The Limits and Excesses of Individualism
In Which I Examine Some of the Criticisms of Individualistic Societies
I write often that I’m an individualist. By that I mean that I believe in the heroism of the man or woman alone, rather than the crowd or the mob, and that I subscribe to the philosophy that individuals are endowed by God with certain natural rights, including the right to their own life,1 the right to dispose of their property as they see fit, the right to order their lives in a manner of their own choosing provided they do not infringe on the rights of others, the right to profit off of their own labor, and the right to defend themselves against unjust attack. By individualism, I mean: individual liberty, rights, consent of the governed, the individual as the fundamental unit of society, personal responsibility, free will, and individual moral agency (i.e., the idea that each person is an independent moral actor whose guilt or innocence is not dependent on their profession, class, race, religion, or any category to which they belong).2 I believe that people should be left alone to make their own decisions, and that it is morally right to allow people to live the way they want to live.
But I was asked recently by a friend about the excesses of individualism. What do I see as its weaknesses or problems? While I believe the excesses of individualism pale in comparison to the excesses of its opposite (the body count of societies dedicated to individual liberty is a rounding error on the body count of societies established in the name of the common good), and while I believe that our nature creates in us such a strong natural suspicious of the person alone that tribalism will always be a greater threat in any society than individualism, there are some problems which obtain in an individualistic society. I’ll try to examine them as briefly as I can, but even if this essay ran to ten thousand words, I would be giving short shrift.
Setting the Table:
First, I think we should push out of the way any notion that individualism is synonymous with selfishness, or that it means that everybody is in it for him- or herself. This is a strawman erected by critics of individualism going back centuries. Even Ayn Rand, who argued individualism was about selfishness,3 did not argue that individualism meant that we should only look out for ourselves.
We should also clear out of the way the notion that self-interest is synonymous with selfishness, or that self-interest is necessarily bad, or that self-interest cannot coexist in the human mind alongside charity and altruism, or that self-interest can be done away with by education or by a different regime type. Self-interest is a fact of human nature. It is not the only fact, but it is not something which is done away with by pretending it doesn’t exist.4
Part of my individualism stems from a distrust of groups. Groups magnify human virtues, but also human vices. Human beings joined together can do beautiful things. But they can also stoop to deeper depravity and greater evil than individuals acting alone. They often do. The temptations of an individual can be curbed or checked by the group, but they can also be inflamed by the group. Very often, the group will tell us to do something we know to be wrong, but it will feel good in the moment, and because we are doing it together, we will even believe (against our better judgement) that it is the right thing.
Additionally, the interest of the group is not always more moral than the interest of an individual, but because our brains are hardwired for tribal life, we are inclined to believe that the interest of the group is automatically nobler than the interest of the individual.
My favorite example illustrating this is that it would make the city of New York (or the country of Belgium) collectively better off to murder the wealthiest citizen and distribute his wealth equally among all other citizens or hold it in trust for public works. But it would also be evil. The interest the wealthy man has in preserving his own life and property does in fact outweigh the benefit that would accrue to everyone else by his murder.5
Another example would be the self-interest Afghan women have in not being raped (forcibly married to Taliban fighters against their will) pit against the interest of their communities in placating former terrorists. A community might be made better off by the evil done to innocent women, but that does not justify the evil, nor does it make the interest of the women somehow less worthy than the interest of their communities.
Hence, why I err on the side of protecting the rights of individuals against the rights of communities. But if individualism is not solely about self-interest, and self-interest is not solely about selfishness, and the group is more dangerous than the individual, what are the excesses of individualism?
Subjectivism and Egalitarianism:
The two which immediately come to mind are subjectivism – the rejection of truth which originates outside of oneself – and egalitarianism – the rejection of natural hierarchies and of authorities outside of one’s self. Out of these flows relativism and romanticism.6
One example is literature. Is there a Canon of great works which stand above the rest? Are some texts greater than other texts? Is there any value to studying great works from the past, or is the only reason to read anything in school to improve basic literacy and reading comprehension?
The radically individualistic answer is that there are no Great Books. No dead man in the past was better than anyone today. It’s all a matter of personal taste. The radical individualist takes this one step farther and says that there is nothing in books except what we personally read into them. When reading a book, what we are really looking for is what it tells us about ourselves. We can read anything we like into the book, because what matters is how it made us feel.
I think this is patently ridiculous. Here, individualism is not set against collectivism or communitarianism, but rather against the natural order of the world.7 Individualism errs when it fails to recognize that which lies outside of the self. In this case, the world.
The world exists. It is not formed by our opinions about it. Certain things are true and certain things aren’t. We can’t learn all that is true by turning inward. We have to look outward to do it. We also have to recognize that hierarchy is a fact of nature. Not all things are created equal. Not all books are created equal. We have more to learn from some than from others. Individualism properly understood must be tempered by a willingness to look out, to be humble, and to accept that there exists truth which is not subjective.8
But it isn’t just books. It applies to other works of art. It applies to ideas and cultures and societies. When I earlier wrote that I believe it is morally right to let people live how they wish to live provided they do not trample on the rights of others, I did not mean that all ways of living are morally acceptable. Many are not. One common error of individualism consists of extrapolating from the idea that people should be free to pursue their own interests to the idea that all interests are created equal. But many people are interested in harmful, destructive, obscene, debauched, or pernicious activities. I believe we have free will so that we can choose to live virtuously, not so that virtue and depravity can be equalized.
Finally, I believe one common excess of individualism is the failure to recognize duty (i.e., the rejection of authority outside of the self), and the failure to commit. Four areas come to mind. Duty to God. Duty to family. Duty to country. And duty to carry out well our roles within the institutions in which we find ourselves. Some individualists set their individualism against the family, against God, and against their country. I think this is a mistake.
Faith and obedience to God comes first. He created us and gave us our will. It is our duty that we recognize His will. One of my primary criticisms of America today is that too often we imagine we can pick and choose what to believe and which commandments to obey. But it isn’t logical that the world should order itself in a way that aligns with your or my personal preferences. Each of us has to accept that there are things God has called us to do (or not do) that we may not like. But it doesn’t matter what we do or don’t like, because we are small and He is great.9
The family is the fundamental pillar of society. It comes before society. And while the individual is the fundamental unit of society, family is the bedrock upon which societies are built. While I believe strongly in free choice, I also believe that there are some obligations which are important in our lives because we do not choose them.10 Family is important because we were (except in cases of adoption) born into them.
Except in cases of abuse and neglect, these obligations never really end. They aren’t always picturesque, and they sometimes complicate our lives, but we are who we are in part because of who our families were.
That said, obligation runs both ways (parents to children and children to parents). Individualistic societies are a step up from the Roman tradition of pater familias, in which it was not a crime for a father to murder his children.
I’ve written before than I believe patriotism, grounded in gratitude, to be a virtue. Duty to country comes after faith and family. One problem today is that too many people believe that their country owes them something and they owe their country nothing. But just as the family has obligations to its members, society has a duty to its citizens. A society which tramples on the rights of minorities is not owed the same sacrifice that is owed to a society in which people live good lives.
The last in the list was institutions. Workplaces, schools, clubs, associations, churches, volunteer organizations, charities, etc. Too many people today believe the purpose of these institutions is to allow each of us to flourish or to advance our careers (or our public personas). In reality, we have certain roles in these institutions, and our goal is not to draw attention to ourselves, but to put aside our own wants in order to serve the purpose of the institution. If we don’t believe in that institution’s purpose, we shouldn’t join. If we take a job with the goal of “making change in the organization,” we should ask ourselves whether we are really a good fit and whether we might better serve the organization by leaving. When we join an institution, we must accept that it has (usually) been around before us and will (usually) be around after us, and that we must recognize that not everything that it does will be exactly to our liking.
In Summary:
Taken together, all of these excesses of individualism stem from a failure to recognize what is outside of ourselves.11 Egalitarianism runs the gamut from the “nobody is better than me” populist attitude to sophisticated intellectual arguments for tearing down structures and hierarchies wherever they exist.
Egalitarianism it is not unique to individualism. Most of the communitarian or collectivist ideologies and experiments have been egalitarian in character and in mission. But it is worth pointing out that there is a strain of egalitarianism in individualism as well.
Subjectivism and relativism, the rejection of truth, come from a similar place. But I don’t believe that they are necessarily inherent to individualism (after all, they figure heavily in collectivist ideologies, too).
One of the issues we face today is not that a society based on self-reliance and individual freedom leads to people rejecting old books and using institutions as platforms to advance their social media profiles, but rather that most people are taught only a bastardized version of individualism, which emphasizes only inner feelings and personal truth, by people who stopped believing in the virtues of individualism decades ago. For years, children have been taught that self-interest and selfishness were the same thing, and that American society encouraged both. Is it any wonder that there would be nihilistic strivers today who really do believe that it is impossible to live in this country without exploiting other people, and that therefore the thing to do is to make as much money as you can?
It is outside the scope of this essay to fully debunk this false idea, but I wouldn’t have said that I believe in patriotism if I didn’t believe that American society was (for all our failures) fundamentally good. And if making money required exploiting people, rather than creating wealth, society would have collapsed into the dark ages long ago. Instead, our growing bounty is evidence that the opposite is true (i.e., you grow wealthy by solving other people’s problems, and the pie grows larger with every passing year, making more people better off).12
It is outside the scope of this essay to spend too much time capitalism, but it is worth noting that capitalism is usually the subtext of debates about individualism. Rarely does someone point to a country like Switzerland or Singapore, which are both more capitalistic and less individualistic than the United States, and say, “America’s individualism could be solved if we were just more like Switzerland and Singapore.”
Why I Am Still an Individualist:
Many of the critics of individualism point to aspects of our society which I don’t like (the solipsism on social media, the destruction of the family and institutional religion, etc.). In some cases, I think they are mistaken about the causes of the problem (you will note that I have left out of this essay any discussion of the atomization caused by excessive reliance on digital technology).13 However, in some cases they are correct in their criticism, if not in their prescribed solutions.
But whenever I am tempted by these criticisms, I see something which reminds me why I am an individualist. The celebration last winter of Luigi Mangione, the murderer of insurance executive Brian Thompson, struck me as case in point. Mangione’s admirers seemed not to care about Thompson the person – the father, the man of humble origins who worked his way up in the company over many years. They only cared what he represented. His life did not matter to them. His soul did not matter to them. All that mattered was that he stood in for his company, for a class of people, for health insurance writ large, and for a system they believed to be inherently unjust (without any real knowledge of the health insurance industry, other than it is supposed somehow to be bad). Whether or not he was personally guilty of anything, his death was necessary to atone for some purported collective sins of his profession.
Meanwhile Mangione represents not a wealthy kid who had every advantage in life (as he was), but a youth revolt against oppression. Mangione the person didn’t matter. Mangione the person who was never the victim of a denial of health insurance coverage. Just Mangione the symbol.
It says something unflattering about the character of the people who celebrated Thompson’s murder that they were willing to revel in the death of an innocent father and husband. But of course they would respond that he was not innocent. He was complicit or responsible, whether or not he had done anything, because of who he was and where he worked.14
This is the evil logic of collectivism. It is also a deep-seated human impulse. In any society, collectivist or individualist or communitarian (which may simply mean collectivism on a smaller scale), there will be temptation and sin. It is a part of human nature. The beauty of individualism isn’t that lets everyone do what they want. It is that it teaches us that human beings are not symbols of their profession or class or system (or race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.), but rather are moral agents in their own right, deserving of dignity and freedom.15
In Conclusion:
What I have set forth as the excesses or flaws or pitfalls of individualism – egalitarianism, radical self-expression, anti-traditionalism, subjectivism (to which might be added an overemphasis on inner feelings and a disregard for cold facts about the reality of the world), and the temptation to treat institutions as a platform (rather than to serve in them in one’s given role) – are almost all romantic with a capital-R. That is, they stem from a nineteenth-century (and to some extent eighteenth-century) reaction to the Enlightenment, characterized by an emphasis on subjective feeling, authenticity, and the throwing off of restraint (of custom, family, employer, church, etc.). While many people imagine this movement died out almost two centuries ago, the impulse it captured never really went away. There is something deep in human nature which rebels against a disenchanted world, a technological world, an unfeeling world, a limited world.
Anytime someone says that his workplace is crimping his style (or whatever the kids are saying these days), or complains about “The Man,” he is borrowing from this tradition. Anytime someone responds to data and figures with something like, “But it doesn’t feel human,” she is expressing a romantic sentiment.
But not all romanticism is individualistic. Historically, much of it wasn’t. From the romantic nationalism of Herder (or, really, any nationalist in the eighteenth century) to the nostalgia of reactionaries for the Middle Ages to Marx’s description of life in an ideal communist society, romanticism was by no means solely (or even primarily) associated with individualism.16
I would argue that the problem with the romanticism in individualism today is the romanticism, not the individualism. And that this romanticism would still be a problem in a more communitarian society as much as in individualistic ones. In small doses, it’s probably fine. All the idiosyncratic oddballs who don’t let “The Man” tell them how to dress and talk make American society a more interesting and diverse (if sometimes weird) place.
But devoid of any sense of personal responsibility, any recognition of the dignity of the individual (both your own dignity, and that of other individuals), and any self-awareness, it becomes poor character. I prefer an individualism mostly devoid of romanticism, one that emphasizes reality over emotion, tradition and institution over equality, religion and truth over subjectivism, free action over self-expression, and enlightened self-interest over selfishness.
But we live in a messy world, and any society will always fall short of the ideal vision of that society put forth by its proponents. Pure laissez-faire, “true” communism, etc. are impossible to achieve in practice. Whatever our vision for the good of human life, we will only see imperfect versions of it in this world. We have to deal with better and worse, not perfect and terrible. On the whole, an individualistic society has its downsides. But I believe its benefits outweigh those downsides, and we will simply have to do what we can to mitigate the downsides we can mitigate, and to bear the ones we can’t.
The right to life is a key tenet. Certainly, there are communitarians today who are passionate about the right to life. But individualists have also been on the forefront in many historical battles over life. Crucially, during the debates over eugenics, some of the primary the opponents of eugenics were Catholic traditionalists and libertarian individualists, both of which were derided by the proponents, who couched eugenics in terms of the health of the species, the health of society as a whole, progress, and humane pain-relief (i.e., the notion that it was more humane to end the lives of the “unfit” than to allow them to suffer).
In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre explicitly condemns the idea that individualism leads modern Americans to believe that they are not responsible for the ills of slavery, or modern Germans to believe that they are not responsible for the Holocaust, merely because we were born many years after the fact.
And she had a more complex and nuanced view of what selfishness was than most people. Perhaps most importantly of all, a recognition that much of what passes for selflessness is selfishness by a false name. Rand argued that it was better to have honest selfishness than selfishness that is pretending to be selfless. While I don’t entirely agree, no less than C.S. Lewis argued that the run-of-the-mill tyrant (who acts out of self-interest) is less dangerous than the reform-minded tyrant (who believes he is acting in his victims’ interest) who tells you that he is punishing you for your own good.
The contrast between enlightened self-interest and mistaken self-interest isn’t original to me, but perhaps I will write more about it someday. The other major problem I see today with individualism, which is outside the scope of this essay, is that people don’t understand what it is, and the only understanding they have is a bastardized version so distorted by the strawman erected by its critics as to lead people astray into vice. But as I wrote in my essay defending ideology, the problem with almost every idea is that the simplified version most people know has been so distorted from its original form as to be unrecognizable and usually false. I don’t see that as a tractable problem, because the limits to average intelligence and education mean that the only way to spread ideas is to simplify them into digestible forms. However, we could certainly do a better job teaching people that their self-interest does not consist in screwing other people (a strategy which never works out in the long run), but rather in finding ways to meet other people’s needs (usually, by selling products or services which solve their problems).
If that same wealthy man donated all of his money to his fellow men and women, that would be a morally praiseworthy act. One problem with the alternatives to individualism is that they don’t have much room for choice or consent, but this example illustrates the important difference between voluntary contributions to the greater good and unjust seizures in the name of the greater good.
Romanticism is broad, but specifically I am referring to two things: an overemphasis on inner emotion, and a belief that the most important knowledge is self-knowledge (rather than knowledge about the world around us).
Interestingly, most of the main proponents of subjectivism applied to literature are and were proud collectivists, who would be as quick or quicker to decry American individualism as anyone else.
Since I mentioned her earlier, Ayn Rand would strongly agree with all of these statements. She famously wrote that “A is A” and “existence exists,” and deduced from there her philosophy. She wrote that the philosopher on which she drew the most was Aristotle. But the purpose of this essay is neither to condemn, nor to praise her, so I will avoid mentioning her again. She is not the only, nor the most important, figure in the story of individualism, merely one woman who was prominent in recent years due to her combative public personality and popular fiction.
As a sidenote, when faced with the question of how we know God’s will, I emphasize tradition and institutions. Excessive individualism often leads to a rejection of both, and I think individualism must be tempered by a recognition of what is larger than us (institutions) and what has come before and survived and been passed down to us (and is therefore more likely to be accurate than anything we come up with in the moment).
In marriage, husband and wife choose each other. But excepting adoption and foster care, we don’t choose our children. We end up with the children who are born to us. We don’t choose our parents. We were born to them.
Another good example of this failure is the absurd market for attention-seekers who multiply feigned idiosyncrasies in order to stand out from the crowd. Or the herd of independent minds who style themselves contrarians and freethinkers. There is attention-seeking in every society, but ours especially rewards bizarre behavior and “being different” (i.e., being different in the same way that everyone else who is “different” is different). In our modern era of victimhood, this has taken on disturbing qualities, but even in the past, there was a silliness to the cult of “finding yourself” and “being a rebel.” All of which I will caveat by saying that one of the great virtues of individualism is that it is more tolerant of people who don’t fit neatly in the mainstream. It is more tolerant of people who think differently, or have contrarian tendencies (and we need contrarians to push back on groupthink, but there is also such a thing as too much contrarianism – some people disagree to be disagreeable, while others simply hold minority viewpoints) or who have some rare genetic disorder, or who really are rebelling against some great tyranny in their lives. The problem is that an excessively individualistic society can begin to fetishize these things, especially with the rise of the modern navel-gazing emphasis on self-definition and authenticity. But given that this fetishization tends to foster an odd amount of groupthink, I’m unsure whether it isn’t simply a form of groupishness masquerading as individualism. People mistakenly think they need to go out of their way to “be different,” in order to stand out from the crowd. But all you really have to do to be an individual is live your life. I would rather live in a society too tolerant of weirdos than a society in which stultifying conformity crushes personalities and threatens minority groups and the disabled with social ostracism.
This is not the same as trickle-down economics. What I am arguing is that the premise that making money requires exploitation is fundamentally false, because such a system is unsustainable (as Marxists pointed out long ago). If, indeed, Marxists had been correct that capitalism required extracting value from people who don’t have anything, they would have been right that it would inevitably collapse as the pie grew smaller and the ownership class ran out of people to exploit. That the opposite has happened is evidence that their basic premise about exploitation is necessarily false. I doubt many will be convinced by my brief explanation here, because a century of empirical evidence hasn’t convinced them, but it is worth pointing out anyway.
Which perhaps will need to be addressed at some point. I think blaming individualism for this atomization is to overlook the real cause, especially since America was more individualistic in the 1850s and 1890s and 1920s than it is today, periods also known for much higher church attendance, more mobility (i.e., more people moving across the country), and more social interaction than today.
Another excellent example of this from the other side is the sloppiness of some of President Trump’s recent deportations. It’s been alleged that some of those deported were American citizens, and the others were not guilty of the crimes for which they were supposedly deported. It appears that the administration would rather appear to be deporting the right people, than actually deport them. Once again, no consideration is given to the individual actions of the persons involved (at least, those who were wrongfully deported), but rather the case rests on treating them as symbols of a class of persons. And that holds true even if the individual actions of these persons were highly unsavory – voices on both sides are more interested in what they symbolize than who they are.
Alasdair MacIntyre argues that one of the problems with modern individualism is a lack of appeal to the justice of desert, due to a lack of any shared conception of the good of human life. I would argue that individualism should rightly be understood as standing upon a belief that individual human persons deserve certain things as a matter of justice because we are created by God in His image.
If anything, the individualists were supposed to be the cold, unfeeling ones who neglected the role of human emotion and the human need for community as a bulwark against the harsh reality of the world. The counter-Enlightenment was a reaction against all of that stuff about reason and consent and the rights of man and the rule of law. At the same time, there were romantic individualists (Ralph Waldo Emerson).