Individualism versus collectivism or group desires breaks down to unalienable rights of the individual versus group think socialism and communism. Ask yourself where you stand on this important topic: Do you go along to get along? Or do you stand for what is called “rugged individualism” and against group think?
With Elon Musk allowing publication of the internal communications at Twitter, we have learned a great deal. We learned that leaders at Twitter were being pressured to censor conservatives, Twitter users, by the Biden Campaign, Democratic politicians, and even government agencies. We also learned that the FBI assigned 80 agents to work with Twitter on censorship, and paid Twitter over $3 million. Importantly, we learned the government actively suppressed the Hunter Biden Laptop story before the 2020 election by convincing Twitter the story was “Russian Disinformation”. These attempts to “shape” public opinion through distorting the truth show the extent Progressive collectivist ideology is trumping individual rights. Let me explain.
First, the importance of unalienable individual rights was at the foundation of America. Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence that we believed individuals were created equal and endowed by God with “unalienable rights” including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This philosophy permeated American society throughout most of our history.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s of the importance of American individual freedom:
Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling… they form an association… The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe.
This fundamental importance of the individual was rooted in the Judeo-Christian concept of man. As Russian philosopher and Theologian Klaus Bockmuhl wrote:
Against this the Bible says: It is impossible for man to master guilt and sin and the evil in himself. A liberation of man from selfishness is necessary, but it must come from God. It must be received.
That founding American philosophy began to be challenged by progressive philosophers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Progressive thought was from materialistic collectivist European philosophers like Hegel and Rousseau and Marx, who believed individuals were essentially blank slates and social creatures of society. Early 20th century educator and progressive philosopher, Thomas Dewey, put progressive philosophy best:
“(Humans) are born as empty vessels, as nothing in themselves. As such, the individual becomes a product of a historical context… social arrangements, laws, institutions… are means of creating individuals… Individuality in a social and moral sense is something to be wrought out… There is nothing of any value that human beings possess by nature… Society, not the individual, makes the mind…
Neither nature nor God makes man. Man makes himself, collectively, through “social conditions.” Reality is socially constructed….[Since] human beings are “nothing in themselves”; it follows that they can do nothing on their own….Intelligence, talents, and virtues, as well as rights—all the things the Founders said humans were born with or acquired through the exercise of their natural talents—are produced by the social order.
Karl Marx, who proclaimed his life mission was to “dethrone God and destroy capitalism” is the progenitor of progressives like Dewey. In 1935, Russian Philosopher and Theologian Nikolai Berdyaev wrote of Marxism:
The attitude of Marxism towards person is antagonistic… The anti-personalism of Marx—is a consequence of the anti-personalism of Hegel. Hegel acknowledged the sovereignty of the general over the individual. The person for Hegel does not possess self-sufficient significance.
In attempting to destroy the primacy of the individual, progressive collectivists have gone so far as targeting the family. An example of this came with a short attempt to install Communism in Hungary in 1919, and is one we can recognize in schools today. The Soviet Hungarian culture and education commissar, George Lukacs, believed the best way to disintegrate the family was to introduce sexual perversions in education. Lukacs’s biographer described it this way:
Special lectures were organized in schools and literature printed and distributed to ‘instruct’ children about free love, about the nature of sexual intercourse, about the archaic nature of bourgeois family codes, about the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasure. Children urged thus to reject and deride paternal authority and the authority of the church, and to ignore precepts of morality.
The modern progressive version bears a striking resemblance to Hungary 1919. Founding member of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization, Patrisse Cullors, proclaimed openly she was a “trained Marxist”. Among BLM’s stated priorities was to “disrupt” the nuclear family. BLM and associated social justice leaders and organizations have pushed the collectivist ideology, and particularly the oppressor/oppressed class dynamic of traditional Marxism. Cullors’s organization was nonetheless supported by much of corporate America.
The Honorable William Young has written on the subject of progressive brainwashing through education “In our universities… postmodern multiculturalism and cultural Marxism magnified the theory that differences among individuals are group-based and sought social reconstruction of the undeserved status of privileged groups in favor of historically-oppressed groups. Rights to “social justice” are reckoned according to group affiliation rather than derived from those features of human nature that individuals share.
Americans have been under a deluge of progressive collectivist rhetoric, and respect for individual rights is giving way. The way back from the abyss will come through recognizing and defeating the collectivist ideology. America became great with the societal agreement we were each equal and with unalienable rights from God. It’s time we demand the return of our freedom!
RSS - Posts