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Strategy Pattern (Don’t Laugh)'s avatar

Very Informative. I have a distinct dislike for the lot of totalitarian state worshippers, as it is never particularly clear what their states are meant to accomplish that a much less totalizing state would not be able to, nor what they would do in the modern environment but empower already disagreeable forces. This is all before mentioning their history.

However, you mentioned that individualism and collectivism exist as a pure dichotomy, which I am not sure that I believe and I wanted to explore this.

I interpret individualism to be the belief that the atomic unit of society is the individual, whereas collectivism believes it to be the collective with atomic describing the characteristics of being the smallest inseparable element.

Arguably, you could say something like the atomic unit of society exists as a dualism with two smallest units, let’s say completed individuals and weak collectives, which could be considered a “third option” or perhaps a “0th option” as it is possible that some pre-modern societies would consider themselves to have such a scheme.

I wonder what your thoughts are on this? Would you disagree with my characterization of individualism and collectivism?

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Rachel's avatar

Hey Sasha, I think your article highlights, inadvertently, the uselessness of labels.

God bless the intellectual who studies them, but among the commoners, they divide us.

We don't need more division.

Labels mean what the person sees in them. So many people have proclaimed they are "libertarians" or "socialists" or "anarchosyndicalists", without understanding these movements. And as a commoner who has to go to work, I don't care so much what my neighbor calls himself, as much as I care about what they do.

Politicians especially say a lot of things, and we must never judge them by their words. We judge them based on what they do.

I want a government of action that fights for working families. In my dream, the only property that changes hands are the national resources- gas, oil, timber, metals, WATER, etc- that the profits from those materials be used to fund people's needs, not the profits of a select few.

You hit on a Real Big Truth in this essay:

<<The mainstream narrative may be so severely distorted that it is completely unreliable, but the best lies contain a grain of truth, which is why so many people believe them. On the flip side, just because an alternative perspective turns the mainstream narrative on its head, doesn’t make it true. Don’t automatically reject everything you’ve been told, otherwise you end up believing in utter nonsense like flat Earth. Besides, that’s not thinking for yourself, that’s allowing the establishment to control what you think via reverse psychology; always remember that even a broken clock is right twice a day.>>

Spot on. There are quite a few dumbasses with big followings. But they have that following because they've hit on a truth.

However, when they structure their entire ideology based on that single truth, they end up in a confusing, crazy mess.

We must be open to information.

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