Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

The core proposition of individualism is that an individual has rights and value, irrespective of their group identity, and therefore should be judged based on their ideas, their conduct and their personal characteristics. This has strong connection to the philosophical foundations of Science where ideas should be judged on their merits and not on the speaker or their group identity and capitalism where individual rights extend to property.

The default position of humanity is not individualism by the way, but rather group identity. Historically since time immemorial, rewards, guilt, punishment, rights (etc.) were applied at a group level. This resulted, predictably, in egregious crimes inflicted on huge swaths of people because of their group membership.

It's dismaying that there is a huge segment of academia that wants to revert to this more 'natural' state. It's dismaying to see arguments and ideas being dismissed based on the group identity of speaker in academia and mainstream culture. It's dismaying to see academia and mainstream culture level guilt on individuals because of their (immutable) group identity.

Individualism was one of the most radical ideas in the history of humanity that ushered our modern civilization. We lose it at our peril.

I'll paraphrase some of my other comment to explain why I think that "individualism" is somewhat of a red herring.

Unless you live in a self-sufficient homestead in the middle of a forest, there's no such thing as a "self-made man". Take Amazon for instance: they benefit from roads and infrastructure. But they also benefit from things like police and courts to protect their private property, just like they rely on a workforce capable of meeting their demands. Ultimately, they also benefit from a stable society and mostly wealthy enough population to afford their products! And finally, one can say that they benefit from the work of the people who invented the Internet, who invented computers, who made the American Revolution, the ancient Greek philosophers and the medieval mathematicians and Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, in short: directly or indirectly from the combined work of every single human being which lived and has ever lived. That's what's hidden behind the simple word "society". And that's why no person is "self-made".

For this, Amazon reaps enormous profit. They need to pay what's due: they owe a debt to society, for it was society that enabled their profit.

In a more practical sense, individualism is often found in practice to be pulled as a justification for privatising our economic output in the hands of a lucky few, and for ever-greater concentrations of wealth and an unjust distribution of duties and rewards. I'm suspicious of it on that count as well.

It seems to be popular to attack the "self-made man" idea as of late, but these attacks seem to be addressing the idea as "man in isolation" or "man with absolutely nothing." This runs in contrast to what the idea originally meant.

Frederick Douglass considered[0], "Self-made men ... are what they are, without the aid of any of the favoring conditions by which other men usually rise in the world and achieve great results."

For Douglass, the self-made man lacked "favoring conditions by which other men usually rise." This doesn't mean the self-made man cannot rely on that which is available to everyone in a given society (e.g., courts, roads, existing scientific knowledge, etc.). It simply means the self-made man is not one privileged over others.

This being so, I would reason that your post doesn't really address the idea of the "self-made man."

I also think the evaluation of Amazon is unfair. It is presented as Amazon taking value from society and never giving back. But what value has Amazon given in return to people?

It is often more convenient to shop on Amazon. It offers a greater selection of products than local stores. It often offers lower prices. It also provides reviews to aid decision making. So, to frame it as Amazon only taking and never giving back is an unfair criticism.

Does Amazon take more than it gives? Possibly. That's a difficult discussion though.

As for individualism, yes it can definitely be abused. But, that alone is not sufficient grounds to reject the idea--particularly when one looks the benefits gained as described in the parent to your post.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Men

The original article is a discussion of Ayn Rand's work, so andrepd's comment is a criticism of Ayn Rand's concept of a self-made man and individualism rather than Douglass's.

>Unless you live in a self-sufficient homestead in the middle of a forest, there's no such thing as a "self-made man".

Where did I argue individualism means you're in a "self-sufficient homestead in the middle of the forest"?? This type of straw man is employed frequently and is aggravating because OF COURSE we live in a society and we rely on others. Even hardcore libertarians don't make that claim.

Having said that, society is an ever-present constant, like the environment. An individual by themselves cannot really affect it. An individual, however, can certainly affect how they interact with it and the choices they make. In that sense, there sure are 'self-made men'.

>individualism is often found in practice to be pulled as a justification for privatising our economic output in the hands of a lucky few, and for ever-greater concentrations of wealth and an unjust distribution of duties and rewards.

We're way beyond debating whether we should live in pure capitalist-type of world with a tiny government and everything is privatized. We live in a mixed system, with a market-based economy and a social welfare state. There is no mainstream debate to change that. The political debate is centered around whether to move the dial a little towards the welfare state or the market-based side. So move on from that argument it's not relevant.

The attacks on individualism I'm talking about are ones that deal with attacks on basic enlightenment values like getting rid of due process (as was done on collage campuses when dealing with accusations of sexual assault) or treating immutable characteristics of an individual as boosting or discreding an argument they make ... you know, anytime an argument is taken more seriously when it is preceded with "As a member of identity group X here's what I think...".

How about the immoral idea of 'privilege' promulgated by academia and media, as a way to dismiss all individual experience in favour of group identity.

Amazon (and other corporations) do reap enormous revenues and do good with it for society contrary to your assertion: they reinvest those profits instead of paying out dividends to investors. This creates more jobs and produces more innovations for society.

The idea in practice is that you pay taxes on profits, not revenue. People confuse the two. Not paying taxes on revenue is a feature not a bug. This is there to encourage reinvestment, which long term is good for society. If they didn’t reinvest and instead realized profits, a portion would be taxed and a portion would be paid out to investors. The taxes portion would be both invested and wasted by inefficient bureaucracy.

Either way, reinvestment in society is happening, but in one case it’s going back into reinvestment by a relatively unaccountable private entity and the other case a portion of it is going into reinvestment by a relatively unaccountable public entity. My personal observation is that the private entity, by virtue of earning the profit in the first place (especially if in a fiercely competitive market), has proven itself a more capable steward of reinvesting that money to produce things people in society want (which they demonstrate by buying that company's goods/services)

That’s not to say that there isn’t value in having public reinvestment, but that those in charge of public reinvestment should instead tax other activities (in my opinion conspicuous consumption by individuals via a sales tax) and they should earn that right to spend more by convincing individuals collectively to forego their conspicuous consumption in the present (via raising sales tax) because they will return more value for society through their proposed reinvestments.

Government should tax things you want less of (wanton indiscriminate conspicuous consumption) and not things you want more of: reinvestment

Of course, there are self made men. If you have two people from similar background, education and access to infrastructure and wealth, and one successful and the second not, the first one is self-made.

I don't think that's what OP is referring to.

The one who is "self-made" is not truly self made because they had rely on many more resources and intellectual data by the group to succeed. Therefore there is no such thing as a truly self-made man.

There is only: those who can leverage existing infrastructure to improve the status quo or innovate.

Yes, but for people claiming there's no self-made man, when you ask them, when they would define them ("What person would you accept as self-made man?"), they usually create absolutely artificial cutoff.

Like if there were no public education or infrastructure and you still suceeded (in whatever, science, business), you are self-made. But why? Still, such a person didn't have to invent their own DNA, so they aren't really self-made.

"Society matters, not DNA, not personal initiative, not discipline, not habits..." is a form of bias.

And I just refuse this bias. All this matters. You can be self-made as a seventh child of poor Burmese farmer. Then, you could be maybe as rich as an average developer in Facebook. It is self-made. Or you can be a child of someone rich, inherit $1B and decades later leave the world with 1/10 and it not self-made, even when you still will be way better off that the child of that Burmese farmer. Self-made is relative, not absolute.

Also, you can grow a lot just by luck. Winning a lottery ticket is luck. But picking a career in IT is not. Thirty years ago, everyone knew computers are going to be ultra important. So not every vertical mobility is self-made.

It's complex, but they exist. People who decide to grow in their field. People with right habits, posessing great decision making skills, problem solvers, energetic people.

This assumes all factors relevant to success can be observed and measured, at least to the extent that they might be deemed reasonably equivalent between two people. That doesn’t seem possible in the real world, whose complexity can hardly be accounted for by the broad sort of categories you mention.

Beautifully worded. Western society's recent move away from individualism is probably one of the biggest recent societal tragedies, IMO.

> individual has rights and value, irrespective of their group identity

Individuals should have rights/value irrespective of group identity.

However, individual rights don't exist without a group in general. If you are the only living human, the concept of rights is meaningless to you in general.

I live in the US, so my rights are (supposed to be) protected by the state, in case anyone wants to take them from me.

If my neighbor decides I don't have the right to live anymore and murders me, then I lost my right to live. I only have the rights that everyone around me agrees to let me keep.

> It's dismaying that there is a huge segment of academia that wants to revert to this more 'natural' state.

The opposite is true. Academia is where we get much of the evidence that socially-constructed groups (based on religion, gender, race, etc.) are not biological and should not be the basis for granting value and rights.

Race is not biological? Did i get taxonomy wrong?

Not necessarily or directly, no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

Ah, i didn't realize people in the anglosphere use it as a social category now.

In German language, dog breeds are called with the same word that can also be used on humans ("Hunderasse", "Rasse"), so i always understood it as a biological/taxonomical thing.

Just like gender it used to mean that, but now we have to pretend it has always meant something else.

I have never heard of anyone claiming that modern definitions of these terms should be literally projected back into the past - only that we can analyse the past with current thought on these matters, which seems completely reasonable to me.

If you live in the US, then your rights are supposed to be inherent and inalienable.

The question then isn’t whether you have the rights, but whether someone is violating those rights (which you still possess) or you have “given them up” by violating the rights of another. In a narrow practical sense, this is equivalent to “those around you deciding what rights you have.”

In an ethical sense, it isn’t. If people believe rights stem from the group then the group is ethically fine in deciding you don’t have those rights and acting accordingly. If rights are inherent to the individual then while the group may still violate those rights, it both remains a violation and is not ethically sound. This difference makes it far easier in the former case for groups to violate the rights of individuals and other groups.

Then in a broader practical sense, these are not equivalent ideas. Encouraging the belief that rights are inherent is in the best interests of those who do not want those rights violated.

Even if a group of people decides that certain rights are inherent as opposed to just agreed upon in the group, you are still relying on this group of people agreeing on this. If you are the only one believing in some inherent rights, then what are those worth?

Ethics are defined by personal intersection of values.

Ethics of American and Greek will be different. Ethics of Christian and atheist will be different. Ethics of libertarian and conservative will be different. But then, what about libertarian atheist American for example? There might be thousands of axes, prioritized and changing during one’s life. How could any group create a shared ethics except a few obvious exceptions (theft, rape...)?

>If my neighbor decides I don't have the right to live anymore and murders me, then I lost my right to live. I only have the rights that everyone around me agrees to let me keep.

... what? No, that's is a massive misunderstanding of the right to life. There is a distinction between natural rights (normative ethical statements) and legal rights (what the legal system actually guarantees you). Natural rights are inalienable - they can neither be granted nor taken away by anyone.

If a state decides to commit genocide against a group of people, that group didn't lose their right to life, the state is simply violating that right.

No one grants you rights, you have them by virtue of simply existing. People may not respect your rights, and may interfere with your efforts to exercise them, but you still have those rights.

If you are the last person on earth you may have no need for your rights but again they still exist. Your neighbor can't decide you don't have the right to live anymore, if he kills you that is a violation of your rights. Others will punish the murderer for that violation.

You can forego some rights in exchange for benefits like participation in certain groups, which is the basis of the social contract. For example I agree to temporarily forego the right to privacy in an airport in exchange for the privilege of being allowed to fly. Sometimes the decision to do so is very one-sided, but its still a decision.

If people could unilaterally revoke your rights whenever they became inconvenient, what would be the point of rights at all?

The basic concept of rights stops making sense if there are no other people. You can't even define rights in the absence of other people.

> If people could unilaterally revoke your rights whenever they became inconvenient, what would be the point of rights at all?

They can and sometimes do.

The point in those cases (i.e. all cases) of rights is that they are a mutually agreed-upon boundary, just as you said.

A right means no one can stop you from doing something you have the right to do or require you to do something you have the right not to. If no one is around, there is still no one who can stop you from doing something you have the right to do nor require you to do something you have the right not to. Your rights are unnecessary, not undefined.

If you are mutually agreeing, by definition it is not unilateral.

> A right means no one can stop you from doing something you have the right to do or require you to do something you have the right not to

Then there is no such thing as a right.

>No one grants you rights, you have them by virtue of simply existing.

Eh, kinda, but it's not that black and white. There's different kinds of rights, which is why the US Declaration of Independence specifically calls out the violation of "unalienable" rights as a reason to justify revolting. Some rights are unalienable, some are granted by authority.

But we don't even have agreement on what the unalienable rights should be, which is why Thomas Jefferson changed "property" to "the pursuit of happiness."

In the end, my unalienable rights are dependent on what other people think my unalienable rights are, which is to say, they are granted by society.

Just because you and a friend don't agree on what a cloud looks like doesn't mean it has no shape.

We may believe some rights that are unalienable aren't, and we may believe some that aren't are, but in either case it is we who are wrong. By definition, they are not granted nor revokeable by society. If society does not recognize an unalienable right as such, it violates it.

Which rights are unalienable and which aren't is not a matter of fact.

That's another of my issues with Rand. Trying to say that morality is true/false or that rights are true/false is the same as religion. It has no basis in reality. You can't prove that people have the right to do anything. It's an issue of opinion.

For example, you may believe people have the right to do anything they want to with their body (ex: refuse a vaccine).

If you take that to its extreme, they also have the right to get sick and cough on someone else.

So Rand (and most people) would say, OK, there's a limit. That person has the right to do anything they want to with their body unless it takes a right away from someone else.

But where do you draw the line? Couldn't you argue that an unvaccinated person might be sick all the time, so going anywhere crowded is inherently immoral and they have lost their right to do that?

It quickly gets very murky and very opinionated.

No one takes away your right to cough on someone else. You voluntarily forego your right to cough on someone else in exchange for everyone else doing the same. The vast majority of sane people recognize that we don't want to live in a world where anyone can inject anything into us that they like without our consent, so one of the requirements for living in our society is respect for bodily autonomy, which for better or worse means we can't force someone to get vaccinated either. You can violate this agreement, but then no one else has to uphold the agreement with you.

Every possible action limits in some way the possible actions of others. Your right to speak limits my right to not have my eardrums vibrated. The social contract negotiates how we choose to handle these conflicts. No one will give up their right to speak in general in exchange for the right to quiet, but most of us are fine with limiting how loudly we speak at certain hours of the night in exchange for the same curtesy.

Different people will have different opinions on how valuable various rights are. I'm fine with google reading my emails, so I'll let them in exchange for providing me a free email client with good tools. Others may value their right to privacy more highly and choose not to forego it for something trivial. In the end we all have a unique set of agreements with other members of society which limit what we can and can't do which we may wish to modify from time to time, there isn't one immutable, homogenous code imposed upon all of us by some vague, abstract entity called society.

>The opposite is true. Academia is where we get much of the evidence that socially-constructed groups (based on religion, gender, race, etc.) are not biological and should not be the basis for granting value and rights.

Definitely citation needed here. I agree there is a nature vs. nurture question. But, I can't imagine any biologists are arguing that people are not tribal animals.

I think you misinterpreted what I meant.

Biologists certainly would say that humans are social and tribal. They would disagree that the typical delineations of tribes (based on race, for example) are natural.

To put it another way: tribal behavior is biological, but decisions about who goes in which tribe are social and mostly arbitrary (beyond family relations).

>Academia is where we get much of the evidence that socially-constructed groups (based on religion, gender, race, etc.).

Social Studies in general are frequently non-rigorous, sloppy and a mess. The academic areas where those ideas are promulgated are even more so. For example, I have yet to see any evidence, for example, that a girl who plays with dolls as a child is being socially conditioned away from STEM fields as an adult ... a claim that is repeated all the time and stated as simply a fact.

At this point, given how sloppy those academic areas are, I can only be skeptical of the crap they promulgate.

Are you deliberately phrasing this as an antagonistic position to the parent comment, or am I misreading?

Individualism is whatever I say it is.

The Agile Philosophy.

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