Our social and political culture today seems to be all about collectives. As society progresses, our collective identities have been elevated in importance. At the same time, these collective identities have fractured into even smaller groups (especially along the lines of religion, race, and sexual orientation). This fracturing is an attempt to account for individual variation while retaining a group identity. At the same time that group identities have multiplied and increased in complexity, a new set of groups has emerged: the privileged and the unprivileged, or the victor and victim. We seek to separate into groups and rank groups in terms of their importance to us. Inevitably, groups are pitted against one another, until society becomes primarily organized around the clashing interests of group identities.
On the other hand, modern culture at large has also become highly atomistic. Increased mobilization and shifts in technology have provided many benefits, but these changes have also eroded a sense of local community. American culture in particular is known for its “rugged individualism.” The individualism and individual freedom America is known for may appear, at first glance, to be at odds with collective groups. Particularly with respect to a discussion of the respective “rights” or competing interests of the individual versus the group.
But are individuals and collectives really at odds with each other? What is the best lens through which to better understand how the world works? Should we seek to evaluate society on an individual level, or continue as we are to emphasize and base our understanding on the collective?
Individuals and collectives can easily be falsely dichotomized. But in order to understand how society works, and how to solve social and economic problems, we must understand individuals first. We are all individuals first before we part of a group. Our own bodies prove that; we cannot be inside someone else’s head or body.
“For a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual members’ actions. The life of a collective is lived in the actions of the individuals constituting its body. There is no social collective conceivable that is not operative in the actions of some individuals.” (Human Action, p.42)
Why is it better to evaluate society from the starting point of individuals? There is a very simple reason: only individuals can act. Collectives, or groups, cannot act. Only the individuals that compose them can.
This is not to say that evaluating society from the starting point of individuals means dispensing with or ignoring collectives and the important roles they play in our lives. On the contrary, individuals are the starting point for a truly effective understanding of collectives and how they work.
“Methodological individualism, far from contesting the significance of such collective wholes, considers it as one of its main tasks to describe and to analyze their becoming and their disappearing, their changing structures, and their operation.” (Human Action, p.42)
Neither is this to say that individual actions should be the primary or only mode of viewing the world, or that individuals act in a vacuum, or that individuals are always wise and good in thought and deed. On the contrary, it is only by the inter-actions of many individuals that we come to benefit from group gains in knowledge and skills that those many interactions provide. These sets of interactions can be thought of as a dynamic process; or in a slightly narrower sense, a market process. True individualism:
“…is a system under which bad men can do the least harm. It is a social system which does not depend for its functioning on our finding good men for running it, or on all men becoming better than they are, but which makes use of men in all their given variety and complexity, sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes intelligent and more often stupid.” (Individualism and the Economic Order, p.12)
Because we as individual humans are limited and flawed, we need this interactive process on every level in order to thrive: economically, socially, politically, and relationally.
“…nobody can know who knows best and…the only way by which we can find out is through a social process in which everybody is allowed to try and see what he can do…from the awareness of the limitations of individual knowledge and from the fact that no person or small group of persons can know all that is known to somebody, individualism also derives its main practical conclusion: its demand for a strict limitation of all coercive or exclusive power. (Individualism and the Economic Order, p.15-16)
Does this mean that the individual’s “selfish” wants and needs should always be prioritized and never sacrificed? Of course not. In fact, in a healthy society based on voluntary interaction, individuals do many things in order to cooperate and reap the mutual benefits of social stability and predictability in human behavior. Lack of cooperation can lead to ostracization and rejection.
“Quite as important for the functioning of an individualist society as these smaller groupings of men are the traditions and conventions which evolve in a free society and which, without being enforceable, establish flexible but normally observed rules that make the behavior of other people predictable in a high degree. (Individualism and the Economic Order, p.23)
A key point is: is this process and are these interactions a result of individuals participating voluntarily? Once coercion is introduced into this dynamic process, there is both a moral danger of violating and endangering the individual for the good of the collective, and a practical danger of reducing the unpredictable benefits that come from complex, and voluntary, social interaction.
We will have a clearer, more accurate, and more productive understanding of the world when we begin to view complex social processes and collectives through individual actions and collections of interactions. We must keep our eye on the individual. As soon as the individual experience is subsumed by the collective to the point of being neglected, or even willfully sacrificed, we can know with some certainty that we have lost sight of how the world actually works.
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