Collectivism vs Individualism

An opinion from the Internet:

Your idea about developing in a single, collective humanity with a collective consciousness is wrong.

The collective destroys the quality of life and autonomy. We are not all secretly you. We do not long to be you. No, you do not feel the emotions and desires of others — you are projecting. People are fundamentally different and separate from you and that is a good thing. That is true diversity — plurality and variance in being.

Real people have independent selves that are not dependent on or defined by others. If that is not that case for you — if you’re just a husk with no individual identity and self that is separate and unassailable by others — then you are not a person, that would make you hylic, or perhaps even a literal insect. Only things that aren’t people have a collective identity and hive thoughts.

The collective isn’t any real God, nor is it good. We are not one. We are supposed to be many — we are supposed to have different wants, desires, experiences, ways of being, and ability — that is good and beautiful. If an individual and another so please, they can collaborate, consensually and easily without losing their unique and individual beings.

Why do you want to be part of a hivemind so badly?

What is the appeal? You feel weak and powerless on your own and now you want to imagine yourself as part of a giant, mindless collective that consumes and destroys every individual it meets?

Many individuals in many worlds are far preferable to one world where everybody is enslaved and consumed by one individual’s fear and insecurity with the fact that he is, in fact, one individual human of many with no magical “empathy” powers over everyone else.”

Thank you for your response.

I fully understand, feel your emotional reaction to the idea of being integral parts of a single living organism, this goes against everything who we are, against our upbringing and education, especially when we live in the Western world, especially when one lives in America, where anything collective is referred to as “Communism” and “Communism is, of course, the work of the devil”.

Well, how humanity has implemented collectivism, socialism, communism so far is truly “devilish”.

So to our inherently egocentric, subjective, individualistic self “being part of a collective” is repulsive, intolerable, and even nations, cultures where collectivism is deeply rooted in their nature and past, are also moving towards egocentric, subjective individualism as we speak since this is the instinctive development of our selfish ego. This is how we are born, how we are built.

The “problem” is that this egocentric, subjective individualism “works” only in relation to our artificial human system, as anywhere else in Nature “collectivism”, mutual integration works, without that life, optimal development would not be possible. The cells, organs of our own biological body works that way, you would not be able to exist for a moment, you would not be able to think, act if your comprising elements would not act in unison.

And Nature is now showing us — and we all recognized it already — that humanity also evolved into a globally integrated and interdependent system. So regardless of what our inherently misguided, illusory personal freedom suggests if we want to solve problems and if we want to survive, we have to do that together, uniting above our differences, building a single, living, mutually responsible, mutually complementing, and cooperation human organism from the vastly diverse, seemingly incompatible parts.

Thus the direction towards “collectivism”, mutual integration has nothing to do with human ideologies, religions, it is dictated by Nature’s evolutionary forces.

And our uniqueness, individuality does not disappear in that collective, it is the opposite. Only when we learn how to interconnect and complement each other will we find our true abilities, uniqueness, our role in the system that is irreplaceable and crucially important.

I do not know what you mean by “God”, but even in cultures where they have many “Gods” they always have a “boss”, an overall organizer, supervisor, a single plan, and direction. Our peer review sciences have been desperately searching for a “Theory of everything”, trying to find an all-encompassing formula that can bundle all known forces, theories into a single one.

The reason we are born with an “opposite”, “unnatural” egocentric, subjective and individualistic nature is to give us the foundations for comparison, contrast, conscious and objective observation of reality. This is why we are not born instinctively integrated into Nature, but we feel ourselves independent from it, outside of it. This way we can find our own fully conscious integration and thus fully conscious recognition of the system.

Regarding “hivemind” finally, our present, very limited and distorted subjective and egocentric perception of reality gives us a very shallow and false picture of reality in which we experience life, like let’s say sensing life on the level of a cell of our body. With the consciously methodically developed collective mind, we gain a qualitatively incomparable, much higher consciousness and perception as you now feel your own existence instead of sensing it on the level of a single cell within your body.

Embracing the potential “collective mind” over a single cell consciousness is not weakness, it is the fulfillment of our true Human potential, and it is not acquired by submission, giving up, but acquired through a very difficult, purposeful inner struggle above and against the inherently egocentric, selfish, individualistic nature, program. Only the strongest — supported by other, like-minded, extremely strong people — can win this struggle and rise to that higher state of Human development.