It really isn’t about individualism vs. collectivism

The most important global event of the 20th century was a prolonged struggle between an America-led West on one side and first Nazi Germany, then later on Soviet Russia on the other side. It is always tempting to put such us vs. them conflicts in simple ideological terms, and thus one way to put it was to say that the Nazis and Commies are collectivists, while Americans / Westerners are individualists. Given the utmost importance of these global conflicts, this description influenced virtually everybody who tries to think about politics in a deeper way. And the thing is, it is even true. America really was and is individualist, and Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia really was collectivist. However, the primary reason it was so is that Germany and Russia have been collectivist cultures for a long time. And America and Britain have been individualist cultures for a long time.

The point is, individualism and collectivism is something that describes whole cultures. It is entirely wrong to call subsets, sides, parties inside cultures individualist and collectivist parties. Thus, it is not true that the American Left is collectivist. Generally speaking it is not sufficiently true that inside any country there is such a thing as a collectivist left and individualist right. Surely, things may look this way, but ultimately what matters far more is which way a country, a culture as a whole leans.

But let’s maybe try to define terms. Individualism is about the interests of individuals and about the idea that only individuals have interests, and collectives don’t have any interest that is more than the sum of the interest of the individuals included in the collective. Collectivism is the idea that a collective, reified as a corporate person, a platonic ideal, such as the Nation or the Volk have interests that are irreducible to the interests of the constituent individuals.

Thus every political idea that can be stated as “my rights” or “my interests” is individualist no matter how Leftist it is. Libertarianism is merely a subset of individualism, a moderate subset that claims that individual rights stop at life, liberty, and property. If someone decides to extend it and claim that individuals also have a right to equal chances, that gives pretty much the mainstream American Left, and if someone also decides to extend it to saying individuals have a right to not have their feelings violated, you get SJWs. It’s all individualistic – the libertarians, who are often seen and see themselves as the individualists, are merely the most moderate kinds of individualists whose claims to individual rights are limited and negative-only: they basically just want to be left alone to do their own thing.

Thus Big Government does not necessarily equal collectivism. It is pretty easy for individualism to create Big Government: all it has to do is to endlessly expand the field of individual rights: claiming that individuals have positive rights, have a right to equal chances, to healthcare, or to not have the their feelings violated, and of course it is the government who protects those rights, the same way how it is the government who protects the limited, negative rights libertarians believe in.

Thus there is a straight and fully individualist line from Minarchism or Classical Liberalism to Socialism. M/CL accepts that the job of the government is to protect individual rights. Simply expand individual rights from life, limb and property to anything from equal chances to housing or unhurt feelings, and you got Socialism. Of course protecting those “rights” means trampling on rights like property, and sometimes life and limb. But then again the Left claims, too, that protecting your right to your property oppresses my right to equal chances and that means you both are individualists, you just don’t agree about exactly what rights individuals have.

One clever way to deal with this is to pull an AnCap and claim that it is not the government’s job to protect even my life, limb and property – hence, it has no job at all. Thus any individualist who wants to stay individualist but also wants to have a consistent position that prevents that kind of slide must be AnCap. Another option is to give up individualism altogether and simply not put political arguments in the form of individual rights – well, have you noticed the title of this blog?

Thus American Left has always been individualist, because it is a part of American culture. Redistribution is an individualist thing: robbing Peter to pay Paul is an enforced transaction between two individuals, and a third one who executes the robbing. Debates typically revolve around redistribution. When did that debate exactly start I don’t know, but 1934 was long ago and Huey Long was a famous redistributionist (hence Leftist). And his slogan? Every Man a King. What can be more individualist than that? I can totally imagine a modern SJW saying every person is a royalkin.

Indeed, pure collectivism is something Americans and Brits have very little historic experience of. The closest you get is nationalistic war propaganda – such as the famous Uncle Sam wants you poster. Basically true collectivism only happens if there is no obvious individual beneficiary of a given policy. For example taxing rich people to give money to single moms is not collectivistic: you can easily identify for whose sake it is done: it is done for the sake of the single moms. (And in a more abstract way, bureaucrats and intellectuals. But all are individuals.) But joining up to server the Nation, Uncle Sam, Motherland, Fatherland, the Volk or whatever it is called in a given country, is not supposed to benefit any groups of individuals: it is supposed to benefit the Nation etc. as a reified universal, a reified collective, a platonic ideal.

Thus collectivism is best imagined as a kind of romantic nationalism. No wonder American culture has few traces of it: white Americans are descendants of those Europeans who said fsck serving the Fatherland, I’ll just go somewhere where it is good for me.  How collectivism disappeared from British culture is a more complicated case  – the Empire certain had something to do with it, but it has already been recorded in the Middle Ages how English peasants feel little attachment to their extended families and villages, easily move to another village if land can be bought cheaper there. For me, personally, the most difficult thing to understand about the Anglo psyche is the utter lack of a romantic attachment to a patch of dirt, the lack of the romantic ideas that this piece of dirt is sacred to me because my great-grandfather used to own it and I must live on it and till it no matter why. Here in Mitteleuropa one of the reason Nazi mind tricks actually worked on people was this sacred dirt concept which they hijacked into Blut und Boden. Pretty dangerous, if you ask me, easily hijackable, but I would not be true to myself if I stopped believing in sacred dirt. Anyhow, HBD blogs tend to say it is all about inbreeding vs. outbreeding patterns, outbreeding reduces small-group collectivism, i.e. “clan collectivism”, thus it cannot be hijacked into nationalism.

Now, there is no question about the fact that Russian Communism was collectivist, but then again, Russian everything is collectivist. The handful of individualists in Russia are mostly America-admirers. It is precisely the “right-wingers”, Putin and Dugin, who are surprisingly nostalgic about the Soviet Union and Bolshevism. Putin has put it this way: if you don’t feel nostalgic about it, you have no heart (i.e. you are not a proper Russian nationalist: you don’t like to feel collectively super-powerful), and if you want to bring it back you have no brain. Stalin managed to change Communism into some sort of a Nationalism, and given that Nationalism is the most standard, easiest way to be collectivist it is easy to see why Russian nationalists can never bring themselves to denouncing him. Stalin took it so far that when he won WW2 he thanked it to the Russian people – and didn’t even mention the Party. (Source: historian John Lukacs: Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred). Nationalism is sort of the local equilibrium collectivism tends towards. That is how Trotsky lost. You cannot be an international collectivist for long. You can be an international leftist, but you must be an international individualist leftist, American style.

As collectivism automatically tends towards Nationalism, Nazis don’t even require much in the way of an explanation. Maybe a historic one. It all began with small German states easily kicked around by Napoleon. They had to unite into one Germany if they wanted to have a chance in the longer run, but the issue was that even today, in 2016, North and South Germans don’t really like each other (nor do North and South Italians, for that matter). The way to deal with it was to engineer a fervent spirit of pan-German nationalism, based on romantic-racial notions of the Volk. This led to WWI which was seen as the collectivistic Kultur of Germany and Austria-Hungary fighting the individualistic Civilisation of England-France. In reality, Austria-Hungary was far more individualistic, interpreted as a loose alliance of diverse people united only by the person (individuum) of the emperor-king. Hayek and Mises weren’t historical exceptions but typical representatives of a culture where such a reified universal as Nation or Volk did not really exist, so Vienna always tended towards individualism, all her inventions, from psychoanalysis to economics to music are individualistic in nature. But German influence was strong. After WW1, Kultur, frustrated and defeated, mutated into a far crazier and more dangerous, yet still recognizable version of itself: Nazism.  After WW2, Germany abandoned  – not exactly in a voluntary way – pretty much all of this Kultur and imported American individualism wholesale.

To sum it up, collectivism and individualism are characteristics of national cultures, roughly corresponding to land and sea powers. It is a mistake to see the Left or the Right inside a country as individualistic or collectivistic, what actually happens is that based on what the culture of the country is, Left and Right expresses their goals in individualistic or collectivist ways. When it is an individualistic country, the Left simply extends individual rights into positive rights, equal chances, things like housing or education, and unhurt feelings, and of course considers it the government’s job to protect individual rights. In an individualistic country, the Right simply believes in a far more narrow, moderate set of individual rights which implies a smaller government. In a collectivistic country, the Right typically defines the Nation as one organic unit: see Integralism, Falangism, National Syndicalism and so on. This is the direction the Dugin-Putin project is heading towards. While the Left either goes full Communist in collectivistic countries, or, what we see today is basically they import individualistic American Leftism.

If I may add a personal note, this all seems to explain very well to me why I dislike Big Government and yet not consider myself an individualist. As I have demonstrated above, one typical way Big Government is made is that basically the government is seen as the protector of individual rights, and they just define everything and the kitchen sink as an individual right, thus everything the government’s job. Of course, collectivism can easily lead to Big Government as well, but only if the sovereign territory of the government i.e. the nation as a whole is the collective, the kind of small-scale, clan-tribe collectivism that I am instinctively attracted to tends to be pretty anarchistic. The insight is that if you don’t necessarily think the primary job of the government is the protection of individual rights, you have no reason why its role should relentlessly expand. If I was an organic rightist, like an Integralist, which I am not, so if I was a national level collectivist, I would still see the government merely as the head of the social organism and not the whole of it, and would not necessarily want the head to expand forever and dwarf the body. However individualist leftism leads to precisely there, because government expands with every expansion of the idea of individual rights, and ultimately all human desires can be presented as rights.

Why does this really matter? Because today the Right will lose if they keep fighting collectivism, thinking collectivism equals the Left. It is the other way around. Leftism today is about a twisted kind of individualism, the kind Brett Stevens called myopic hedonism and it destroyed pretty much everything that ever looked like an actual community. Big Government may still be the enemy, but mostly because it is used to enforce an ever-expanding and ever more destructive definition of individual rights, which pretty much makes it impossible for people to live together in communities anymore.

Today the Right must be a community-builder. Respect the core set of individual rights (the negative, libertarian ones) but be fairly ruthless about the need to sacrifice the rest of them for the sake of community. For example, if you argue with feminists about whether gender roles are biological or social, you are doing it wrong. Why does “social” equal “can safely ignore”? Do our societies deserve no respect? Our countries, our ancestors deserve no loyalty? The correct answer to feminism is that nobody puts a gun to your head to behave like a traditional woman, so in this libertarian sense we respect individual rights, but we withhold status, respect, cooperation and acceptance from people who blatantly transgress traditional roles because even if it was 100% socially constructed, which it isn’t, we think the society, the community, the country and civilization that constructed it  deserves respect and loyalty. To respect only biology and society and its traditions not is disloyalty, the kind of seed from which treason grows. This is how the Right should argue these days, I think.

Tribal competition, status-wireheading and its uses

Sort of a reply to SSC.

When we were kids, we played mostly soccer on the playground, our city being located in Europe. We always kept score and it was actually important which team wins, even though teams were mostly assigned randomly, in the order of showing up. Playing it without counting goals looked so boring, we hardly ever tried it. So we had this spirit of competition in us, and the important thing to understand that is not the economic kind of competition, which is largely about multiple people wanting the same thing. It was empathically not scarcity based. There was nothing to win, other than temporary glory i.e. social status and prestige, but even that was not fully real, as we did not heap much praise on winning teams. We respected good players, individually, and yet we did not turn it into an individual competition, so did not decide to play an individual sport instead. Although we did something like that if not enough boys showed up, but once we were enough in numbers real football started. In short, we mostly played for internalized group status, the sweet, sweet feeling of the power trip when your team defeats the other team. It’s basically self-esteem, but through collective, not individual wins.

This is something that is hard to notice because it sound so irrational. Even buying individual social status – such as with Apple products – is so irrational that a lot of Aspies don’t get it and they think people are just being duped by marketing instead of actually getting their money’s worth: not in technical feature but in status. Getting the kind of collective social status – my team is da champion, we are No. 1 – looks more irrational as it is not even directly about you. And then you realize it is mostly just inside their heads because they are not getting any actual respect and standing out of their team winning. I mean star football players are of course celebrities but Joe Plumber the fan will not get any sort of social standing out of his team winning. It is status wireheading. But the simple truth is that our basic biological instincts are so that we get a lot of good feels out of this “my gang yay, your gang boo” setup and this is why we do it.

And it works very reliably. The FIFA, NFL are huge money-machines, based entirely on group status wireheading. And spectator sports and sport nationalism were more or less explicitly invented in order to replace war.  Videogames that pit team against team like Counter-Striker are hugely popular and they are based on that, too. And teachers know if
they want to make boys to clean up they have to turn it into a game. And a game does not simply means something that allows playing: like some sort of a toy. Oh, no. Game explcitly means teams competing e.g. in who collects more litter, with a clear winner team who gets applause.

I said boys, not kids. I think this sort of thing is closely related to testosterone. Competitive orientation clearly is, that is more or less a scientific fact, but I think even team loyalty, too. In Europe the relationship between machismo and nationalism is pretty clear. MMA fans always seem to have more than the average number of nationalist tattoos. It was always the manliest, highest-T, most aggressive guys I know who really hated traitors and disloyal unpatriots, and never wanted to forget the grievances caused by neighboring nations. Or they go and join PEGIDA and similar ovements. I remember how girls related differently to these sports games in my childhood. Some just wanted to play volleyball for the sake of just playing, not winning. Yes, there were other girls who cared as much about winning as boys did. But while almost all boys cared, only about 30-40% of girls did. These 30-40% of girls were generally annoyed by all the other girls who did not care to win. They often said they rather prefer playing with the boys so that they don’t have to deal with the other girls who don’t play to win, although getting accepted was not easy. I suspect they may have turned into feminists later on.

Most intelligent Aspies people have figured this out more or less actually – such as by looking into spectator sports and asking themselves why exactly do neurotypicals care about whether Arsenal wins or loses – while neurotypicals don’t even need to figure it out because it is more or less their life.

But do people really internalize the lesson? For example, suppose you retire and then get bored and figure out you will breed pigeons as a hobby. But you still feel bored. What to do? The obviously correct solution is to join or form a pigeon breeder club and compete with other pigeon breeder clubs. Individual competition is less fun – you don’t get the same
tribal camaraderie – and having a club that does not compete is aimless and pointless and does not have the same kind of “fire” that one that does. And yet, while this is the correct solution, do many people figure it out?

So this is what is largely missing from Scott’s article is that it is not merely about the benefits of tribal membership. It is that sweet, sweet power trip when we defeat them. But it seems in order to feel that, to crave that, you need to have fairly high testosterone levels and Scott does not seem to be very good at that. So he may easily miss that point.

It is really weird that despite the fact that this is literally everywhere, people are not using this model to actually solve problems. If I lived in a startup-friendly place, I would help solving them obesity problem while getting filthy rich through a web startup that is largely about organizing local, team-based chin-up or pull-up competitions, in various leagues and real money to win (from participation fees). So your other team members who want the team to win would motivate you to lose weight and/or get stronger. You would never have to motivate yourself to work out anymore, they would do it for you, while you would do it for them.  And why is that real corporations who compete in the economic sense never challenge each other to a bet to compete in quarterly profits? Would be a way to motivate people.

Individual status drives matter, but when it is combined with tribal loyalty, when group competes against another group for status, including this merely internalized feeling of the win even if it brings no actual standing, is one of the strongest motivators of the world. Use it to solve basically any social problem you want to, I am not saying it is magic but it can improve anything from fitness motivation to learning at schools. As long as you can really, truly make people identify with the team. This is probably the trickiest part – maybe you need to base that chin-up or math competition on real tribal splits, like people of different races or religions showing each other who is da Boss.

Intertribal competition can take many forms. Sometimes it is literally about massacring each other, sometimes it is about fighting for real prizes like wealth, sometimes it is just like in sports, a short-term glory and a heady power-trip feeling, and sometimes it is just that funny kind of not-even-competition when you sit safe and comfortable with your in-group and crack jokes at that idiot outgroup. Either that, or you praise yours, like, erecting statues to national heroes. Yes, people do it all the time, like how Reddit likes to make fun of religious conservatives. It is all about feeling better than the other group without having to even do a thing like actually winning a match. This the least realistic but easiest kind of status-wireheading and probably deserves a name on its own, I will now use Direstraiting after the  Money for Nothing song.

There is of course the opposite kind of problem, like how to stop tribal violence and friction. The obviously correct solution is the often-raised Patchwork/Archipelago for multiple reasons. One is that violence often comes from feeling the other group is actually winning the status game, so you lash out in frustration. Isolating our group from them, so that within our circles we are still respected is one of the solutions. If in a country an ethnic minority can form an autonomous territory, then they can teach in the schools, put it on stage plays how cool they are and can largely ignore the painful reality that the majority nation may think they suck. This is one handy way of collective status-wireheading. Another reason is that any shared territory will be fought over. Drawing a border and saying this side of the river is ours does not completely stop all raids – it never fully stopped warfare as such – but it reduces them. War is usually less terrible than civil war. I don’t just mean physical territory, but often things like schools or tax spending – any prize that can be fought over.

I mean, for example, how to stop atheists and Christians from hating each other? Look at what they fight about. Education? Then split schools into atheist and Christian schools. Make them as independent from each other as possible. So far it is possible, have atheist and Christian cities, states or countries. If tribes can live in an autonomous way, not struggling with other tribes over dominance over the same territory, it reduces friction. They still crave that power trip, but often find it safer to just sit on their asses and engage in Direstraiting.

What follows from this? Some of the things that follow are less controversial, some are more. The less controversial ones include:

– Support every ethnic secession or local autonomy movement.
– Two-state solution for Palestine.

More controversial ones include:

– Unless your state is very monotribal, like Denmark used to be a few decades ago, privatize everything, keep taxes low or else tribes will keep struggling over who gets what from the public purse.
– In countries like the US where ethnic-racial-religious secession is difficult, a good policy would to allow constituent states a lot of room in designing policies and they should be explicitly designed so that different states should attract different races or religions/irreligions. Eventually these states should be nearly autonomous from each other and the FedGov, effectively isolating major races and other main tribes from each other and reducing the friction of their competition.

– Split South Africa between whites and blacks. Literally separate countries. Two-state solution, remember?
– Stop calling whites racist shit when they want to segregate themselves / secede like that. They just want to do what literally every other ethnic tribe, such as Palestinians: want to have their own place where they can feel they are the best, other groups are worse, and generally run things their own way.
– Stop third-world immigration to Europe. Why the fsck should we need to import more tribalism? Letting these refugees in islike the worst idea ever, because the most likely outcome is that tribalism increases on both lines, theirs against us, and ours against theirs and the other option is that theirs increases but ours gets suppressed by the antiracist crowd, which is just plainly unjust and unfair.

Here is another thing. It can also be done the other way around. We already have independent, sovereign entities called nations (although e.g. European nations are far, far from being sovereign). Anyway, one thing we can do is to try to channel  tribal sentiment towards nationalism, because it is already true that nations, through being independent, are fairly isolated from each other. War is bad, but less bad than civil war, and often it is replaced by Direstrating and other kinds of status-wireheading instead of direct conflict. This idea is actually far simpler than it sounds. It is just the concept that in the average European country everything from street statues to historic stage plays and national poems taught at schools give you the “we are cool” message. So if you identify with your nation, you get status-wireheading for free, and the isolation, sovereignty means you don’t have to face competing viewpoints too much.

I swear I am not trolling. I mean, it looks like I am basically just inverting standard liberal ideas, like mixing with different people and keeping an open mind to different viewpoints are good ideas. I am not actually inverting them, I arrived to these conclusions independently. The issue is that liberals think that bigotry, hatred and so on is mostly just about ignorance. In truth it is about the need to feel your group is better than the other group. The more open you are to the outgroup, the more you know how they think your group sucks, the more you mingle with them, the more pissed you will be. So the open mind does not make you hate them less, but more. This is highly ironic. Ignorance actually protects you from the knowledge that other groups think yours is shit and makes you less hateful, non-ignorance makes you angry  because you know how much everybody else is dissing your gang. If you can sit in a safe bubble where all you hear is your group is great and the other sucks and nobody challenges it, you will at least not be angry. And that is nationalism in the older sense.

I know it sounds weird for liberals, but the trick is that they define their groups differently. They are not actually ingroup with the standard, run-of-the-mill nationalist, ethnicist, racist, religionist Joe Plumber. They define their own ingroup precisely as the “enlightened” people who are opposed to that. One reason there is so much grief about politics is that liberals are disloyal, they do not ally with their natural allies, their own race, religion, ethnicity or nation, but define themselves precisely as different and superior to the average peasant of their nation, ethnicity, race or religion. So for them, the open mind stuff and the mixing with other folks works, as long as he does not get mugged, because this reinforces the belief in his own tolerance and thus superiority.

Anyhow, my point is that nations largely being sovereign bubbles – at least they are supposed to be, these days are hard to be independent from the US State Dept – if people primarily identify with their nation, they can more or less isolate themselves from other tribes that way and that may reduce friction.  So instead of your tribe seceding, you take “that which is already seceded” and make it your tribe.

Of course the complicated interaction between citizenship-nationalism and ethnic nationalism does not make it easy.

To sum it up, tribalism isn’t just about various advantages but the very basic collective power trip of defeating another group or simply feeling superior to another group. It is just about the easiest way to motivate people or put meaning and purpose in their lives, but it largely depends on testosterone.  It can used to tackle social problems cleverly – you want more X, form teams amongst pre-existing  tribal lines and make them compete in X – at least so far as genetics allows them to be solved. They can be pretty dangerous but a good solution is local autonomy or secession, basically isolating tribes from each other, as this at least reduces friction, or the opposite solution, to base tribal identity on that which is already seceded, and that is called nationalism. The only issue there that every people are allowed to think along those lines, but whites quia whites not, for example nobody is suggesting or has been suggesting a two-state solution for South Africa. Whites must always endure unwanted interference from other groups, other tribes are respected to some extent when they say they want to be autonomous. The main reason for this that whites are split, white liberals are treating other whites as an outgroup.

Oh! I almost forgot something. When I first started reading Alt-Right blogs, the Anti-Semitism of some (very few) authors and (still few, but more) commenters displayed was often very WTF worthy, I really did not understand how they came to those conclusions.  These days I think the main reason is that generally every ethnicity tends to form one ingroup, unless there is a religious split. That fact that in case of whites it is not so is very unusual and one way to  solve this dilemma is to assume liberals aren’t really whites. And thus they call them Jews. It’s just a pattern. When and if people essentially say whites suck, you assume they aren’t white. Then you look at them and you see a pale face. WTF. What then. And basically these guys just think well, then they are no true whites.  That is how I think they think.  As they assume every tribalism is ethnic, they assume white-hating whites are of a different ethnicity. In reality it is true that Jews tend to be highly liberal but largely because assimilating to white liberal elites. Most Jews are liberals but most liberals aren’t Jews. The ethno-racial disloyalty of white liberals is simply explained by the historic winning of the white people. Winners tend to feel safe and thus tempted to infight. Group, tribal identity is depending on external competition, whenever people feel like there is no external competition worthy of the name they will turn on each other i.e. split their tribe into infighting subtribes. We always knew external threats increase cohesion. This is just the flip side of it: defeating external threats leads to less internal cohesion and a formation of subtribes that are at each others throat.