For the first time, since I started reading you, I have found something that you have written that is either poorly researched (in that you have not understood the individualist position) or you simply let your collectivist tendencies get the better of you. Regardless of my longwinded essay below, I truly enjoy your writing.
I’ll start here:
“This argument is of course true”
This argument is true, but irrelevant. Those sociopaths simply head up collectivist entities like… governments or large non-profits, instead. Whatever source of power there is, those people you mention will lead it by whatever mechanism is provided for them (voting, social networks, bribery). I am quite sure I don’t have to list our current set of world leaders and corporate heads for us to find agreement here. What if we had a system that didn’t make this path easy?
What if we didn’t have a system where people voted between two psychopaths they want to have in power? What if corporate status didn’t relieve psychopaths of the risk they push on to the public while being granted the profits from the collectivized risk? The more you push towards a system like that, the more you are pushing towards and individualist society.
“In reality, we are witnessing…” [long paragraph of the terrible things happening in the world]
Yes, all those things are happening, and none of it is happening in a individualist world. It is happening in a collectivist one where large groups of people are forced to live under a flag, forced be the victims of their leaders poor choices, and forced to pay for the oil subsidies, the farm subsidies, the subsidies for moving your plastics company into a state, the subsidies for pig farm clean up, for building a whole city under sea level, for a bridge to nowhere, etc etc. This isn’t individualism…this is pure, unadulterated collectivism, and all of those bad things that are happening to the planet are caused by it. These are all symptoms of having global collectives and in some cases a single global collective (such as the IMF as well as many other global institutions). Where is the individualism that you speak of?
How do we save the bees? We farm the bees. Want to save the elephants? Well how about not letting a government be in charge of them and killing off thousands? Guess how we can save the rhinos…..
Unless you are an Ayn Rand zealot, individualism doesn’t mean “Me and no one else”. It means the freedom to assemble and collectivize as you wish and the freedom not to. No anarchocapitalist, no libertarian, and no Libertarian says that it’s even possible to have a society without collectives, it’s the forced collectivism that is the problem. Businesses are a collective. So are religions, cultural and social societies, mutual aid groups and healthcare centers, and a myriad of other collectives all exist and all of them are voluntary (maybe not healthcare in England, etc), are you under the assumption that individuallists want to end these collectives? Then you have confused them with communists.
Would plastic in the oceans really be such a problem if the governments of China, Indonesia and India weren’t dumping it in there (heck, they are accepting our trash and dumping it)? Would straws and bags really be so cheap if we knew the real costs of oil, refining and waste disposal rather than the government subisdized versions fo those. Would almonds be the price they are if the water wasn’t subidized in california (Heck the govenrment moved a whole river for them)? And what happens when water subsidies stop? Farmers try to conserve as much as they can because they have to pay for it.
Would we even have suburbs if the government didn’t fully fund interstate highways? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that at least we would know real costs to them, and then we could use a real market to drive them in the directions we, the various voluntary collectives, wanted.
By the way, let me give you a better list with regard to what US collectivism brings us:
The war on drugs
“WMD in Iraq”
The Red Scare
The Salem Witch Trials
Prohibition
War in Afganistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq,
Vietnam war (to name one, of many)
1500 deaths by cop
Corporate Personhood
Government sales offices for corporations
Governments choosing which countries will dump out trash into the ocean
The list of obvious wrongs perpetrated by forced collectives is a mile long, far longer than the list you gave, which was also a result of living in a society ruled by collectives.
“We’re never going to compete our way out of this situation”
I think you spelled “govern” incorrectly, it looks like the word “compete”. The one thing we can be damn sure of is that governments and forced collectives brought us here, and they sure as heck aren’t going to get us out of it without huge violations on human and individuals rights, and not without huge economic damage. Why? Because for 6000 years that is how governments handle adversity, they simply do not have another tool.
Individualism and voluntary collectives rely on peaceful means to get things done. It means, fundamentally, respecting the individual, their body and their subsequent property. What if eminent domain didn’t exist? What would a highway actually look like if it had to respect property? What about a pipeline? Would a pipeline really cost so little if the property owners were the ones who decided where it went? Would we even have an economy based on oil?
“ If we had centuries for more environment-friendly models to rise to the top we might have a chance, but we don’t have centuries to turn this thing around, we have years”
We have had centuries. And the globe has been in a forced collectivist paradigm for that whole time. Frankly, you are also discounting how coal saved the forests, and oil saved the whale. Then, new worries about the effects of fossil fuels lead to the development of Palm oil products, initally extremely subsidized by governments where palm grows, and now we see that massive palm oil development may also be bad or even worse for the planet than oil.
There are other aspects to our energy supply that are also dogged by collectivism. Nuclear is an extremely good example. The US had a number of nuclear plant architectures available to them in the 50s. From Uranium Hydride pebble beds, to liquid based thorium solutions, all of which were safer than the way the US government chose to pursue. Result? Dangerous active designs that are so out dated it’s incredible. Then the world followed. Meanwhile, new designs with new fuels have been ready for market only to be crushed under regulation and power structures that forced collectivism uses. We literally could have had safe, abundant cheap energy for decades that wouldn’t harm the environment, and wouldn’t drive us to war every five years.
“Individualists know this, which is why their ideology relies so heavily on denialism of scientific consensus regarding the disappearance of the ecosystemic context in which our species evolved”
I dont even know how to respond to this. Are you talking about republicans? They are forced collectivists too. The US military, the US national surveilance system, the police force, the nationalist, interventionalist policies are all symptoms of a forced collective. It’s just not the collective YOU desire. Nor, as an individualist, is it one that I desire. In fact, this is the worst part of being in a forced collective, the barrier to exit is very high and you must pay for the things that the psychos who are in charge of the collective require. As evidence on my contention that you are confusing individualism with right-wing mumbo jumbo I present your own words:
The door is closed to solving our problems via rugged individualism anyway. The arguments for individualism have been used by right-wing mainstream political parties to cut taxes, slash social programs, kill minimum wage hikes and roll back regulations on corporations, but never, ever actually end up shrinking government beyond that
Not only do you directly conflate individualism with right wing politics, the examples you give are what happens when you have a forced collective. The small group of individuals who are steering the collective get to choose what the collective does even if most of the collective doesn’t want it. When you have concentrated power, it doesn’t matter if it points towards communism or fascism, the problem is the forced collective.
The individualist scenario
As mentioned, I think you have misunderstood what the individualist wants and have confused it with a cartoon version of individualism that collectivists have made. If, in your mental meanderings before writing this piece, you considered a house fire and how the victims of the fire have to negotiate with different private firefighting companies before it will be put out, then you have fallen for the collectivist strawman instead of actually considering what would happen in a free market society. If, after this sentence you must ask “Well, how would it work?”, then you have fallen so far away from rational discussion on the topic that it would be pointless to answer.
In a society, free of forced collectives, a person can join any collective they wish, or none. Those who choose none, will have a far harder time surviving than those who have banned together. They key is being able to leave a collective, with your property, at no cost. They can join a farming collective, or a different one. Their individual relationship with that farming collective could be one of a farmer, a gas supplier, a consumer, or whatever. The same goes for a fire fighting collective, a policing collective, a road building collective. But instead of a collective, we usually just call these things businesses or charities.
The crypto realm has fully embraced this concept. You can enter a crypto economy at little or no cost. You can participate in one or more economies with little or no specific crypto skills. Some projects are implementing basic income, some have it by default. So projects are pooling funds to help is economically ravaged areas, some to imbue money into areas populated by victims of government imposed scarcity, some have lotteries, and some have small governing groups (like eos), some have an extremely flat governing group (like NAV), and there are many in between. But in every instance, there are no guns pointing at you to be in the collective. Unlike, your kind of collective. There are even some who are working on being recognized as a nation.
Meanwhile, if there is one thing to learn is that to benefit everyone, you need an economic and politicial system that is inclusive, and to steer as far away from one that this extractive. Collectives have been able to do this, but in general they all follow a path to athoritarianism, especially when the bills become due. Individualism, fights this, at every level.
Finally you simply have to hide in a box to not see how free markets solve problems. When solar is cheaper than gas and oil, they will be incorporated. It’s as simple as that. We are seeing it now, and the implementation of both residential and utility grade solar as well as the implementation of microgrids has never been higher. Blockchain is bringing energy trading to everyone resuting in even lower prices, especially in areas with historically high electricity costs. But it goes even further than that.
When China opened is economy to free markets, when free markets find their way into impoverished nations around the world, you see declines of extreme poverty rates by 90% over the last 100 years, you see a variety of medicines and vaccines making it into areas where they are needed most, as well as other medical services, you see abundant food supplies allowing Argentinian farmers to have customers in europe they would never have had. And the thing that bungs this free market system up the most? Government induced subsidies and regulation preventing everyone from competing equally. Wealth improves, health improve, mortality rates improve. And somehow you think that if we just opened up the rest of society to free markets and individualism, the other aspects wouldn’t improve to?
We don’t need price controls and poor market management from people who can’t predict the myriad of forces that result in the price of the product. We have to use the price of a product or service as the sensor by which we plan and solve problems and make it better for everyone. We can’t judge a healthcare system if we do not understand that actual costs of that service. We can’t plan an energy ystem if we do not understand the costs of energy. We can’t plan a recycling system unless we understand the costs recycling or the value of the plastic. We can’t do any of that effectively when there is a fractally complex set of subsidies and taxes on things that disrupt their actual price or cost.
Conclusion
If, in your article, you are talking about voluntary collectives, then you are embracing individualism. If you mean forced collective, then you are simply embracing collectivism, the status quo, where guns are pointed at you to define yourself by your flag.
So you can blame individualism and the right to free assembly all you want, but every single malignant effect you mentioned is due to collectivism.
Update:
I can’t recommend Chistian Gruber’s comment below enough. Please read it also.
