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Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

All these "individualism is trash and here's why" type articles do that because they're necessarily written by someone who fundamentally believes group association and/or groups themselves have some sort of inherent good so they have a massive ideological blind spot when it comes to seeing any benefit to doing something as an individual.

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Worse than that the article is riddled with fallacious reasoning. It basically amounts to:

I am a scientist, a really awesome scientist, I slayed Rand because of my awesome sciencey authority, Rand was wrong. Oh BTW rand was right about fiction being a good conveyor of morality, because it suits my narrative. So I wrote some fiction with no science in it, to slay her for being wrong. Did I mention I am a scientist so that gives authority to my fiction, being fiction it negates my need to provide the sciency bits to prove my point.

This authors hubris is at the L Ron ++ level.

It’s almost as though they actually believe there are no individuals, just group members. Or rather, that what we call an individual is more appropriately described as the intersection of a collection of group memberships.

Yeah, there's nuance here that so many miss. We can understand humans through a social lens when discussing psychology or anthropology. However, we might consider humans through another lens when discussing political theory. It would be entirely consistent to be an ardent individualist politically whilst also believing that humans are social animals who prefer close-knit units. I think the root of the problem is the naturalistic fallacy.

Indeed, it reminds me of Jordan Peterson’s remark that every household is communist.

This is in essence the core of intersectionality, which is very popular in academia right now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

Which might be correct, and those group memberships are different for every one - making it a gasp individual-individual!

> who fundamentally believes group association

Not only that, but they see themselves as a leader in the group or imagine that the choices of the leader would always be consistent with their preferences.

> This inference became logically inescapable as soon as people began to ascribe to the state not only moral but also intellectual perfection. The liberal philosophers had described their imaginary state as an unselfish entity, exclusively committed to the best possible improve- ment of its subjects' welfare. They had discovered that in the frame of a market society the citizens' selfishness must bring about the sanic results that this unselfish state would seek to realize; it was precisely this fact that justified the preservation of the market economy in their eyes. But things became different as soon as people began to ascribe to the state not only the best intentions but also omniscience.

...

> A socialist advocates socialism because he is fully convinced that the supreme director of the socialist commonwealth will be reasonable from his-the individual socialist's point of view, that he will aim at those ends of which he-the individual socialist-fully approves, and that he will try to attain these ends by choosing means which he-the individual socialist-would also choose. Every socialist calls only that system a genuinely socialist system in which these conditions are completely fulfilled; all other brands claiming the name of socialism are counterfeit systems entirely different from true socialism. Every socialist is a disguised dictator. Woe to all dissenters! They have forfeited their right to live and must be "liquidated."

[1]: https://cdn.mises.org/Human%20Action_3.pdf pp. 688-689

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