Hacker News Reader

Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

When individualism fails, all you end up with is egoism. The problem with individualism, is that it's only some form of organized egoism. People are content when their self-interest meet with others, but when they don't the whole thing crumbles and people blame the government and don't pay their taxes, because it's not their fault anymore.

Individualism is a really misleading word, because it easily is an excuse to dismiss the system entirely, pat yourself in the back, and blame all the ones who did not make it like you did. It is worse than egoism. Individualism becomes an excuse where people deserve their bad situation.

Individualism literally becomes the "no excuse". You're not a star? No excuse, did not work hard enough. No job, no friends? No excuse, you have a bad personality and are weak minded. TV appearance is the established ideology of success.

View on HN

That's the problem with every-man-for-himself individualism. If people are doing well, it's treated as a success of individualism. If people are doing poorly, is it a failure of individualism? Of course not! It's due to a betrayal of individualism, so we must hunt down and punish the betrayers. It's the exact same thing we used to see on the extreme-collectivist side. Every real-world success was a success for collectivism, and every real-world failure was a betrayal of collectivism. Rand/Trump zealots have more in common with Lenin/Mao zealots than either would admit. Both refuse to accept that their ideology could have failures or weaknesses. They're both unrealistic, though frankly the shadowy conspiracies required to betray individualism are even less realistic than the lone bad actors required to betray collectivism.

Back here in reality, a more practical kind of individualism can prevail. Whatever you do by yourself, you do by yourself. As soon as you start aggregating power with others, you will be required to do so in ways that do not become coercive mini-governments undermining the system itself. Relying on individuals to resist such aggregations of power doesn't work, and neither does the "gang warfare" model. The only model that kinda-sorta works is a democratically elected and accountable government to keep the autocratic mini-governments under control. It's the worst option except for all the others.

In theory, individualism is a concept best that might best be described by the Nash Equilibrium: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

An individual failing to account for others is just as natural as them responding to that failure to account for them.

In an idealized state, no single individual is able to change the state of the system without cooperation.

I think in Karl Poppers "The Open Society And Its Enemies" I read a helpful description of indivualism and egoism. He basically says that individualism, egoism, collectivism and altruism form a 2x2 matrix. Egoism being the opposite of altruism, and individualism (caring about individuals rather than groups) being the opposite of collectivism, you get these combinations:

- individual egoism (probably what most people mix up as the same)

- individual altruism (altruism directed at specific people, specific problems, e.g. Jesus says "love thy neighbor", not "love the entire town" or "love thy people")

- collective egoism (this is what you would see very typically in form of racism, sexism, but also the elites in communist states)

- collective altruism (people forming systems to help each other, in various forms)

Nash's equilibrium is mathematical description, it does not really describe what people perceive of themselves, of their fellow citizens and of the system as a whole.

I agree that we need sound economic tools, but reducing people to numbers is what leads to inhumane treatments.

Here's a thought:

You can't really believe in individualism and judge people at the same time, can you? You can judge yourself, but in judging others you try to make them fit into your view of what a person should be. And that hardly sounds like something befitting an individualist.

A competition is only worthy if it is in the mutual interest of everybody. In reality people seek achievement and success with an ego contest, and it end up in cannibalization. To me success is only fueled by jealousy and the fear of mediocrity.

Individualism and moral relativism are two orthogonal things.

I say that with no attempt to imply anything about the rightness or wrongness of those things (at this time, anyhow); I simply am pointing out you seem to have conflated two things that are quite different.

It doesn't sound like a conflation to me. I think the point of the person you were replying to is that, while they are separate things, individualism isn't internally consistent without moral relativism.

I think you're making the same conflation without realizing it. No, they aren't the same. There is no inconsistency in thinking non-relatively that people should generally be able to stand on their own as individuals or that the individual is generally more important than the collective or any other interpretation of the term I can think of, nor any special inconsistency in thinking that morals are relative but that individualism has no value or may even be harmful, beyond the general logical incoherence of moral relativism. They're orthogonal concerns.

No, they aren't the same. I explicitly said that in the comment you're replying to. Two ideas can be harmonious or conflicting without being the same.

For example, the ideas "water is red" and "the color red exists" are not the same at all — most people believe the second one is true but not the first, and you could believe both are false without any contradiction. However, believing in the first one makes it impossible to self-consistently believe in the second.

Belief systems are more complex and subtle than simple claims like that, but they can still harmonize or conflict. I think the line of thought here is something like this:

Moral relativism is self-determination in the moral realm. Self-determination is a cornerstone of individualism. Therefore, individualism without moral relativism is somewhat compromised.

"Moral relativism is self-determination in the moral realm. Self-determination is a cornerstone of individualism. Therefore, individualism without moral relativism is somewhat compromised."

I'd call that equivocation on the word "self-determination". I'm not even sure the first sentence is correct in any sense. At best engaging in self-determination is a permitted result of moral relativism, but it is not the conceptual essence of it, nor even particularly necessary to be morally relativistic. Declaring all morals are relative, then importing someone else's wholesale is not something that contradicts moral relativism.

I'm not sure that you have to be a moral relativist to be an individualist. You could just hold that the highest moral good is people having the agency to pursue what will make them content (which I think is an appropriate definition of individualism). I believe a whole bunch of moral principles follow from that, like that they can't do whatever they want to other people because then those other people won't have agency.

Who knows if it's a good moral code, but I don't believe it's moral relativism.

America's obsession with individualism also has a much darker side-effect:

> Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily improving life expectancy.

> The larger context of this isolation and alienation is America’s culture of individualism. It, too, can worsen the despair. Taken to an extreme, self-reliance becomes a cudgel: Those who falter and fail have only themselves to blame. They should have gotten more education. They should have been more prepared.

From an article in The Atlantic called "All Hollowed Out, The lonely poverty of America’s white working class": http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-wo...

Contrast this with say Japan, where people kill themselves and suicide doesn't have quite the cultural stigma that it does in the US. They also have less individualism, more collectivism. Yet people kill themselves there too.

I like to say hyperindividualism, not individualism. Individualism and collectivism are naturally related: cooperation can bring out our individual potentials. From David Graeber's “The Democracy Project”, about Native Americans:

> Others (John Locke, for example, or many of the other English political philosophers so beloved by the Founding Fathers) became fascinated by the discovery of societies in North America that appeared to be simultaneously far more egalitarian, and far more individualistic, than anything Europeans had previously imagined possible.

In a European settler society like the US, people are still propagandized to believe the two are at odds: individual vs collective. But a moment's thought shows this to be ridiculous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com