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Individualism, the Collectivists’ Nemesis
t is individualism that the American Founders elevated into political prominence and it is individualism that most politicians and governments, including America’s, find most annoying because it is the bulwark against arbitrary power.

If, as the Declaration of Independence states, individual human beings have unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, no one may violate these rights. Every adult individual is sovereign, a self-ruler and not subject to the rule of others. (This is why Americans are referred to as citizens, not as subjects, like so many around the globe.)

Karl Marx was among the many political theorists — like Hegel and Comte — who realized that if individualism becomes prominent, their dream of ruling others in the name of whatever “higher goal or power” is over and done with.

So they worked tirelessly to discredit individualism, to establish that no one is sovereign and we all belong to some group — the nation, the tribe, the race, the class, the ethnic group, whatever.

Today some of America’s most powerful mainstream politicians have gone on record denouncing individualism and they are joined by a great many academicians, even some scientists in trying to besmirch the idea. Instead of each person having the free will to guide him or herself in life, each of us is said to be but a cell in the larger organism that is humanity.

There have been many who laid out this idea in forceful ways — just read what the French “father of sociology” said about this: “All human rights then are as absurd as they are immoral. This [“to live for others”], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.” Marx put it even more succinctly: “The Human essence is the true collectivity of Man,” and referred to human beings as “specie beings,” meaning they are part of the larger organism or body of humanity. The book, by Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell, defended the idea in the mid-20th century! ...