Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

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We get to this place because people see obvious wrong being done and say "it's such a shame the government hasn't done anything about this" instead of doing anything about it themselves.

There hasn't been a time when "the individual" handled problems like a war or a massive pandemic. You "as an individual" haven't solved this mess and neither you nor I are going. I mean, I stop and help people broken down by the side of the road, I tell people what I think and what I think needs to be done. But that's individual initiative and it's not going to fix large problems.

Large questions have always been handled by groups, informal groups or formal, either coming from society. When a society was too small scale to produce a large collective response to a problem, well it failed. Why large nations have replaced small tribes.

It's true that today a lot of people view the government as a thing outside of themselves rather than a thing they create. But that's a slightly different problem.

> I mean, I stop and help people broken down by the side of the road, I tell people what I think and what I think needs to be done. But that's individual initiative and it's not going to fix large problems.

The impact of one individual doesn't fix the whole problem, but the impact of every individual doing their piece is how it gets done. Ordinary people wash their hands. Doctors treat patients or research a vaccine. Restaurants switch from dining in to takeout.

All different people doing all different things, but they each individually know what they need to do. Nobody has to exert top-down control in order to make it happen.

> Why large nations have replaced small tribes.

Large nations replaced small tribes because the technology was created to exert power at a distance. It's more of a bug than a feature.

> It's true that today a lot of people view the government as a thing outside of themselves rather than a thing they create. But that's a slightly different problem.

It's a problem caused by the size and centralization of government. It makes each person such a small contribution to the system that they have no capacity to exercise influence over it and then they correctly perceive it as an external force acting upon them rather than something they have any meaningful control over.

The impact of one individual doesn't fix the whole problem, but the impact of every individual doing their piece is how it gets done. Ordinary people wash their hands.

This is how ridiculous the conversation has gotten. It's tautological that humans acting together involve individual actions. The collective is; thinking about the group and coordinating.

What's happened in the US today is that minority of people have decided that taking an action for group benefit, notably wearing a mask but also other anti-infection measures, infringes on their "individual right". This is the "cult of the individual" that the gp mentioned.

Moreover, almost human collective individuals leadership. Not even enforcement but trusted people setting the tone. America's leaders have failed, abjectly, visibly, to set a coherent tone, to send a message. This failure is an important part of the chaotic US response and the deranged ideological claims of a minority.

Individualism, taken to anything like an extreme and as policy, can't even form something resembling a modern economy. It is, generously, an open question whether one can even do that without a state (less generously, it's not in any practical sense an open question, and no, you can't) and certainly you can't without forming some kind of bonds and structures that can force action of members against their immediate wishes, so there goes any high-purity individualism if you want... like, any stuff.

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