The Rise of Collectivism

            If you pay attention to the news and the wider world you will have noticed in the West a growing divide among the people. You see black clad people running through the street leaving a path of destruction and battered bodies in their wake. You can also see people calling for an ethno state. These would be the philosophies of the Progressive Left and the Alt-Right, though you’ll get people from both of those camps firing those labels at anyone in the center. At the core of these philosophies are the same ideas just carried out in different ways but to much the same outcome.

            At the bottom of both of these schools of thought is collectivism. They both put people into groups based on some immutable characteristic and subscribe attributes to those people. They then place one group of people either at the top or the bottom and attack everyone else as being evil. This is why you hear people being called a ‘race traitor’ or ‘uncle tom’ or ‘cuck’ when they step out of the norm for their ascribed group. There is a great irony when these collectivist groups, who claim to be protecting and standing for these marginalized people, end up marginalizing these people the most when they start to think a different way.

            This is one of the underlying problems with the collectivist way of thinking. It is based on these ridged narrow ideas that are destroyed if the tinniest dissent is allowed. That is why those who dissent need to be weeded or purged along with anyone else who they may have talked to or shared the dissent with. Opposite to that is the liberal (classical liberal) idea of the individual. The classical liberal point of view not only withstands dissent, it values it.

            The Progressive Left has been pushing identity politics for a long time so it is easy to see why the Alt-right is pushing for the same thing. The Alt-right are trying to fight fire with fire and that is an understandable reaction, though not the best reaction. You don’t fight collectivism with your own brand of collectivism. Instead you fight collectivism with individualism. If you think the collectivist idea of oppression through you eventually get to individualism. It may very well be true that black people are oppressed one way and white people are oppressed another. Yet not all people are oppressed in the same way. A homeless white man suffers more oppression then Barak Obama’s daughters. You see this in the ever expanding acronym of the LGBTQ community. Eventually you will have to create a group for each individual at which point you have reached individualism.

            Both of these collectivist ideas must be rejected. In the end they are just groups of people vying for power in an attempt to impose their world view onto everyone else. The only way to stop them is to not start collective groups of our own but instead individually support individualist ideas. Like the Death Star a collective is very powerful but very ridged, it can focus a lot of power at one point, but cannot stand against several individuals who dare to disagree.