Collectivism

Collectivism is an outlook stressing the priority of group goals over individual goals and the importance of cohesion within social groups. Collectivism is a basic cultural element that exists as the opposite of individualism, which is any philosophic, political, religious, economic, or social outlook which emphasizes the interdependence of every human being. Collectivists usually focus on community, society, or nation.

Alphabetized by author

• Until now, neither the distinction between “worthy, since durable” and “vain, since transient,” nor the unbridgeable abyss separating the two, has disappeared for a moment from reflections on human happiness. Nonentity, the demeaning and humiliating insignificance of the individual bodily presence in the world by comparison with the unperturbed eternity of the world itself, has haunted philosophers (and non-philosophers, during their brief spells of falling into and staying in a philosophical mood) for more than two millennia. In the Middle Ages it was raised to the rank of the highest purpose and supreme concern of mortals, and deployed to promote spiritual values over the pleasures of the flesh—as well as to explain (and, hopefully argue away) the pain and misery of the brief earthly existence as a necessary and therefore welcome prelude to the endless bliss of the afterlife. It returned with the advent of the modern era in a new garb: that of the futility of individual interests and concerns, shown to be abominably short-lived, fleeting and vagrant when juxtaposed with the interests of “the social whole”—the nation, the state, the cause.
  • Zygmunt Bauman, The Art of Life (Cambridge: 2008), p. 31

• A powerful case for that refurbished, secularized response to individual mortality was constructed and extensively argued by Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology. He strove to insert and settle “society” in the place vacated by God and by Nature viewed as God’s creation or embodiment—and thereby to claim for the nascent nation-state that right to articulate, pronounce and enforce moral commandments and command the supreme loyalties of its subjects; the right previously reserved for the Lord of the Universe and His anointed earthly lieutenants.
  • Zygmunt Bauman, The Art of Life (Cambridge: 2008), p. 32

• Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times (1829)

• They corrupt the morals of young girls and destroy posters of Che! What do they think? That this is a bourgeois liberal regime? NO! There is nothing liberal in us! We are collectivists! We are communists! There will be no Prague Spring here!
  • Fidel Castro, as quoted in Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him (August 2008), by Humberto Fontova

• The unity of the manipulated collective consists in the negation of each individual and in the scorn poured on the type of society which could make people into individuals.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 9

• If there is any sense in deploring the growth of corporate and collective art forms such as the film and the press, it is surely in relation to the previous individualist technologies that these new forms corrode.
  • Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), p. 258

• We have to rid the individual of unworthy work if we are to set free the better parts of him, and only collectivism can do that.
  • Sir Leo Chiozza Money , The Triumph of Nationalization (1920), p. 177

• It cannot be said too often — at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough — that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.
  • George Orwell, in a review of The Road to Serfdom (1944)

• The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.
  • Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus (1991)

• The collectivization of labor during recent centuries has now been duplicated by the collectivization of thought. Industrialization collectivized labor by forcing workers to gather in large units and to specialize and simplify the functions of each worker. Similarly, the rise of the intellectual factory, the modern university, which has been indentured to the service of industry and even more so to that of technology, forces a concentration and a specialization of thought. The search for human truth has become the search for productively useful knowledge. ... Thinker is servant to thought, thought is servant to product, product is servant to consumer, and the consumer is enslaved by beliefs and thoughts that are either traditional or are produced mechanically by the demands of an abstract system purged of all human will.
  • R. E. Puhek, “The Collectivization of Thought”

• Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called "diversity" actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist.
  • Ron Paul, in Government and Racism (16 April 2007)

• Totalitarianism is collectivism. Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group — whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called "the common good." Throughout history, no tyrant ever rose to power except on the claim of representing "the common good." Napoleon "served the common good" of France. Hitler is "serving the common good" of Germany. Horrors which no man would dare consider for his own selfish sake are perpetrated with a clear conscience by "altruists" who justify themselves by — the common good.
  • Ayn Rand, in "The Only Path to Tommorow" in Readers Digest (January 1944), pp. 88-90

• Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage — the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
  • Ayn Rand, in "Racism" in The Obectivist (1962), also in The Ayn Rand Lexicon : Objectivism from A to Z (1988)

• The hard evidence of totalitarian rule has caused in mankind an uprising of the intellect and will. Whether it is the growth of the new schools of economics in America or England or the appearance of the so-called new philosophers in France, there is one unifying thread running through the intellectual work of these groups — rejection of the arbitrary power of the state, the refusal to subordinate the rights of the individual to the superstate, the realization that collectivism stifles all the best human impulses.
  • Ronald Reagan, in an Address to the British Parliament (8 June 1982)
• Both the Soviet and the Nazi political economies relied upon collectives that controlled social groups and extracted their resources. The collective farm, the instrument of Stalin’s great transformation of the Soviet countryside from 1930, was used by German occupation authorities from 1941. In the occupied Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Soviet cities the Germans added a new collective: the ghetto. The urban Jewish ghettos, although originally meant as resettlement points, became zones for the extraction of Jewish property and Jewish labor. Their nominal Jewish authorities of the Judenrat could usually be relied upon to raise “contributions” and organize labor brigades. Both the ghettos and the collective farms were administered by local people. Both the Nazi and the Soviet systems built large systems of concentration camps. Hitler would have used the Soviet camps for Jews and other ostensible enemies if he could have, but Germany never conquered enough of the Soviet Union to make that possible.
  • Timothy D. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010)

• Individualism is the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self without regard to its participation in its world. As such it is the opposite of collectivism, the self affirmation of the self as part of a larger whole without regard to its character as an individual self.
  • Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be (1952), p. 113

• The intelligence is defeated as soon as the expression of one's thoughts is preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word 'we'. And when the light of the intelligence grows dim, it is not very long before the love of good becomes lost.
  • Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (1949), p. 26

• The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity.
  • Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

• Collective actions
• Conformity
• Cult
• Groupthink
• Individualism
• Large-group awareness training
• New religious movement
• Sect
• Self religion

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Collectivism

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