The Individual Versus the Collective
Article by Tim Jones:
Once you give the government the power to elevate one group over another, regardless of the reason, you are one step closer to dictatorship. This is why the left focuses only on the rights of the collective that's always based on and enforced by the power of the state, whereas the right focuses only on the rights of the individual that's always based on "the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness" of each individual citizen. Once the precedent is used to lift one group over another, that power can then be used in the future to marginalize, criminalize, and persecute whatever group government deems a threat to its prevailing ideology and why it's so dangerous.
Two of the easiest examples that can be cited are that of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Hitler was quite open about his determination to make the Aryan race preeminent not just in German society but throughout the world as well. And it was the Jews who became the primary outcasts at the start of his quest for world domination, or the “Thousand-Year Reich,” as he called it. The extermination of an entire group of people was just the beginning of his long-term plan.
Then there was Stalin. Although operating from a different political ideology, Russian communism really was no different than Nazi fascism. The USSR was founded by Lenin on the premises of Marxism, also an ideology that believed its historical destiny was to dominate the world, with the revolutionary vanguard leading the proletariat. And like Hitler's concentration camps, Stalin implemented his vast prison system knows as the Gulag Archipelago, where millions were interred and perished. Along with the gulags, Stalin also implemented a systematic state-sponsored extermination plan in which tens of millions of Russian peasants, also known as kulaks, were exterminated through starvation in the name of Soviet-style economic rationalism. In both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, individualism was extinguished in the name of securing the utopian future of the collective.
What many don't realize is that both fascism and communism, along with democratic principles, are all rooted in reason. All three are essentially branches of the same tree that grew out of the Enlightenment. It gave the world both reason and rationalism that was the basis for modern society because it was the new pathway to truth that tells us everything we need to know about the world and how it all works.
Nazi Germany ("NaZi" was an abbreviation for Nationalsozialismus) and the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) both had modern industrial economies as did the United States where all three of them developed and grew out of scientific rationalism. The problem developed between the three ideologies when reason became the only tool for obtaining truth while dispensing with a built-in standard of universal morality.
Therefore, reason was easily manipulated as a tool for validating and promoting an existing ideology rather than a transcendent truth that most people believe came from God our Creator. Without an attendant morality and virtue attached to reason, it becomes just an amoral and corruptible tool in social experimentation.
There must be first principles where all morality and virtue originate and are universally accepted by everyone in order to construct a civil and just society. The Founding Fathers did exactly that in creating a country based on the writings and ideas from some of the Enlightenment thinkers, primarily Locke and Montesquieu, whose philosophies emphasized individual freedom. But the Founding Fathers also included the all-important biblical morality without which the Constitution as they wrote it would probably not have been the same. In the Constitution, the rights of the individual were elevated so they would never by subject to arbitrary or capricious power of the state, which is exactly what identity politics does and that the new social justice movement is advocating.
Since the emergence of the modern state, there has been a long and winding road leading to the consolidation of governmental power at the expense of the individual and this is why the American experiment in freedom is in peril as the collective gets artificially elevated at the expense of individualism that was organically built into the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
The United States is really not that different from Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. The big difference is that the United States has a large number of built-in checks and balances against the consolidation of power by the state that in turn protects individual freedom. They have been steadily eroded in the last one hundred years by progressive forces manipulating and distorting the meaning of the Constitution in the name of the "greater good" rather than the individual. And this is leading to the same destination as those two totalitarian regimes.
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