. Following the Jouvenelian model of human orders, he divides society into three parts:
- The Center which occupies Power: Occupied by an institution (or a network of them) or perhaps something metaphysical; The ruling office, Monarch or God(s), etc.
- The Subsidiary: seen as the appendages of the Center; Nobility, Church etc.
- The Periphery: Governed by the Subsidiaries.
This was how it went: in response to the invocations of Plenitudo Potestatis by the Catholic papacy against secular authorities, the idea of Divine Right of Kings was developed as a counter-justification by the secular princes. In response, the Papacy promoted the likes of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine who asserted the consensual nature of monarchy. Bellarmine's argument was challenged by Sir Robert Fillmore and the British Tories. In response to that, the Whig oligarchs of England promoted John Locke, who defended St. Bellarmine's idea of "consent of the governed." The rest, as they say, is history.
In fact, throughout European history, we see how various dissidents were raised up by the princes of Europe against the Church: the Duke of Lancaster promoted John Wycliffe; the Bohemian royalty promoted the Hussites; the Elector of Saxony, Frederick III promoted Martin Luther; and Michael of Cesena promoted William of Ockham. All of these dissidents would be used to smash the Catholic Church's authority while the liberalizing monarchy smashed feudalism to create a more absolute state centered on themselves. At the end of this process, once the king had destroyed the power of these Subsidiaries, the Whig oligarchy would take his power for themselves. At the end of the day, you had a powerful state and a bunch of "freemen."
The sociologist Robert Nisbet saw this process as being what led to the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century. He argued that there were two central elements of totalitarianism: the existence of the masses and the ideology of political community. "What is crucial in the formation of the masses," he writes "is the atomization of all social and cultural relationships within which human beings gain their normal sense of membership in society. The mass is an aggregate of individuals who are insecure, basically lonely, and ground down, either through decree or historical circumstance, into mere particles of social dust. Within the mass all ordinary relationships and authorities seem devoid of institutional function and psychological meaning. Worse, such relationships and authorities come to seem positively hostile; in them the individual can find not security but despair." Masses are not united by any common consciousness, so they can be easily manipulated and swayed by any power-hungry political ideology. And, wouldn't you know it, we have a very powerful state right there, waiting for the right people to take it over.
Libertarians might respond that they support "negative rights" against the state, so they can't be for a powerful state! But the liberal state, in order to enforce negative individual rights, has to 1) be powerful enough to prevent any individual with more coercive capital than another individual from violating the other individual's rights and 2) has to be powerful enough to destroy Subsidiaries such as the Church, aristocracy and other privileged groups, such as corporations chartered by the state, independent towns, banks, and guilds. That modern people don't realize how powerful these groups were in their time is a testament to how thoroughly destroyed they were by the emerging liberal state. Even something as basic as your right to bear arms or your right to freedom of speech requires a higher authority (e.g. the federal government) forcing a lower authority (e.g. some state official) to respect your rights, which is necessarily involving the Center of Power in your private life!
This necessary violence against the Subsidiaries to defend the individuals leads me to my next and final point:
4) Individualism is necessarily anti-social.
The individualist sees themselves as they are as the center of attention, with as many qualifications as possible obscured. Individualists define themselves in opposition to the various institutions and dependencies that surround them. The more against them you are, the more self-actualized you are as individual. "Don't look at me as a _____, look at me as an individual!" Individualists are necessarily in a perpetual state of mutiny against whatever form of order threatens to define them as something other than an individual.
"What's the problem with this?" The individualist may ask. Certainly, we don't feel like we're in a constant violent mutiny because we are so habituated to it in our modern day climate. We don't have any feudal lords or guilds or Churches that can stand up to the individualizing state, though we are always on the lookout for them. But what would happen if we were able to become consistently individualistic? What if we were to define ourselves indiscriminately against every social dependency - against your friends, your families, your colleagues, your acquaintances, etc. - and sought to free ourselves from them? Such behavior would be psychopathic. The individualistic society is, therefore, a society that promotes a mild form of psychopathy. It's no wonder, then, that mental illness is so rife in our society!
In short, these are the reasons why individualism is, I believe, a necessarily false belief. It calls for rights against the State while simultaneously empowering the State. It promotes egoism by denying that any higher good than the private good exists and psychopathy by denying the importance of social orders. It is rife with contradictions. I have no doubt that it is at the heart of the problems of our society. Only by rooting it out will we have a chance of restoring sanity.
Last edited: