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Comment by peanut_merchant | Hacker News Reader

This argument feels like an oversimplification to me.

These are only two examples of "collectivist" societies. The idea that you are either strongly individualist or China/Russia seems like a false dichotomy.

Some of the happiest societies in the world employee a model that is neither rigidly collectivist or individualist (e.g. the Nordic model).

My intuition is that the solution like probably in the middle ground at a political level, while adapting to our new digital reality.

The argument that our society must embrace full individualism or fail, feels a bit like the red-scare lite.

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the nordics are probably the most individualists in europe. Look to the south for more collectivist cultures. The strong nordic state welfare actually enables people to be individualists. there s no argument about what society must do, but the evidence shows that people gravitate that way

They are collectivist in the sense that they pay very high taxes without trying to weasel themselves out of them. But yeah, they pay them so that they can actually live an individualistic life :)

> they pay very high taxes without trying to weasel themselves out of them

You haven't met rich Nordic people, IMHO.

> Some of the happiest societies in the world employee a model that is neither rigidly collectivist or individualist (e.g. the Nordic model).

Nordic societies are the most individualist societies on earth. Their policies are all about individual people and their wellbeing. They have no collectivist concept of a greater good that is above the individual. In Russia and China the concept of national rejuvenation is paramount above the individual. These nationalist visions are maximally collectivist. Trump is a lite version of this. The sociocultural construct of "America" and the sociolegal construct of "freedom" is supreme over the actual positive freedoms and negative freedoms of the individual. Self-described right-libertarians are often very collectivist in actual practice. You can't be anti-immigration and call yourself an individualist, it's a nationalist (and therefore collectivist) position.

> You can't be anti-immigration and call yourself an individualist, it's a nationalist (and therefore collectivist) position.

I don't neccessarily disagree with the rest of your post, but the above seems obviously false. Most anti-immigratio people are not for it because of some abstract ideas, but because they see immigrant as direct competitiors for their jobs. That was one of the biggest reasons behing Brexit votes for example.

I believe the motive is more ethnonationalist than is admitted to in polite circles. "Culture" or "jobs" is the euphemistic front, but the true reasons are fear of crime/terrorism, and fear of becoming a racial minority and the consequences that will have on their voting power and racial supremacy.

Anti-immigration that comes from fear of crime is collective guilt and collective punishment. Only a small minority of individuals will be criminals, but the entire collective is punished all the same. Anti-immigration that comes from fear of racial diversity or fear of cultural change, is also a collectivist motive, it's a more nationalistic and nativist iteration of collectivism than fear of crime.

If the earnest reason is jobs protectionism, I'd still argue that protectionism isn't individualist. It's not explicitly collectivist, but it's a suppression of individual rights for cynical reasons. At least, it's anti-individualist, if not collectivist.

> I believe the motive is more ethnonationalist than is admitted to in polite circles. "Culture" or "jobs" is the euphemistic front, but the true reasons are fear of crime/terrorism, and fear of becoming a racial minority and the consequences that will have on their voting power and racial supremacy.

In the Brexit case, it was white Eastern Europeans coming in to UK and taking over low-paying jobs. So, neither a threat of terrorism nor racial supremacy (they're all white). I guess one could be afaid of some regions losing its inherent British culture though.

> In the Brexit case, it was white Eastern Europeans coming in to UK and taking over low-paying jobs.

Perhaps true in many people's minds, but it largely seems to be the case that native Brits do not want to do those jobs. Either Brits tend to see themselves as "above that", or there is a serious shortage of workers in those areas (structural problem). Therefore, such jobs were left undone or severely delayed. The UK got what it literally asked for and is now finding out that it didn't actually want that.

Brexit was a mish mash of motives. Some of those motives were explicitly collectivist, others were anti-individualist if not collectivist.

Brexit was partly fear of Muslims, not just job competition with Eastern Europeans. You see this in the discussion around Syrian refugees from people like Nigel Farage, Douglas Murray and Sargon of Akkad. They wanted to exit the system that enabled that. This particular motive was collectivist.

In addition, Brexit was partly the typical arrogance and wounded ego you see from declining and fallen empires. The glory days are still fresh in people's minds. There's a feeling that Britain is on the decline. People couldn't accept the egalitarian terms and low status of being just another ordinary EU member state. This also is collectivist through and through.

It's deeply American to call Russia "collectivist". It's more similar to 1800s America, economically, than it is to the USSR. Oligarchs owning resource extraction for sale into capital markets.

Generally when people say "collectivist", they mean "bad guys in black hats and also I liked Ayn Rand"

Russia is collectivist not because of their economic system but because of their nationalism. National rejuvenation is prioritized above the prosperity and freedom of the individual.

That's just a narrative the ruling thugs use to explain to people while their lives continue to be shitty while the rest of the world keeps improving. Most people in Russia are brainwashed into believing that, even though they're not well off by any means on a personal level, Russia is a global superpower that can rival the US. BTW I wonder if the current absolute embarrasment of Russian Army in Ukraine will be able to speak some sense into Russian people - but, judging by what I see in the Internet, the official propaganda has already convinced Russians that their army is fighting against entire NATO forces and not just Ukrainian army (because obviously, just the Ukrainian army would be defeated in under a month).

Yeah, if anything, Russia is a hyper-individualist ultra-capitalist endstate of society - every man for himself, taking care only for himself and everything you need has to be paid for. Even soldiers have to buy their own equipment with predatory loans from people that stole it from the army.

Calling Russia (heck or even China) "collectivist" is just repeating propaganda from expired times and show a horrifyingly poor education.

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