We Need To Merge Collectivism And Individualism

At first glance, it seems clear to which societies we have to assign collectivism and individualism. Today, China, in particular, is an example of collectivism. The former Eastern Bloc was also considered collectivist. Therefore, collectivism and socialism are often equated.

The USA and its Western allies, on the other hand, stand for individualism.

But this division does not stand up to realistic consideration.

The false individualism of the West

No collectivist state can do without a personality cult, and thus presents individual individuals in a highly exaggerated way and as shining examples.

The Western human being today is drowning in a mass of meaningless individuals. Their only value for society is to be workers and consumers.

Western societies suggest to people that they are free individuals. Socialism makes people believe that they are an indispensable part of a great joint project.

However, the lives of most people in the Western industrial nations are structurally very much predetermined.

Closed ranks have long since formed, with better access to all resources than the rest of the population. Parents' income and education largely determine which professions and educational paths are open to their children.

Sure, everyone has the opportunity to break free from their social class through self-discipline and hard work, but this is usually a very theoretical possibility.

For every one who manages to climb the social ladder, thousands do not make it despite their most significant efforts.

It can't be any different, because our interpretation of individualism always and everywhere includes the principle of competition.

Everybody can achieve everything, but if everybody wants to rise, a fierce fight arises in which only the strongest survive.

This competitive struggle leads directly to an all-encompassing egoism. But egoism runs directly counter to the basic idea of individualism.

Individualism promises the individual to be able to develop freely but lived egoism leads to the fact that everyone wants this freedom primarily only for himself.

The egoist does not care whether others have the same possibilities, and that is why the idea of individualism has long since become pure egoism in the western industrial nations.

The call for solidarity-based systems, such as universal health insurance, free education for all, and sick pay, is often understood as socialist propaganda in the USA.

Yet these things are a necessary prerequisite for the free development of the individual if one understands by free development more than the freedom to fight for one's life.

In other Western nations, such as Germany, there are social security systems. But these systems are always linked to the principle of work. Those who have worked longer get more when they are in need. Also, the security in old age depends directly on what you have earned before.

These collectivist approaches, such as a general health insurance scheme, seem to counteract the individualism perverted to egoism at first.

But on closer inspection, the same principle of competition prevails in this system as well. Those who were better positioned before the emergency (unemployment) occurred will subsequently receive more.

It is not a question of how valuable the work of the individual was for society, but what monetary value was attributed to this work. The importance of the individual for the community is also not taken into account in the German pension system and German unemployment insurance.

A woman who has only had a few years of work because she has raised children receives less pension than a woman without children who has worked all her life.

So there is no question of collectivism in Germany or other Western European countries. However, individualism is somewhat less pronounced here than in states without social security systems.

The false collectivism of socialism

The collective is everything, and the individual is nothing. Socialist societies have dedicated themselves to this motto. The basic idea behind it is that the individual can only be happy if the community is happy. Who wanted to contradict this?

But the reality is different. The Eastern Bloc collapsed not because people were doing so well, but because the mass of people was doing poorly.

The enforced obedience of the masses benefited a small elite, and no one else. The freedom of the majority was not restricted for the benefit of the majority, but the benefit of the leadership.

Socialism failed because of this contradiction between claim and reality. Socialism has failed because of the denial of individualism, whereby the problem was not the individualism of the masses, but again the individualism of the elite perverted to egoism.

Socialism has never existed as a form of state. The states that called themselves socialist were, in reality, just as marked by perverted individualism as the Western states that were scored by the market economy.

The failure of both ideologies

Both socialism and individualism ultimately failed because of the same phenomenon - the egoism of the elites, or rather the sheer existence of isolated elites.

Has the West failed? But the USA, Germany, France and all the other Western societies still exist and are flourishing economically, you will say now.

This is true. These states exist and are economically successful. But they have failed in keeping their promise to the people.

Individualism promised freedom and equal opportunity for all.

What we got is a Darwinian struggle for survival with unequal opportunity.

Now, of course, there is a view among neoliberals that the Darwinian principle is to be welcomed. After all, this principle has worked excellently in nature for millions of years and has led to the best-adapted organisms surviving.

I do not know about you, but for me, the progress of humanity consists precisely in not submitting to natural selection processes, but in overcoming them.

Those who agree with the neoliberal ideology of Social Darwinism also agree with fascism. Nazi Germany was the prime example of what happens when we subject everything to the Darwinian principle.

Creating the synthesis of thesis and antithesis

Both collectivism and individualism have noble goals. Every ideology wants to develop and improve society as a whole. To achieve this, both ideologies have taken opposite approaches.

But two opposing approaches cannot both lead to the same result. Nevertheless, I say that both collectivism and individualism have led to the formation of privileged elites.

How can this be? Both have pursued the goal of improving society and making it juster.

Well, they merely pretended to do so.

Both ideologies were reinterpreted from the outset by the respective elites to their advantage and therefore led to the same results in terms of the real freedom of the individual.

Indeed, in the West, the individual is allowed more than in the former socialist states. The West has always had freedom of travel and freedom of speech, while people in the Eastern Bloc were imprisoned.

However, this difference was not based on the difference between collectivism and individualism, but the difference between dictatorship and democracy.

One reason why individualistic systems have survived to this day is that they have produced democratic states.

Democracies grant their citizens individual opportunities for co-determination, which makes them more stable than a dictatorship.

Americans, Europeans, and the citizens of other market-based democracies do not live under a political dictatorship.

But we do live under a dictatorship of capital. The monetary value determines what is and what is not.

In the USA, this dictatorship of capital is certainly much more pronounced than in Europe, but there too, money is the leader.

In my opinion, the best synthesis we know between collectivism and individualism was in Germany when the social market economy actually still existed. But Germany has gradually abandoned its social market economy under the pressure of globalization and the triumph of neo-liberalism.

The health sector has been privatized, as have transport and energy supply. Education was adapted to the needs of the market, and the social security systems were restructured in such a way that access to them is now linked to conditions that can be enforced utilizing coercion and sanctions.

To keep the promise that collectivism and individualism once made to people, we must combine both ideas.

We must finally treat the individual as unconditionally worthy of protection, but curtail individual freedom where it begins to harm the common good.

In concrete terms, this means that no one must be left behind economically, socially, and culturally just because he or she does not meet the demands of a modern meritocracy.

At the same time, no one who has more intellectual or monetary resources at his or her disposal may be relieved of responsibility for the common good.

Property must be an obligation to increase the prosperity of society. As before, everyone should strive for personal happiness and even wealth, but at the same time, social commitments must grow at the same rate as income.

A company that grows and only makes the owner richer is socially useless.

At the same time, a social system that devalues personal achievement by altogether socializing all means of production is anti-progressive and prevents innovation.

Individualistic collectivism must, therefore, have reliable social security systems.

It must also function according to the market economy and democratic principles and always restrict the market and the individual when a social imbalance arises.

The emergence of social imbalances can be seen in exploitative working conditions and oligarchic-elitist structures, among other things.

A system that functions according to these principles would have the happiness of the individual as well as the well-being of society in mind.