When I hear people bag on individualism it’s almost always the same thing; no one is an island and we need community in order to have nice things. Therefore, goes the argument, individualism is stupid and childish, impractical, dumb, mean, and maybe even evil. People live and act in groups, so thinking of people as collectives, be they along racial, national, class, educational, or generational lines is valid and proper.
This sidesteps the entire reason that I personally consider myself an individualist. That reason is accountability. I understand that only individuals can act and that taking action creates effects.
Let’s say an innocent man is killed by police. The collectivists will say that there’s a “systemic” problem with policing and that the institution needs to change. But what if there isn’t any kind of policy that unjustly results someone being killed? What if it’s just the guy pulling the trigger being incompetent or an asshole? I think it’s lazy to blame a system rather than go after the individual people doing the bad things. Was there a protest that turned into a riot? Why blame everybody when actual, specific people caused the damage?
Well, for one it allows entire groups of people to be guilty. One thing that I find amusing is that depending on the specifics of an incident each side will fall into one group that blames the entire other group, and the target group, depending on whether or not they think the act is even bad, will either deny that anything is wrong, or rightly point out that only the person committing the act is guilty of it.
The Geneva Conventions prohibit collective punishment (yeah, yeah, I know that bringing up the UN and expecting them to consistently apply any of their principles is silly, but the point stands that it’s a solid principle) for a very good reason, yet we see it happen every day in a myriad of ways.
If you don’t like how something works on your social media feed, don’t blame “the algorithm”, blame the people that wrote it! It didn’t just spring into the world fully formed, specific people wrote the program! Do I know, necessarily, who those people are? Likely not, but that doesn’t stop me from directing blame where it should actually go. Even if there actually is a racist, classist, religious, or otherwise-biased rule, again, there are people that you can point to that wrote and implemented it, and are responsible for it no longer being there
What I think is happening, however, is that it’s that vague for a very good reason; there is an industry to support! If your livelihood depended on a social ill, you have to admit there are people out there just as interested in perpetuating the problem as there would be in ending it, if not more. The way our government works, there’s a LOT of free (taxpayer) money out there if you’re an activist for a particular cause. Deny it all you want, but there are millions (billions, really) of dollars available to anyone with a cause and a halfway decent line of bullshit.
Do we blame “the mob” when rioters burn something down, or do we blame the people that lit the fire? I blame the specific people because I don’t blame people for things they didn’t do. Do I support gun control? No, for the same reason; if my guns and I are innocent we shouldn’t be treated otherwise. And the “safety” argument doesn’t work, because criminals aren’t waiting for that one really tough law before they go straight, they will ignore the new law just as they’ve ignored all the previous ones.
What it all boils down to is accountability. Only the perpetrators should be punished, only the actual heroes deserve credit. No one else is or should be involved.
