Libertarian National Socialist Green Party

Individualism

It is said that a great strength also becomes the greatest weakness. What may ultimately destroy the Indo-Europeans is their great strength, which is the autonomy and creativity of their individuals. As collective civilizations, they have created many of humanity's greatest works, but these sprung about, as often as not, through the labor of a handful of dedicated, genius personalities who spearheaded the efforts to organize and render the end product. In the stories of these accomplishments there is a familiar theme: the lone individual who can visualize the concept and execution of task, opposed by those who do not understand or care about its completion, and thus hinder that individual at every turn.

From this cultural "feeling," something made stronger each year by the encroachment of bureaucracy and "official" rules and laws and memorized facts, as Indo-Europeans we have an aversion to both authority structures and collectivism. Common wisdom holds that once we dispense with ruling bodies and rules, we will be "free" as individuals to do what is necessary, and even more, what is unique to us and possibly more farsighted than that which our neighbors do. This view is upheld not only by both the extreme left (anarchism) and extreme right (libertarianism), but also to varying degrees by moderates, including American-style liberal and conservative parties, although the latter tend to believe freedom from rules and bureaucracy only comes about through more bureaucracy - the "right" bureaucracy, instead of the "wrong" one we have now. It has occurred to only a few independent thinkers that this predominant feeling might be in itself incorrect.

Before we can understand where these thinkers are right, it is important to explore past failures in achieving collectivism. The greatest collective impulse of the last millennium was arguably Communism, but when we look at it with a microscope, it takes on a different appearance: Communism was the triumph of the individual worker, not the workers as a whole, and it appealed to that in each individual which felt slighted by wealth being passed over to others. In this, it's important to note that the Communists were fundamentally correct: wealth and class systems divide our populations against themselves. Where the Communists failed was in trying to make a collective system out of individuals acting in their own self-interest, with collectivism being the tool they used to achieve their own ends. In this, Communism is not much more than a mirror image of Capitalism, with the state and not the corporations holding the wealth. Its motivic structure is the same.

It is argued by many that National Socialism was a vicious collectivist reaction against the past, and this is to some degree true, in that it recognized the danger of having a population united only by personal self-interest, or its devices: money, social prestige, Judeo-Christian morality. However, like Communism, National Socialism was hindered by its appeal to the individual, and to the secret network of individual self-interest operating within it. This was no conspiracy - it was better than a conspiracy, because those who operated this way required no power structure and no cryptic codes. They simply did what they saw as being in their own best self-interests, and put those of the people and their representative State on a secondary level. Consequently, the Nazis often operated against each other while they were theoretically collaborating to achieve a collective end. This failure parallels that of Communism: one cannot use the devices of what one deplores to reach an end state opposing those devices.

The Cold War granted us the opportunity to watch a collision of two cultures of the individual, Communism versus Capitalism, but ultimately the one that granted recognition and wealth to the individual on the basis of his or her deeds won out. Much as Communism handled all wealth through its government, it also handled all praise and recognition, thus the best one could hope for was handed down by the government, which deepened the dependency between individual and state and increased the bureaucracy one had to endure to pressure any idea through the system. Much as in ancient times the recognition of heroism spurred warriors and artisans and philosophers to great deeds, in modern times, the ability to be known for solitary achievement (and to reap its reward) impelled those in the West to a higher degree of efficiency, outcompeting the Communist state and causing its internal downfall. While other factors, such as quality of population and natural resources, are part of the equation, its most fundamental result suggested that Communism would not succeed because it did not reward individual impetus.

In the years past WWII, our emphasis on individualism - or placing individual self-interest before all else - has grown, and with it politics and society have changed dramatically. One can no longer appeal to the common good and expect people to rally around that idea; even American-style conservative parties now appeal to the individual, usually in the form of the wealth- and self-image-boosting concept of deserving, as in, "she worked herself up from chimney sweep to bank President, so she deserves her wealth and fame." The far left collection of parties, including Greens and Anarchists, exclusively appeal to individualized reasoning, promising greater autonomy through a power structure composed of individuals at an equal level. If we're all equal, we can each do what we want, beholden to no others, provided we simply assert that from which our political system derives its authority.

When we look more closely at the question of our current political disaster - a world civilization which is incapable of planning ahead to avoid inevitable outcomes like overpopulation, pollution, resource depletion and climate change - it quickly becomes apparent that whatever ails us has its roots in some choice made long ago, some branching from a sane way of life to one so subtly insane it might take several millennia for its impact to be fully felt. Such a branch occurs when a great strength is converted into a great weakness, usually through a smaller weakness, and thus the civilization separates from reality in favor of dogma, or an almost religious belief in the truth of a precept. Dogma replaces common sense with a rule that overrides all others, namely that all belief and action must first justify itself according to the dogma, and that more than any aspect of reality as we experience it, this dogma must be taken as fact that obliterates all other facts. This mindset causes people to deny the obvious in favor of the comforting and oft-repeated "fact" which is the root of the dogma.

A religious view of truth, in this nature, establishes veracity as something which exists outside of our experience. In this psychological state, the "truth" of the dogma summarizes all of life into a singular question: does each act, idea or emotion correspond to part of the already established "truth"? If it does not, it is discarded for being contrary to the founding principles of dogma, which are easily confused with the founding principles of civilization when a society has existed so long that it has forgotten the struggle of its origins which resulted in the creation of civilization where previously none existed. In the mechanism of dogma we can see how societies evolve or devolve; when a society is healthy, it asserts reality, and when it is ill and feels it has lost its way, it replaces reality with dogma and as a result, slowly decays from within. A religious view of individualism, taken as truth, would replace all other motivations with the singular I, meaning that self-interest as dogma is the universal rule, and is considered before any other question, including that of practicality and eventual outcome of behavior.

Like most great questions, the question of individualism is one of degree; if individual self-interest is considered within the context of what is also good for the civilization as a whole, it is still individualism, and one does not need run to the counterproductive opposite extreme of collectivism. It is a futile gesture because, when one inflicts injury on the individual instead of the whole, the reaction is similar to that when one inflicts injury on the whole in deference to the individual: resentment, and clandestine internal theft and other passive acts, result. There is no refuge in these extremes, and for that reason, it is important to find a middle path. This middle path, like the question of individualism, is a question of degree. The individual self-interest must be preserved, as it encourages people toward great deeds, but it must exist only within what is healthy for not only the civilization, but its surrounding environment, as well as the "invisible factors" of human society, namely the psychology of individuals derived from their degree of satisfaction with how their lives are spent (efficacy for a good cause is all that dispels mortality in the human mind).

Currently, our society has no concept of individualism in degree. Like a religious truth, it is seen as coming before all other things and having greater importance than any other single concept, replacing reality with desire and ego fetishism. This ego fetishism justifies itself as self-interest but by the nature of its primacy, quickly becomes a fundamental truth, and much as dogma or religion replaces reality, it leads the individual to do things which while in the temporary interest or desires of the individual, have consequences which extend far beyond that moment. It becomes a religion which holds all other religions, a value which holds all other values, such that no matter what the individual claims is his or her motivation, that impetus is filtered by and dependent on the primary goal: gratify the self.

In the hands of this worldview, morality becomes pity, because the pitier feels a superiority to the pitied; self-interest becomes greed, because there is never enough in the external world to satisfy the emptiness within; love becomes manipulation, because only through domination is the ego satiated. All of these errors originate in the original mistake, which is to confuse having a degree of self-interest with having self-interest come before all else, and they multiply, because self-interest is ultimately a relatively small part of our lives. The environment in which we live does not originate in the self, nor do our communities or our learning, but these are reconstrued as expressions of the self when the self becomes addicted to its own importance over all else. Those of greater learning in the past referred to this condition as solipsism, or being entirely self-referential, in which state one is only able to see the meaning of external objects as relates to the self. A forest does not exist for its own sake, but for either self-profit, or self-enjoyment, with no concept of others to follow - or any concept of the forest as something which justifies its own existence through function and beauty.

Individualism of this nature is both a "freeing" from responsibility and a psychological obligation which can destroy the individual soul. If one starts with the assumption that the world exists for the purposes of self, the feeling of external obligation is replaced with internal obligation. As individual desires have little to do with the working of the world, the individual is thus made a prison by his or her own self-image, and compelled to justify that self-concept through any number of clever rhetorical or philosophical sleights of hand. The ego - normally a strength, and a healthy thing - becomes fragile and introspective as it tries to bring the results of past choices into coherence with a philosophy where the self alone is king, god and dogma. It is this impulse that brings about the shallow competitive nature of human beings, where having enough wealth is not enough, where having sufficient friends and family is insufficient, where no amount of self-importance can diminish the world-ending (for if self is world, the world ends with the self) tragedy of death. Grotesque neurosis follows, and from this comes the revengeful viewpoint that engenders true selfishness: the individual is reminded every day how illusory its primacy must be, yet has nothing to believe in and no cause except that self-image, and thus is forever attempting to synthesize reality (self as small part of world) with fantasy (self as world).

As a result of this individualism - which we now can define as placing the self and its interests before all else - our society has collapsed slowly over the centuries, first and foremost by changing the factors of natural selection such that those who are most comfortable with individualistic dogma succeed. The epidemic has reached the point where, even in National Socialist circles, most people are primarily individualistic, and engage in activism to give themselves a public identity or social group. Thus, when they "participate," it is in the most trivial of ways. They do what is convenient for them, usually throwing around half-literate flyers or posting antiquated dogma on abandoned buildings, and then go back to living for their own whims. If an honest challenge comes their way, they back away in favor of things they already understand, because to undertake something that is not a known quantity is to risk displacing the self-image as the primary motivation of the individual. For this reason, doctrines which would benefit us all collapse into bigotry, alcoholism, infighting and degeneracy. People do not respond to what is needed, but to their own preference: I'd rather be drinking beer. That doesn't interest me. I'm not the kind of person who can do that.

We cannot create a law to curb this addiction to individualism, as laws by their very nature appeal to the individual through the conception of its absolute autonomy, or "free will," and therefore rest on the assumption that all people have the same ability to predict consequences and the desire to avoid them. It is not so. Much as Communism attempted to regulate self-interest through an appeal to the same, and thus failed, and National Socialism tried to use collectivism to motivate the individual, an external law cannot substitute for internal discipline. Interestingly, the best among the Indo-Europeans, while partially motivated by self-interest, have always had an inner compass which instills this discipline in even the most chaotic of minds. While they work for their own greatness, they see the acts that merit such grandeur as being the cause of that greatness, and the individual as the engine of capability that creates them. Unfortunately, thanks to years of altered natural selection that merits the most selfish, these people are now fewer in number than ever before.

In this situation, the modern thinker is caught between extremes of individualism and collectivism. Since collectivism by its very nature is less popular than individualism, almost all modern thinkers thus appeal to the individual, in the hopes that one can undo individualism for more individualism (a prospect which resembles quitting heroin by smoking crack). If there is a solution, it cannot be by law, but by change in the philosophy shared among Indo-Europeans to something that is not perpetually bouncing between these extremes. Taking a cue from the ancients, we can see that both collectivism and individualism are concepts which address only human perspectives on the world, and do not include the order of the cosmos and nature; for this reason, the great Indo-European civilizations of years past were careful to diminish humankind, and keep it subject to the whims of gods and nature. In that mindset, the individual saw himself or herself as part of a much larger function, and was not submitting his or her will to either a collective or a rampaging ego fetishism, but was operating in concert with a divine order which permeated every aspect of being.

Every ethnic group creates a culture according to its genetic dispositions, and similarly, is shaped genetically by its culture through the process of human-mediated natural selection: those who exhibit the attributes found valuable by a culture have more reproductive success than others. If our greatest strength is our individuals, but our greatest weakness is a misinterpretation of that into an individualism applied to all individuals, our only cure is to change our culture so that we start breeding better individuals. The first step in this is the replacement of individualism with the form of cosmic view that the ancients upheld, something that for lack of a better term can be called "holism" (The theory or principle of a tendency in nature to form or produce organized wholes which are more than the mere sum of the component units - Oxford English Dictionary). When we see the universe as an operating whole of which we are one part, we are spared the psychic burden of individualism, as well as its delusions, and can again cooperate toward making something great of our civilization.