Feb 04, 2005

Anti-Individualism

Greg Swann emails to give me some input on my last post, Serving Ideals.

Regarding individualism versus collectivism, it is more precise, I think, to speak of anti-individualism. Collectivism is a nice catch-all, but although Abel doesn’t necessarily always pursue collective ends, he is always opposed to individualism. Consider a cloistered nun, for example. The altruists would argue that her objective is selfish, but no one who understands the self would call her an egoist. Collectivism is a form of anti-individualism, and it is a very potent form because it is so hard to argue against. Environmentalism is another hard-to-argue-against form of anti-individualism that doesn’t even have any thing to do with people, either singly or in groups. The point of every superficially varied form of anti-individualism is simply that, an opposition to egoism that the advocate hopes is incontrovertible. To paraphrase Ayn Rand, roping her into my own metaphor: Abel doesn’t want to live. He wants for Cain to be prevented from living as he chooses, guided only by his own rational choices. It truly is a war against the mind as it really is. There is no way that Abel can win this war, not without killing every Cain, down to the last mind.

He was unable to post to his blog at the time, and asked that I post it here. With reference to his intriguing Cain and Abel metaphor, see here.

Feb 4, 2005 11:21:16 AM

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Serving Ideals I've got a whole thing brewing with respect to that title, but it's going to take a while to work it all out, which will likely take several entries over the next few days. It was set off by a sequence of events. First, Greg Swann writes me sometime last December to remind me that the world actually isn't going to hell in a handbasket. I think he cunningly waited until just before the Christmas holiday to tell me that, counting on the whole joy of life at that time of year just overwhelming me. It did, actually. Then, longtime mutual friends Billy Beck and Greg get into it over that "to-hell-in-a-handbasket" thing. I'm not going to rehash the debate in detail (see their websites). Essentially, Billy thinks things are getting worse and that we're reversing the progress gained in the Enlightenment. He refers to this state of affairs as the Endarkenment. Greg thinks things are getting better because mankind is advanced by a few tremendously great people who come along to grace mankind from time-to-time, and in-between, most everything else is just noise that can be disregarded. To Billy, it matters greatly that so many people are so stupid....
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Another Nail Why you should be optimistic I recall about 10 years ago, just as the general public was catching onto the world wide web (I was on when it was still possible to view every website that existed), that there was a lot of hand wringing over porn, of course, but also over cultish propaganda, such as Neo-Nazism. I recall remarking at the time that it's the best sort of thing that can happen. The way to render things like Neo-Nazism and other stupidities obsolete and irrelevant is to shine a light on them. In the moist darkness of cloistered "authority," they can grow like mold and attract all sorts of idiot followers. Illuminate them, and they become clearly ridiculous to everyone that matters. They're no longer interesting to the curious clueless, because they're no longer mysterious. John Sabotta posts a great example of this phenomena. I will just humbly suggest to those with a pessimistic outlook, that perhaps the pessimism is brought on, in part, by all the idiocy we now have easy access to that we never had before, and that the real reason for optimism is that ultimately, Bullshit cannot stand.

Richard Nikoley

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