Expressions of Discontent

It is more or less universally accepted in Britain, the USA, Australia and Canada — the countries that are heirs to the Anglophone liberal tradition — that individualism is a good thing. To doubt the superiority of of individualism as opposed to collectivism is not merely heretical, it is almost inconceivable.

Yet it can be done, and I present here a case against individualism:

Individualism says: I don't care about social norms, what I think is right, is most assuredly right. I'm as good a judge as anyone else. Who has the right to tell me what I should do?

The individualist fails to realize that one individual making judgements is less likely to be right than a whole bunch of "just as good" individuals coming to a consensus. The individualist fails to realize that constant contact with and feedback from others helps one avoid error. The individualist fails to realize that individual judgement, consciously or not, tends to be selfishly biased. The individualist parent fails to realize that "letting the child develop as an individual" amounts to denying the child the benefit of the collective's accumulated wisdom, and that a few generations of individualist child-rearing, will produce a fractured, amoral, self-obsessed population, scarcely deserving the label "society" any more. The individualist fails to realize that, because it is part of human nature to want to belong to a collective, if the youth are not drawn into the existing collective, they will band into little collectives of their own, which will be opposed to society at large, and society will fragment, to the detriment of all.

I know that my remark in passing that individuals are "less likely to be right" than the collective is bound to invite skepticism, but I do have a response ready to counter such doubts, and I present it below:

If we assume all individuals are equally good judges, then no, the collective is always more likely to be a better judge, because either (a) all the individual judges have seen the same evidence, in which case the majority opinion is most likely to be right, or (b) the individuals in the collective have seen different evidence, so the collective has more evidence to go on than any one individual would, in which case, the collective is much more likely than any individual to be right in its judgement. All the above assumes that the individuals are reasonably likely to come to the right judgement in the first place. (Condorcet's Jury Theorem proves that collective majorities are more likely than individuals to come to the right judgement if each individual's probability of being right is more than .5 and less than 1.0)

If we assume, on the other hand, that the quality of judgement varies a lot between individuals, then the individual might be a better judge than collective, but let's remember that the collective in that case is likely to contain exceptionally talented judges. For the individual to be a better judge than the collective in that case, the individual must be a very, very good judge. Not only does the individual have Condorcet's Theorem to contend with, there's also the probability that the individual is not as talented as the most talented judge(s) within the collective.

When people do speak against excessive individualism in the West, it is usually couched in terms of "1960s values". However, individualism has deeper and older roots. The 1950s may look very conformist to our 21st century eyes, but it is certainly the case that the indivualism was an important intellectual idea that had popular appeal at that time, what with Freud and Jung being demigods in that era, and beatniks, jazz and rock'n'roll exciting the youth. At least one philosopher, Leo Strauss, was of the opinion that the rot had set in by then.