Collectivism & Individualism, part one

American WWI era pro-war
propaganda poster,
featureing "Uncle Sam"

What is Collectivism?
Wednesday – September 17, 2025

Collectivism is the mode of being that describes when men gather in groups that form around a common collective identity that in turn form organically around certain collective goals, aspirations, circumstances, problems, etc. Human beings are said to be "social animals" and by this it is usually meant that humans need each other mutually in order to sustain their own life, and therefore the collective effort that is put into sustaining life becomes the organizing principle of any collective: that is to say that the original collective intention was always to make life easier, since men working together and cooperating can create a better outcome not only for the individual but in the process every other member of that collective. In the prehistoric past of mankind it is thought that men that were expelled/deported from their immediate collective, their tribe, would likely face certain death, since one man alone can only be expected to achieve very little in the material domain, and thus it is thought that man has adopted to the harsh circumstances of the material domain by favoring collective solutions to the circumstances of life, and this can be seen in almost any major enterprise in the material domain: men working together towards a common collective goal often creates vast economic value, but also sensual value. However, there are many downsides to man's collectivist tendency, for in our modern world where people can move around in freer fashion over larger distances than ever, before, it can be noted that men often default to their immediate collective, in our world often such things as: race, ethnicity, nationality, religious sect, etc, and this tendency towards sectarianism or really tribalism has also caused much devastation for humanity, often in the forms of large scale conflict where the individual member of any given collective becomes reduced to an object deemed not worthy of human life, a political object. Indeed, to be a member of a collective is surely to be a political object, and this objectification of men on political and material grounds can be thought of as an innate and diseased tendency of man, a sickness of the mind. But tribalism can also be thought of as the logical consequence of such things as multiculturalism, propaganda, nationalism, imperialism, and really anything that promotes large scale mixing of different groups in a way that challenges the political boundaries of their given collective. For instance, take the example of race, an issue that has been on the forefront for many years: it can often be noted that race in many contexts is a western term used to describe individuals that do not fit into the in-group, often the collective of colonial settlers in an area/region that they are new to, and those individuals where usually deemed a different race, and that classification often referred to someone's skin color, but it has historically also referred to many other features, some of them anthropological and political in nature. Then we have the category of ethnicity and this category of political objectification is more subtle and harder to define and describe, but usually ethnicity in merely anthropological terms refers to an individual's group membership in terms of history, genealogy, and culture, and it often becomes harder to clearly delineate or define the political boundaries of different ethnicities, especially if they are said to belong to the same race. Clearly the political boundary of race is harder to cross in certain circumstances, such in the case when members of two different races enter into a sexual relationship.

    Race and ethnicity are only two ways in which collectivism collides with the modern world, but I do want to add that both of those constructions if you will are rather recent, in the way that they are used to describe human beings, as well as in the way they are used by human beings to identify with that common goal that is essential for any collective. There are many ways in which human beings interact through collectives, as opposed to merely interacting with the world as individuals, and this can as I just mentioned take the form of racism and tribalism generally, but there are also other ways this occurs and this is the cornerstone of modern politics, based on mass hysteria. Why are political parties created? In democracies, liberal democracies, political parties again functions as a collective and unifying platform to put the grievances of certain individuals with a common interest and often a common goal, and this can be demonstrated in how political parties are stratified across economic and social boundaries: more often than not a given individual is not particularly political or ideological, he is merely a member of a political sect through his shared solidarity and community, often perceived community, with the members of that political party, and thus he at the very least feels compelled to vote for them in the elections. Solidarity and community are two very important tendencies innate to the collective individual or the individual member of some given collective: when a man is a member of a collective, most men are members of multiple collectives, he wears his collective on his body, like he wears clothes, he is in that moment the political individual or the political object, and in a sense he belongs to each individual in that collective and each individual in that collective belongs to him; this is the primordial sense of tribe on full display, and it can indeed be used for good and for bad. In the trenches of 20th century mass politics the individual has surely been sacrificed without much hesitation for the overall benefit of the group and often more so for the benefit of the leaders of the collective. Indeed, while collectivism can be used to create great things in the world, certain men that are lustful for power in the material domain, seldom have any issues with abusing collectivism for their own selfish goals.

    I am a proponent of collectivism on small scales, because I believe that human beings work better together and I believe that life becomes more bearable in the material domain if men can unify around certain goals and certain issues, such as short term survival. I do not approve however, of collectivism on a scale larger than a village of about 150 persons, for such collectivism cannot said to be organic and natural in nature: indeed it has been shown that most men cannot clearly perceive of more than about 150 individual members of his immediate collective, and thus it doesn't take much to completely warp and corrupt the mind of any man with a good conscience once the scale and size of his collective is multiplied, such in the case of nation-state, and political mass mobilization. What happens to the individual once he becomes a member of a collective is that he is placed in a vertical relationship to the common of the collective, and this is inherently oppressive, to the extent that it can be used to control and corrupt men. The natural collective is the immediate collective, historically the tribe and yet more recently the village, but any collective beyond that is doomed to reduce men to mere disposable political objects mobilized in the defense and promotion of the revolutionary elite, which also goes to show the inherent danger from the individual point of view, in ideas that claim universality, that they apply to each man, such in the case with the liberal humanist axiom, socialism, and multiculturalism – they all promote a kind of extra collectivism while at the same time being applicable to each individual. More about individualism in part two.

Reginald Drax – September 17, 2025.