Individualism Is Not What Ails Us

Both the radical left and reactionary right are incorrect on this point

I have a few different things I should be doing now, so I am going to write this instead.

What made me think it was actually worth writing about, after a week of thinking otherwise, was Mike Hind’s response to my last post about Freddie deBoer:

Hmmm...I keep thinking the obsession with individual identity has a right wing libertarian quality, so what FdB said about it chimed at my end. I think he’s talking more about an intersection between those ideologies rather than saying they’re equivalent. But obviously I’m not in his mind. And I’ve decided to identify as a tree from here on, so you’d better respect that or I’ll email your employers.

Hearing this from a third source really sapped my conviction that this sort of thing was just one of those random “and screw those libertarian guys” throw away line that have been so common over the past 15 years. I just can’t leaf it alone. While I might not be able to tear out the notion root and branch, I think we ought to really consider whether individualism is the issue here as opposed to a desire to dissolve the individual into a group. It is probably too much of a knotty problem to deal with completely here, but what can yew do?¹

For reference, here’s two of the other sources tossing off this notion in the past week or so.

James Pogue in Vanity Fair describing the NatCon crowd’s views:

they share a the basic worldview: that individualist liberal ideology, increasingly bureaucratic governments, and big tech are all combining into a world that is at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning—as Blake Masters recently put it, a “dystopian hell-world.”

Now admittedly I don’t know if Pogue is being fair here to the beliefs of the “New Right” but it isn’t the first time that I have heard those on the right, including Curtis Yarvin, saying something along the lines of “individuality has gotten out of hand.”

Freddie deBoer arguing that “Turning Red” was a stupid movie [emphasis mine]:

Longtime readers will know that I maintain a morbid fascination with inspirational Instagram memes, truly a cursed genre. They represent a vision of human flourishing based on the notion that healthy, well-adjusted people are possessed of absolutely deranged self-confidence and pursue their desires with remorseless and violent ambition. It’s a nightmare, man, an army of 20-something women telling each other that the way to enjoy a healthy and satisfied life is to insist that you deserve every last thing you’ve ever desired and then “manifest” those desires into being. It’s a terribly cruel thing to teach people, given that life will never, ever fulfill those lofty expectations. But it’s also straight-up Ayn Rand shit, libertarian me-first propaganda laundered through a vaguely social justicey philosophy that says some people’s selfishness is to be celebrated. I’m afraid you can’t get to a more progressive society by teaching people that their only concern should be maximizing their own personal desires.

So from both the American right and left we have people saying individualism is really the problem here. That ought to make you think it is more likely that 1: they are correctly triangulating in on the problem, or 2: they are both wrong for a similar reason. I am going to argue for 2, obviously, but I want to take a peek at why 1 might true.

What’s wrong with individualism? What even IS individualism?

These are fair questions, and the latter certainly needs to be addressed just to figure out what the hell we are talking about. Rand spent years writing to describe it, only to have people largely ignore her words and cackle at the cartoon villain version of them, so I probably can’t do a lot better in a reasonably long post here. I can go pretty cartoony though and roll with the notion that “individualism” means that each person pursues their “rational self interest” as the first goal, that rational self interest being defined a bit like an economic utility function. Self interest because they should be taking actions based on the belief that it will maximize their happiness (assuming happiness is their goal; it doesn’t need to be) and rational because they are not being stupid about it and have the ability to think through the consequences of their actions. You think all of Ayn Rand is summed up in the title “The Virtue of Selfishness?” No problem, let’s call individualism being selfish, with the caveat that we need to be rationally selfish, and each individual makes decisions for themselves based on that.

The claimed flaws of individualism, as implied² by Freddie, Pogue, Yarvin, as well as books like “Bowling Alone,” is that people are disconnected from each other, largely as a result of their selfishness making them unwilling to make sacrifices of themselves for other people. Everyone wants to take from everyone else, or at least never give more than they receive, and so it is impossible to fit into social groups well. Church wants me to not do things I want to do, and besides it is too early on Sunday. Clubs want me to volunteer my time for the benefit of the group, and I don’t want to hang out with people who are not exactly like me anyway. Family is annoying and makes all sorts of claims, and I don’t want to deal with that. And if aunt Gladys makes one more snide remark about why I don’t have kids yet, I am going to punch her overly made up face. This is obviously terrible, as humans need social groups, and not just the kind you get on Facebook and Twitter. We need dense social networks of people we see face to face and actually do things for. We need responsibilities and duties for people outside of ourselves. Very few people, possibly zero, can be happy and stable without other people they are connected to.

This goes hand in hand with the notion Freddie points out that since the individual is the center of the universe, anything they want should come to them and if it doesn’t the world is at fault. If Mike wants to identify as a mighty larch, well everyone else had better damned well acknowledge and celebrate his majestic woody nature. If I want to the Queen of France, Macrone had best recognize and back the hell off. People today seem to believe that they deserve whatever they want, be it material goods, approbation, love, respect, etc., simply because they want it. They have lost the notion of earning anything, instead feeling that existing is enough to have earned anything they want.

Which… actually Rand would agree with all that 100%, because what I have just described is perhaps being selfish, but it isn’t rational. You can argue this is a poor steel-manning of the anti-individualism position, and please do so in detail if so, but it isn’t the result of rational self interest, but rather the self centered, solipsistic view of a child or whiney teenager.

A rational person weighs costs and benefits, and recognizes that other people exist as they do and are doing the same thing. Sure, being part of a church has costs, but so what, so does everything³. What matters is whether the benefits of being part of a church outweigh the costs. Individualism no more demands that people don’t join social groups than it demands wearing winter jackets all the time; the point is that the individual makes the decision rather than the group, based on what the individual thinks is best for them overall.

Does that mean I won’t go to church because I don’t like it? Maybe, but then maybe I go because while I don’t get anything out of it my kids really seem to, and since I care about my kids, I go too. Maybe being bored in church and having to talk to people I don’t really care for after is a price I am willing to pay for the good it does my kids.

Of course, if it stops being good, I might want to stop paying the price, and that makes sense, too. Not all groups you can join are groups you should join. Just because Heaven’s Gate is recruiting doesn’t mean you should sign up. You have to find the groups that make sense for you. Hell, even your family might be so awful that leaving them is the only thing to do. That might be hard for some people to believe, but I have seen drunken, abusive parents, relatives who seem only to gain pleasure by seeing other people feeling worse, and any number of other dysfunctions. Family is valuable and not something to be dispensed with lightly, but only a fool or a demagogue would claim that every family is worth being a part of no matter what.

In short, being part of a group isn’t an end to itself, but rather a means for humans to get the social benefits we need. Individualism is not at odds with joining groups at all. Rather, rational self interest recommends actively seeking out to join or form groups because they are really good for humans, only avoid groups whose costs outweigh the benefits.

You might be noticing that the rational part of rational self interest does a lot of work. That is the big difference between the individualism of an adult and the self centered crying of the child who wants everything given to them. The brat screaming that they deserve something because they want it has not thought through the fact that they are one of billions of people who all want things from each other. How do we decide who gets what when there isn’t enough to go around? We make trades, between each other’s desires and between our own desires. The proper, Randian individualist would say that you deserve what you can persuade other people to give you⁴. If you want respect, earn it. Want a nicer house? Convince someone to give you theirs (I recommend money for that, but maybe they want a roommate, or a spouse?) Do you want people to refer to you by a non-standard set of pronouns when talking about you with someone else? Maybe ask them politely.

Indeed, Rand’s entire project was explicitly against positive rights, the notion that people deserve things simply for existing and other people are obligated to provide them. Applying the rules of rational self interest to all humans suggests that in general if someone says they deserve something because they want it the proper reply is “sure, now are you going to make it yourself, or give something to someone else to so they give it to you?” Individualism says random strangers⁵ don’t owe things to us just because we want them, and we don’t owe things to random strangers just because they want them, but rather we have to earn what we want and so do they. It doesn’t say we can’t love, respect, give people things, or even that we can’t do that just because it makes us feel good. In fact, if it makes us feel good we should probably do it more! It does say that the actuality of what you owe and to whom is a question to be analyzed and properly addressed, not just asserted. The individual is the proper level of analysis, and the good of individuals over all is the end. Other people are not a means to your ends, so if you want them to do what you want you had better see to it that you find some way to cooperate, i.e. help each other out.

In fact, individualism is essentially just economic theory applied to wider society; I am not sure how much Adam Smith Ayn Rand read, and whether it includes Theory of Moral Sentiments, but I am struck by how much of her work reads a bit like a more fire brandy systemization of Smith’s. (One of these days I will have to reread Rand’s essays and write a bit about that, but today is not one of those days.) In short, nothing about individualism described as rational self interested individuals making decisions for themselves about how to advance their wellbeing suggests any of the current dysfunctions.

Identity politics is very much not about the individual, but rather how our system focuses on groups. You don’t get guys claiming to be girls so they can win swimming competitions because of rational self interest without the rules saying “Hey, if that person says they are part of this group, they are part of the group, and how we treat people depends on what group they are a part of.” In other words, it works exactly because our rules don’t look at individual attributes but rather groups. The NCAA changes the definition of the group to be “people who say they are a member of the group” and there you go⁶. We put race (group level) on college applications and ignore SAT scores (individual level), for yet another example. All of progressivism’s sins (past and present) are largely due to focusing on groups instead of the individual.

Now, you might want to go back and say “Alright, but by individualism I don’t mean that the proper level of analysis is the individual or rational self interest. I mean the atomization of society into disconnected individuals who suffer all sorts of mental disorders because they don’t spend enough time with each other and have no sense of duty to anyone else.” Ok, fine, but firstly, you can’t blame that on libertarian ideology or Randian Objectivism, or even liberals⁷. Nothing in those three traditions argues against being part of social groups, organizations or families⁸. It is quite reasonable to bemoan the problem of a society whose individuals seem unable or unwilling to form meaningful, mutually beneficial bonds with each other. If you want to fix that problem, however, you need to figure out why it happened. Why do people suddenly think joining social networks of mutual responsibility is a net loss for them? Long story short, I think it has a lot more to do with governmentalization of social affairs than individualism. I am sympathetic to arguments that people are less rational and have been steadily fed a diet of “trust the government, not civil society groups” since they were in kindergarten. I would argue that the resurgence of individualism in the 1940’s was pushback against the government’s crowding out and outright destruction of much of civil society’s mutual support groups⁹.

At any rate, while we can agree that a society without social connections and mutual responsibilities is going to be awful, we ought to be clear if that is what we mean by “individualism” because that isn’t what that word usually means. I would recommend using a different word, because individualism as it is perhaps more normally understood doesn’t really mean that I don’t think, and it certainly doesn’t mean that if you are going to invoke libertarianism, Ayn Rand or any philosophical aspect around it¹⁰.

If I am missing some definition that was totally spelled out and solidified that everyone is referring to yet I somehow just missed, again, please let me know!

So if it seems the American right and left are not both correctly triangulating on the source of the problems they see, are they both wrong for the same reason?

Yes, I rather think so. I think Eric Hoffman’s book “The True Believer” offers many useful insights here¹¹. Let me sum some up:

1. People join mass movements because they are unhappy with their lives, and the present state of the world

2. Sublimating their individual self into the group, the movement, is how they deal with their unhappiness

3. Radicals and reactionaries are both unhappy with the present, the difference being radicals want an imagined future different from any past, and reactionaries want a future that goes back to some imagined past

4. Moderates are generally those who are pretty happy with the present and have no wish to sublimate their individual identity to a group, usually because they are pretty happy with themselves

5. As such, radicals and reactionaries are not at different ends of the political spectrum with moderates in the middle, but actually are at the same end and moderates are at the other

6. All mass movements are inherently anti-individualism because the members of the movement don’t want to be individuals responsible for their perceived shortcomings, but want to blame the deficits in their lives on others while disappearing into the anonymity of their group

Now, I am a bit skeptical of #6, and if a reactionary said “Look, I am not arguing we should go back to the salad days of the Edwardian monarchy. I think we just went a bit far in the past 50-100 years and should roll back some of the really bad decisions,” I would be very sympathetic.

Still, there is a lot of truth there, and it ties up a lot of observations people have made in the past years regarding just what the hell happened. Conservatives are subjectively happier than liberals. Elite overproduction explains why there are so many grumpy college kids and graduates pissing all over everything. Cities with higher standards of living but high inequality are less happy than lower standard of living but lower (or less obvious) inequality rural regions¹². If you feel awkward and don’t fit in, maybe you are the wrong gender? People demand respect and privilege not based on who they are but what they are.

In other words, we have gotten to the point where a lot of people are very unhappy with the status quo of their lives and society, and want to change it. They do this by joining mass movements they can make into their new identity, and eventually attempting to overthrow the current order.

The radical left seems to have gotten there first, with identity politics movements being the groups unhappy people throw themselves into. All the college students who expected an elite job only to struggle with their Women, Gender and Sexuality undergraduate degrees sooth their damaged egos by joining the oppressed group. The social justice warrior speaks the language of fighting oppression in the name of the movement, but really is clinging to the movement for dear life, because the movement is the only thing that gives their life meaning. The religious feel of wokeness so often commented on is exactly so: religious mass movements and political mass movements feed upon the same human tendencies. Woke progressivism is a religious movement, albeit one without an identifiable god that instead focuses on ideological purity.

The reactionary right, appropriately enough, arose as a reaction to the excesses of the radical left. It finds the status quo equally distasteful, for different specific reasons but the same general one: its members are largely unhappy with how their lives are going. It is no coincidence that e.g. the new right is described as being made up of incels¹³, often by its own members. These are not people who think things are pretty ok now, but maybe the whole pronouns, transgender thing has gotten out of hand and should be rolled back a bit. They are deeply unhappy with the current state of affairs, and at least in the case of Curtis Yarvin do advocate for a return to monarchy to factory reset our society. Now, I am pretty sure that since 1911 we have made things worse more than we made them better on net, but that’s a bridge too far even for me.

At any rate, the point is that both the far right and the far left, or in Hoffer’s model the “We hate the present” radical and reactionary wing, have members very anti-individualism for the same reason they are anti-present: they are very unhappy with how their lives are turning out. Individualism suggests that their lives are poor in part because they made poor decisions. The radical woke left suggests that their lives are poor because they were oppressed by systemic racism, or whatever X-phobia is popular today. The reactionary right suggests that their lives are poor because of the crazy woke lefties who hate white men, religious people, and basically everyone. Both groups offer membership in the oppressed group as a palliative for dissatisfaction with one’s individual life outcomes.

Now, that doesn’t mean that either one is wrong about what ails society! I mean, in this case I am pretty certain the radicals are super wrong philosophically and the reactionaries are just overdoing it, but in principle it is possible that the existing order is messed up and needs to be overthrown. At the same time, both are going to make the error of blaming “individualism” for the ills of society.

Why? Because their members are those for whom individual choices didn’t work out well, and those who are ok with the status quo tend towards being disinclined to sublimate their individuality to a group exactly because it is working out for them. Those conservatives who are pretty happy and self content don’t need to pretend that their choices aren’t responsible for their lot in life, in fact they want to believe the opposite. Someone who is content with saying “I identify as a bipoc trans dolphin” doesn’t need you to celebrate that statement or even be aware of it, they just go about their day. You have to feel pretty bad about yourself to need everyone to tell you how stunning and brave your Twitter post about the oppression of trans-cetaceans of color was.

Well adjusted people don’t go on and on about how they are oppressed, even when they are actually oppressed¹⁴. People who have irrational expectations about life do.

Another minor point is that individualism tends to stand athwart grand schemes for reordering society. Such schemes, from both left and right although more common from the left, tend to focus on top down, compulsory adherence to the desires of the group as dictated by a few leaders, whereas individualism focuses on voluntary choices of the individuals involved. As such, any mass movement is going to tend to really hate on individualism because many individuals are not going to want to drink that Kool-aid, and any justification for the refusal is counter to the movement’s aims. If you want to collectivize the means of production you are going to have a lot of individuals pushing back, just as if you want to do away with democracy and install a monarch. Arguing that individuals who disagree are bad and selfish, and so don’t matter, becomes very convenient rhetorically.

So, yea…

I don’t think individualism is at all to blame for the current problems in society. If you are on the far right especially that is a strange claim, because we as a country have been accelerating away from individual responsibility and towards the all powerful state for some eight decades. The radical left is at least a little more consistent, as they explicitly reject individualism in favor of intersectional group identity politics nonsense. The reason both the far right and far left have a distaste for individualism has a lot less to do with individualism and more to do with their distaste for the status quo of their lives and society. Every mass movement denigrates the individual and subjugates their will to the group driving the movement, which is to say the leaders of the movement. For the members that is a feature, not a bug.

I think we are seeing two mass movements in the USA, the first from the far left and the other from the far right, but really the distinction is between the sea of moderates who think things are pretty ok but need some work and the two movements that want to upend things. The line between both gets fuzzy of course, but a good place to start when trying to figure out where someone is is their stance on the individual and society. I think Hoffer’s model has a lot more explanatory power than the claims made by modern radicals and reactionaries.

1. Ok, I’m done. I promise.

2. I use “claimed” and “implied” because I frankly have not seen any writer spell out their definition of individualism and then work through why it leads to the problems. I very much get the idea that they have a personal notion of what individualism means, assume that everyone pretty much shares it, and then don’t feel the need to question much why it leads to the downsides.

3. I am really feeling not having written the post on opportunity costs right now.

4. Outside of a few negative rights such as “don’t kill me or steal my things” but that’s a rabbit hole for another day.

5. A bit of emphasis on random strangers here. We obviously might well owe people we have long associations with things, and our own children have a pretty hefty claim on us.

6. This move broke things in part because it moved from an objective “what chromosomes do you have?” to a subjective standard of group membership. The objective standard of group membership worked because the tag used for membership in the group also led strongly correlated with individual level differences. Not all objective standards for group membership are therefore equally good; XX vs XY chromosomes works in a way that “long hair vs short hair” does not.

7. Whether you mean liberal in the pre-1850’s USA sense or modern.

8. Ok, modern (post 1880’s) American liberalism does maybe push governmentalism instead of voluntary associations and family bonds. I am not sure how inherent that is to American left liberalism as opposed to the Progressive, technocratic movement, however.

9. See David Beito’s “From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State” and, well, my dissertation.

10. Even if you want to lean really heavily on the independence being part of individualism, independence doesn’t imply having no truck with other people. Individualism doesn’t demand living alone on a deserted island. Rather it demands exchanging good for good with other people, mutually beneficial voluntary exchange instead of coercion.

11. I am reading it now, and perhaps will write up a review later. For now, it is very insightful and incredibly quotable, and I recommend it.

12. Which I can’t for the life of me find now… I am pretty sure I didn’t dream it, so if someone finds it please comment with the link!

13. Involuntary celibates, i.e. those who can’t find a partner.

14. This is one of the strange problems plaguing the “happiness” scientific literature. Short of those people being actively persecuted and attacked by their government or countrymen, most everyone in every country reports they are pretty happy. Apparently humans either just accept life and are happy if they seem to be doing alright given the relative conditions, or we have a really badly tuned model of what makes people happy.