For a lot of people in society, individualism is seen as egoism and selfishness, the root of the evil that enslaves the less fortunate ones to the most powerful of society, a form to justify actions that prejudice others. Because of this negative view of action for oneself, we must free ourselves from greed and serve our society for the betterment of all. This thought can be traced back to Plato, when he formed his metaphysics and epistemology, as he elaborates on his theory of forms.

In sum, Plato says there are two worlds: the material world, a world that’s not real and imperfect, and the world of thoughts, a mystic and immaterial world where it has the perfect forms but we cannot sense it. He develops his theory by saying that all humans in the material form are imperfect because we are in a “fake” world, whereas in the “real” world (the Form of Good), we have the idea of the perfect human. As Leonard Peikoff explains Plato in his fantastic book:

But to grasp this crucial principle, Plato continues — and here one can begin to see the relevance of epistemology to politics — the mind is inadequate. The Form of the Good cannot be known by the use of reason; it cannot be reached by a process of logic; it transcends human concepts and human language; it cannot be defined, described, or discussed. It can be grasped, after years of an ascetic preparation, only by an ineffable mystic experience — a kind of sudden, incommunicable revelation or intuition, which is reserved to the philosophical elite. The mass of men, by contrast, are entangled in the personal concerns of this life. They are enslaved to the lower world revealed to them by their senses. They are incapable of achieving mystic contact with a supernatural principle. They are fit only to obey orders.¹

Because we in the material world are imperfect, we should abandon individualism and embrace an “organic theory of the state,” where the individual is viewed as a cell to form a complete organism, the State. Plato elaborates more on it in his theory:

“The first and highest form of the state and of the government and of the law,” Plato writes, is a condition in which the private and individual is altogether banished from life, and things which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have become common, and in some way see and hear and act in common, and all men express praise and blame and feel joy and sorrow on the same occasions, and whatever laws there are unite the city to the utmost.¹

Here, we can clearly see that Plato advocates for the end of the individual and the start of a totalitarian State. The school of thought that represents society as a group is called collectivism. You can see it being applied in some dichotomies, such as the race war, patriarchy, the class struggle, any two groups that can be labeled as the oppressor and the oppressed. This is a bunch of bullshit, and I want to refute those arguments made by collectives who are making human life more miserable for everyone. But first, let’s introduce what it means to be an individualist.

What is the individual

The individual is oneself, a unique person that doesn’t have equal counterparts. Despite the similarities one can have with another, they will always have something that can differentiate them from others, such as name, age, sex, profession, hobbies, life experience, family, religion, beliefs, knowledge, wealth—the list goes on ad infinitum. Although we could make an empirical analysis to find similarities between individuals and classify them as groups, they will never be equal. It is impossible to find a mirror-perfect version of yourself because that would mean they lived the same life as you, and no other person can live the very single moment, occupying the exact space of another. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time! With that, by applying logic and reason, we can conclude that no individual is equal to another, but rather different by natural law.

This simple reasoning already disproves ALL theories of intersectionality and identity politics. They want to tell you how hard or easy YOUR life is based on their incomplete observation because all they care about is if you identify as a group, NOT as an individual. Because of their FLAWED AND INCOMPLETE observations, they want to BLAME people because of a group characteristic and DEMAND social reparations by incorporating programs such as DEI. Do you know what else blames an individual based on a characteristic of a group? Racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, ageism, ableism, ethnocentrism—the list goes on and on!

These horrible things are the same type of judgment that people who say they promote diversity do: collective guilt. It is only ethical to judge a person by the actions of the individual, not because they ARE in said group. Some of them admit that this is indeed discrimination, but they claim it to be positive so we can have social justice. This is also wrong, because of the problem of intersectionality explained above.

So please, unless they can certainly TELL what I’ll eat for lunch in the next month, their social studies and academic consensus are complete and utter BS. Their analysis is as flat as a board, and no empirical analysis will EVER defy reasoning and logic. I DARE YOU TO TRY TO PROVE THAT 2+2=5 WITH STATISTICS…

…ok, my bad, I’ll try to be reasonable from now on. My nerves really kick in when I see people imposing their irrational judgment on me.

Ok, so what is the solution?

One who recognizes what it is to be an individual must respect each other’s individuality. This means one should never force someone to be something they don’t want to be. Similarly, one should never be forced to engage in something they don’t like. One doesn’t prosper with coercion, but by voluntary cooperation.

With this, I urge you to become more selfish instead. Take care of yourself, elevate your self-esteem genuinely, pursue happiness, give purpose to your life, work hard to achieve it and, most importantly, follow reason, not faith.

This is just a brush of a philosophy I’ve become more interested in called Objectivism, which you can learn more about here.

Unfortunately, I can’t describe it now in such a short blog post, but I’ll promise to talk more about it in the next ones and learn more about it. I hope you’re having a nice day.