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.