Individualism vs. Collectivism: No Compromise Possible

Collectivism does not cause the group to focus on the group. It is, in the end, only done through physical force by those who choose to make the individual focus on the group----or suffer the consequences. Voluntary cooperation with a group, or voluntary assistance to a group, is not collectivism. Collectivism is the generic term that includes, but is not limited to, Marxism, Socialism, and Communism.

You therefore do not "balance out" your right to be an individual, with the force behind a collective.

"There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction." [1]

Why is it a compromise of basic principles to "balance out" individualism with collectivism?

"Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members." [2]

Individualism goes back to the Protestant Revolution; but politically, individualism and "individual sovereignty" go back to the Enlightenment, derived from the concept of "natural rights" which collectivism denies.

"Individual sovereignty was not a peculiar conceit of Thomas Jefferson: It was the common assumption of the day..." http://www.friesian.com/ellis.htm

 

[1] http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/compro…
[2] http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/indivi…

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America Is Now Communist

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm said the governmental firing of the CEO of General Motors turned him into a "sacrificial lamb". The White House asked Rick Wagoner to step down as a precondition for government aid.

Get used to it. Wagoner was no sacrificial lamb; he was merely the first to fall in the huge government take over of the entire American economic system. It is no longer capitalistic, but it hasn't been for decades. Now it is no longer even the "pretend capitalism", called the "mixed economy", that we have had for decades. Now it is communist.

Communist? Why not socialist? Socialism is when the government controls industry. Communism is when it also owns it. Now the government owns it, and the government is not listening to We, the People.

Why should government listen to We, the People? It has no reason to. It can now do what it wants. But first it had to ignore We, the People, pleading with Congress not to pass the bail out; then pleading not to give money to Detroit; then pleading not to pass the stimulus package; then pleading not to pass the budget that was filled with over 8000 earmarks. We couldn't plead with them not to monetize the deficit by printing $1 trillion out of nothing, because we were not told about it until the last minute.

No, Rick Wagoner was the first, but he will not be the last. The Obama administration now controls the entire American manufacturing and marketing machine, and it intends to set the agenda for the post-capitalist world by determining what products We, the People wish to buy, ought to buy, and can buy.

Do you think this opinion goes too far, that it can't or isn't true? Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said "the market will not solve this", meaning the country's economic mess cannot be fixed the old fashioned way, by the very mechanisms that have worked for the last 400 years.

Geithner said the US needed to target reckless risk-taking with "better, smarter, tougher" regulation. (March 27, before Congress) At that same time he also said, "To address this will require comprehensive reform, not modest repairs at the margin, but new rules of the game."

However, we now have the same administration who actually forced bail out money on banks who didn't need it and said no, and who now find they cannot easily return it, firing the CEO of a major manufacturer.

"The centrepiece of the reform package -- and the only element presented in any great detail -- is a proposal for a new 'super' regulator to provide enhanced oversight of all systemically important firms -- be they banks, brokerage houses, other financial services firms, hedge funds or insurance companies." http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25252187-36418,00.html

But many critics say it won't end there, that in the future any business sector that gets itself into trouble in such a way that would create financial difficulties for other sectors, would come under the "super" regulators clutches.

I have no doubt that is what will happen, because that is the historical story of communism.

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Government Dogma, and Oversight of Industry

The following came from the Pacific Research Institute, using an article from the San Jose Mercury News, from December 15, 2008:

"One week after the election, a think tank founded and led by President-elect Barack Obama's transition chief, John Podesta, referred to synthetic biology as "the most profound challenge to government oversight of technology in human history." In an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News, Daniel Ballon, Ph.D., PRI technology studies fellow, explains that synthetic biology offers an unprecedented opportunity to transform modern medicine, generate clean, renewable biofuels, and create millions of "green collar" jobs. Will the Obama administration encourage this innovation and respect the scientific community, or cave in to special interests peddling fear and hysteria?"

The better question is this: What authority does the government have to "oversee" any industry? We recognize such things as its authority to oversee standards that have been set for such things as pollution controls; national security interests such as selling items like supercomputers or explosives to enemies who would use those things against us; or in sorting out the vagaries of such things as where the rights of one industry may or may not overlap, such as the right of independent VOIP companies to use the high speed internet providers who offer their own VOIP?

President Bush is the first, and hopefully the only, President who can be said to be of the "religious right". His administration prevented the use of embryonic stem cells in research because his extreme right wing views are such that he--and millions of other people--believe that once the egg has been fertilized by a sperm, it has a soul provided by the Almighty, or that in some way it is one of God's sacred creations and therefore cannot in any sense of moral conscience be destroyed.

Where is the separation of church and state? Since several federal courts have deemed atheism to be a religion for the purposes of protection under the Constitution, an atheist who wishes to experiment with embryonic stem cells ought to be able to do so; after all, I do not have to follow the religious dogmas that Mr. Bush lives with, and he does not have the right to implement such dogma into law.

So where does the right of government oversight begin and end?

It seems it is to have a new beginning under the Obama Administration, which is going to print billions of dollars of money to put into those industries it deems either necessary, worthy, or "green."

Along with all these manufactured dollars will surely come oversight. Free money does not come with out strings. And it is not going to be a simple case of an industry accepting government funding for something it is already doing. The Federal government agencies responsible for handing out these unsecured greenbacks are going to be looking for results--and only the results it wants to see.

Obama is going to replace religious dogma with government dogma.

This is the reason that Ayn Rand stated the principle that there ought to be a wall of separation between industry and state, for the same reason as there is between church and state.

The Bush administration pushed for the government dogma of alternative fuel in the form of corn-based ethenol. This pushed up the price of corn to indefensible levels, farmers put wheat on the back burner in order to cash in on the profits to be made from corn, and as a result both wheat-based and corn-based products went up in price.

Government dogma screwed the American citizen. Fuel mileage is lower with corn-based ethenol, but it costs less, which was a priority when oil prices were going up, and in the attempt to wean us from middle east oil. Instead of paying higher prices at the pump, we now pay a much higher percentage for our food than we would have paid for our oil-based gasoline with the corn syrup left out of it.

Government dogma has no idea of how to "manage" industry or the economy. As a matter of fact, they cannot be "managed" without dire consequences. The housing market bubble disaster is because of government "management" of interest rates, which encouraged Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to perform in a very un-business-like manner, something they never would have done if money had not been so cheap.

Part of Detroit's problems are caused by concessions made to the Union--after the government stepped in many times to help negotiate a settlement because it was deemed "disastrous" to let the industry sit idle while both sides held their ground.

Part of Detroit's problems are that it's own dealers protested when, for example, GM announced several years ago that Chevrolet was going to be making only small cars, and the bigger cars would be in the other brands. Chevy dealers protested that they could not sell only small cars. Now, mini cars are the rage, along with the small, compact, efficient vehicles put out by the Japanese and the Koreans and the Germans and others.

Government oversight of how to build a car, i.e., what specifications and standards it should meet to be viable in the market place, would have bankrupted the industry already if it had such oversight. It seems it is going to get such oversight, at least in that part of the industry where it will have a "car czar" to tell it where government dogma says it is doing wrong or right.

I read, in a highly respected science magazine, that the Chinese are building a different kind of nuclear reactor than American law allows for. These reactors are smaller, cheaper, easier to build, can be transported in sections and erected in series, as needed, to increase output when it becomes necessary. And the Chinese reactors are so safe that the "China Syndrome" can never happen.

America knew about this type of reactor before "oversight" outlawed it. As a matter of fact, this kind of reactor was invented by the west before it invented the kind of reactor we use now.

But government dogma had other ideas: it seems that cheap, plentiful electricity, easily installable, would throw the electricity industry into some form of "confusion," and the big monopolies would no longer have monopolies, which means that they and their share holders would lose money because competition to build these smaller, cheaper, cleaner reactors would cause the existing companies to shrink.

"Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen." Wired

When mayors of Chinese cities and towns need more electricity for their citizens because of population growth and capitalist-style industrial growth, they call the manufacturers of these small reactors and order them! And when they need more power, they order another one to be put in line with the first one. This series can apparently go on for as much electricity is needed.

Instead, America goes for dogma instead of the Chinese idea of how capitalism can cause a nation to become rich.

Certainly China has problems too, such as the murderous chemicals its unscrupulous manufacturers put into their products. But every nation has unscrupulous manufacturers. "Oversight" can never catch such forms of immoral behavior. It would require inspectors everywhere, in every industry, at all times, 24/7/365. And it still would not catch what smart but unscrupulous people will do to their goods just to make profit-making easier or quicker.

Communists used to be fond of saying they did not need to invade other nations to "take over" those other nations. Just let socialism creep in and take over everything, like vines creeping on a brick building, and when there was enough socialism, communist political takeover would not seem threatening at all.

Bush has created the biggest federal statism in our history. It is now Barak Obama's legacy, before it has even begun, to finish the socialist task of creeping into every nook and cranny of American industry.

Perhaps in my lifetime I will even see a communist President who denies he is communist, as Obama (never denied) he is Marxist.

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Tocqueville and Individualism

Tocqueville Was Wrong about Individualism for its Own Sake

What is "self-interest well understood," the virtue Alexis de Tocqueville found that Americans claimed for themselves?

Tocqueville said, in "Democracy in America", that Americans had mastered the concept of “self interest well understood.” His definition was that we understood that we had to give up a small portion of our personal sovereignty to others in order to get a large portion of what we want. We understood, he said, that we had to think of everybody once in a while instead of just ourselves and when we did that, we would get MOST of what we wanted.

Giving up a small portion of our self-interest is the concept that John Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and others called "common sovereignty." In the American Constitution, the American ideal was of "individual sovereignty", which the Colonialists abstracted from "common" sovereignty; it was translated back into "common sovereignty" with the phrase "general Welfare," and by the democratic republican form of government.

Individual sovereignty was radically defined by the limitations upon the powers of government concerning the powers of the States, and especially of "the People," which was not a collectivised "people," but another abstraction made of individuals.

"Individual sovereignty was not a peculiar conceit of Thomas Jefferson: It was the common assumption of the day..." Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. in a review When all of the possible behaviors and acts of men are added up, the "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, [and which] are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people," give considerable sovereignty to the individual person. http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/10/free-assemblage-of-metaphysical.html

Tocqueville qualified his endorsement of "self-interest well understood", however, when he makes it clear that he did not understand this "common assumption of the day", saying the pursuit of self-interest for its own sake is simply the best means available to our leaders and educators of encouraging social associations; that it only works when supported by free political institutions, and that it may do little to underpin the virtues of courage and the and what may be characterized as the habitualization of altruistic behavior.

While his conclusions are correct, his premises as stated above didn't get him there. Individualism practiced for its own sake is not for the purpose of discouraging social associations by those who practice it; it is for purpose of encouraging only those one wishes to engage in without lending support to those one opposes. That is the right of someone who owns his own sovereignty, as we all do. To practice it for any other purpose is the practical description of "soft altruism," whereby we go along with things we do not politically approve of because it is easier than fighting it.

Choosing not to fight those cases of "soft altruism" which are most evil and that carry the biggest consequences, allow our educators--*90% left-liberal in public institutions)--and our leaders--(Democrats in the electorate outnumber Republicans 4 to 1)--to encourage and to legislate more and larger shares of collectivist policies and public practices.

"Appeasement is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is consideration for and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelings of others", and "is an attempt to apologize for his intellectual concerns and to escape from the loneliness of a thinker by professing that his thinking is dedicated to some social-altruistic goal." Ayn Rand

If Tocqueville never used the word altruistic, his supporters do. "Tocqueville’s defenders of self-interest argue from its strength, and rather than urge people to deplore and transcend an inclination so powerful, they defend its legitimacy. They hope to turn self-interest against itself by maintaining that one’s own interest is, as a rule, best secured in pursuing a general good. Well understood, self-interest even requires a certain degree of sacrifice." "What Tocqueville Would Say Today"; Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop; Hoover Digest

Perhaps Tocqueville was working from the thoughts of Edmund Burke, who wrote in 1790 in "Reflections on the Revolution in France", about "An enlightened self-interest, which, when well understood, they tell us, will identify with an interest more enlarged and publick."

But the public interest is not supposed to be like Barak Obama's misleading idea of "communism," whereof he said John McCain would "be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in Kindergarten." http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/10/obama_im_sorry_to_see_my_oppon.php

What Obama is unwilling to tell the American public is that his teacher did not take his toys and redistribute them to the other children. The American Founding Fathers wrote in the Constitution about providing for the "common defense" and promoting the "general Welfare." But in no way were they asking us to infer, in order to "promote the general Welfare," (which is politically not the same as "the common good",) that we had to accept the teacher taking our toys if we had too many, in order to prevent us from practicing individualism for its own sake.

Just because some men don't believe in practicing individualism for its own sake, does not mean the they can take it, then break it like loaves and fishes to be shared with others who do not believe it should be practiced by those from whom they took it.

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Determinism Vs. the Individualistic Naturalism of the Soul

The Soul is Naturalistic and Individualistic
“Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.” Tom Clark http://www.centerfornaturalism.org/presentations.htm

Responsibility to aspire to the greater good? Well, then I'm glad I'm not a commie naturalist. I am not even implying that Tom Clark is a collectivist in any way, shape, or form. I don't know the man's politics. But after all, "the greater good" is Communism, as opposed to "promoting the general Welfare," which is American Constitutionalism. And that is a not a parsing of the terminology. So why use such terminology?

While Marx said violence in and of itself is not a good thing, he admitted it may at times be necessary to achieve a greater good. But the promotion of the general welfare requires the protection of the individual from violence initiated by others. The use of State sanctioned violence "when necessary" is the tyranny of the rulers over the ruled--for the ostensible benefit of those who are ruled.

And ostensibly, the "humanist naturalism" Clark promotes is because he wants to "affirm our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.” So we have an ethical responsibility, Clark is saying, to look for personal fulfillment no where but in the squelching of individuality. If we were to look for it in the affirmation of individuality, it would destroy the ethics.

Why do I take the critical and extreme path of making the Clark look like an anti-individualist? Because he speaks in the most general of "mushy" soft terminology so that he can not be pinned down as to just what he means--unless you read between the lines."[W]e [need to] live in the light of the empirical truth about ourselves; we don’t need another way of knowing that [which] applies to personal concerns or ultimate concerns. This simplifies things."

What is this "empirical truth" that is opposed to "personal concerns?" According to some of his highly esteemed contributors, the empirical truth is "memes" and "genes" and "environment." Clark mentions the environment on this website; no where did I see him bring in the rest of the "empirical truth" his well-known members insist are real.

Why should personal concerns not be of importance? Because personal concerns get in the way of the common good, without which we can have no ethically personal self-fulfillment!

Naturalism," he says, "affords superior prediction and control of our environment and ourselves, since in dropping the soul and free will we get rid of the fictional supernatural agency that blocks true explanations of phenomena." How does the state, or an organization, "control" the environment for "the common good" which is made of people who ought to have no personal concerns except those of the common good?

Clark admits his naturalistic world-view is probably for the 25th Century because it will take a lot of "education"--or should it be called "re-education"--before we see the idealism of which he dreams. So it may be assumed he does not advocate State-promoted violence in order to accomplish any of his goals. But others of his world-view, those who are also looking at "the common good," do not feel this way. As I wrote in a column last week, the "WeCanSolveIt" campaign that is all over TV is a direct offshoot and is supported by Al Gore's environmental campaign. That can only mean government controls, since he isn't talking the 25th Century; Gore is talking ten years.

Tom Clark's vision of "progressive humanistic naturalism" defines free will as "supernatural." If individuals do not have free will, what do they have that Clark defines as "natural"? He says what is "natural" is that we are "fully caused to want what we want, and to be who we are."

Everything he says is obfuscation. "Fully caused" means that what we "want" and "who we are" are the result of things not in our control, those pesky memes and genes and environmental factors that "fully cause" us. "

"If we reproduced the exact circumstances that obtained at a given time and place, the same behavior would arise: so, in any given situation, we couldn’t have done otherwise, on this view. This means we can’t take ultimate credit or blame for what we do."

He means, if you had something to do all over again, went back in time and encountered the same circumstances, you never would have thought of a different course of action. This is not because in going back we are repeating history. It is because "we are not the ultimate originators of our behavior, but simply the most proximate cause, and other causes surround us in time and space." In time and space we are fully caused by things not in our control, which affect our choices, thereby leaving "free will" to be not only "supernatural" (to be explained below,) but leaving free will to be anything but free.

Why are we not the "ultimate originators of our behavior"?

"According to [the] sciences, we are more or less deterministic, organic, evolved systems, fully embedded within natural causality; so the bottom line is that the empirical debate about free will is essentially over."

There again, Clark uses that non-differential phrasing that means nothing. He says we are "more or less" deterministic. Which is it? And why are we deterministic, if indeed we are? Because the "other causes that surround us in time and space" determine who and what we are for us.

He says we are "organic, evolved systems." That is stating the obvious. We are not rock or gas; we are organic. Does this help his argument? It merely gives it a weightier preponderance of overspeak.

He says we are "fully embedded within natural causality." I'd venture to say we could not be half embedded, or one-tenth embedded, or two-hundred percent embedded. But what does it mean to be embedded "within natural causality?"

Clark uses that phrasing over and over as some sort of mantra, trying to dispell the soul as something man is predisposed to think of as supernatural. It is his goal to "embed" us so deeply into the "natural full-causality" of our determined lives as un-free members of the "common good" that individualism and the knowledge of what we call soul--no matter what it turns out to be be--is dismissed by us as the equivalent of mythology.

"Thanks to neuroscience, there are vastly fewer gaps these days in which the soul can hide." The soul is not an empirical existent, as Clark leads us to infer, something he says we believe is supernaturally reified and existing as something separate and apart from the biology of the human body, floating around it, causing our bodies or our minds to do things while we go on blindly believing that we have free will in order to fulfull the agency of the soul.

It is true that anyone with a belief in traditional religion believes something along these lines. Even Deists believe it. But naturalists don't have to give up defining a "soul" we know exists even by any other name they may choose to give it. We naturalists don't believe it is supernatural. So we naturalists don't believe it is "implanted" supernaturally or otherwise. We believe something exists that has been called soul and is defined as supernatural, but is not supernatural and is the result of our biology. We don't have to search off the beaten track for "memes" and "genes" and environmental agents as "causes" of behavior which are unchangable even if we went back in time to do something all over again.

The soul is precisely that which Clark claims neuroscience dispells: the neurological mechanics of the human organ in its entirety, the act of consciousness looking in upon itself and "feeling" its position in the world, knowing it must decide right from wrong on the basis of extant circumstances.

On that account he is correct; we must make all our decisions based on extant circumstances, on things that we have no control over, such as the light turning red when we're in a hurry to get to work but forcing us to stop, for example. We have no free will to run the light? Why not? We have no free will to calm down by saying the Serenity Prayer? Why not? We have no free will to explode with road rage and scream obscenities at the light and the city that put it there, and at the people going in other directions who didn't have to stop? Why not? Why don't we have the free will to act otherwise than we would have?

Adherents of determinism like him say that determinism is disbelieved by people such as myself because of three lies, "God, immortality, and free will [ ] joined together in a religious narrative, founded in medieval theological dogma [. ] The narrative goes like this: the universe is governed by an all-powerful benevolent spiritual entity – God – who implants a spiritual essence into people at some point following conception. It is this spiritual essence, the soul, that gives people two unique gifts – gifts they did not get from evolution and do not share with any other animal or plant. These two uniquely human spiritual God-given gifts are free will in this life and immortality in the next. According to traditional religion, it is because we have souls that we can transcend the influences of genes and environment, and even triumph over death itself, as our souls fly back up to heaven." Robert Gulack http://www.ethicalfocus.org/index.php?mpage=34/Free_Will.htm

Well, that was not the naturalistic world view of the soul before St. Augustine, but the pre-Augustinian Naturalists did not believe that the soul was implanted by the ruler of the universe. They were well aware of what we now call the "tabula rasa" mind, and that as the mind fills with metaphysical entities, so grows the soul based upon our evaluation of the specific entities we have come to comprehend. They did believe the soul was supernatural, and that it was transcendal of time and space.

They did believe the soul "flew back up to heaven," or some such nonsense as that. But if neuroscience is proving that there is no "implanted" entity we can wrap our minds around, it certainly is proving that what we can wrap our minds around is the idea that emotions are caused by the firing of neurons and the resultant chemical and electrical reactions in our central nervous system.

I've always said the soul is nothing more than the manifestation of the central nervous system, a manifestation of which we are aware within our cognitive capacities. But manifestations can be positively identified, and if the firing of neurons when we are faced with a decision, and the resultant firing of more neurons when we make that decision, can be located within our being it does not have to have the identity of "supernatural" when everything that exists as its cause is necessarily "natural." It is for the greater good of mankind that we identify the soul as individualistic, and neither "contra-causal" or "compatibilist", except that the harder I look the less luck I have finding an actual denotation of either phrase as it relates to free will. "Contra-causal" seems to be a floating abstraction not found in dictionaries but imbued with the anti-virtue of leaving man powerless.

The soul is natural, as natural as the fingernails on your hand, and was no more put inside you at conception by something that supercedes "natural" than your fingernails were implanted supernaturally. But they both exist.

I think Clark has things backward, but for the life of me I don't know how he got it that way. Since our souls are not supernatural, since they are nothing but neurons firing and the resultant emotional responses, then doesn't that indicate individualism, rather than "being one" with nature?

But whether the determinist takes it as "oneness" or or the metaphysical naturalists such as myself takes it to support individualism, neither idea leads to the ethical conclusion that "personal fulfillment [is to] aspire to the greater good of humanity." That aspiration is a very individualistic choice, and has nothing to do with causes which may be out of our control.

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