Some believe that the Great Replacement justifies collectivism as a response. When we thoroughly examine collectivism, however, we discover that nothing justifies it.
First, “collectivism vs individualism” is a false dialectic. It is false not because we can massage the definition of these words so as to make their referents harmonious, but because the very duality is logically unnecessary, regardless of its harmony or antagonism. A group does not exist independently of the individuals it comprises. Individual identity always comprises a number of group identities, including the identity of “individual”. A tribe almost always outlives any given individual member, however, there is no point in time when the tribe comprises anything other than its individual members. For an individual who is the last living member of his tribe, his birth to that tribe requires that at least one other member have been alive contemporaneously with him, there is thus a metaphysical living group identity that is ineluctable. A group identity may be such a value to an individual that he may consider his own life not worth living without it, but it his still his life and cannot be anyone else’s. No one can relate to and value a group in the exact same way as anyone else due to individual uniqueness.
Although group commonalities such as blood ties tend to be more self-valued features of our individual identity than unique features like our fingerprints or retinal patterns, the manner/degree of how/how much individuals value such commonalities varies from person to person. An individual may also substantially value things in which a group relation does not inhere, such as certain types of hobbies. Regardless of how group-oriented one is, an individual’s value set in its totality is unique. One can act only toward satisfying his own value set because he cannot live anyone else’s life. Objectivity regarding this truth is the ethic of actualism. Actualism is unburdened by the need for external validation of any value within one’s value set because one’s value set is determined by one’s unique neurology and situation. These are almost entirely beyond anyone’s control, even situation, because even aside from geography of birth, neurological wiring is what determines situational outcomes. A simple way to understand actualism is “don’t worry about stuff you can’t control” applied to ethics. Although collective opinion of morality is the more common standard of external validation for non-actualists, individual opinion, even one’s own, is also a form of external validation, and just as unnecessary. Actualism rejects the false self that is defined in terms external to the actual self, external to our direct experience of life and will to live. Actualism does not leave us wringing our hands about the morality of our values because our values are the morality! The actualist never even asks “is it ‘right’ for me to want better for myself”, let alone “better for my group?” Such wants are taken as tautologically given; the always imperfect state of want satisfaction continually presents us with problems to solve in reducing imperfection in this regard; the actualist focuses solely on solving such problems. A significant problem for us to solve is that others’ value sets conflict with our own, often lethally. Actualism is absolutist objectivity about this subjectivity, a subjectivity that exists between individuals and between groups. The social action of actualism is reciprocity, the mutual actualization of individually and collectively subjective value sets. Reciprocity is exclusively pro-social action, the ethics of individualism and collectivism are also motives to social action that attempt, with varying sincerity and success, also to actualize value sets in spite of subjectivity. Because they permit irreciprocity (rights violations), however, they are less successful. Respect for property rights is an instance of reciprocity that an ideal political system protects. Political systems premised on ethics other than actualism expose property rights to significant threats, which makes the case against such ethics much more than academic.
We will start with collectivism. Collectivism is belief in a group interest that transcends aggregate individual interests. Because a group does not exist independently of its individual members, such an interest is nonsense. Specifically, it is an anti-concept, which is a belief that functions to destroy belief in a valid concept by smuggling inside the valid concept an incompatible one. Both “group” and “interest” are valid concepts, as is central tendency of individual interests, as is shared interests (or more precisely, compatible interests) among individuals. The latter two are what can be regarded as true group interest, however, their validity is what gives plausibility to the anti-conceptual version of group interest, which smuggles the prescriptive into the descriptive. It achieves this by exploiting the semantic ambiguity of the “ism” suffix. “ism” can, in addition to denoting ideology, denote pure description of a certain phenomenon. For example, aposematism describes the phenomenon of poisonous animals having bright colors that warn predators. Man is the most dangerous animal of all, but does it make sense based on the preceding fact alone that we should dye our hair neon colors like SJWs do? This by itself is a naturalistic fallacy, but the naturalistic fallacy that collectivism commits is more egregious because its premise of a transcendent group interest is not even true. It is something that certain weak individuals wish were true because it provides them moral cover to parasitically actualize their own value sets at the expense of their betters. They regard actualism as “selfish” so they represent the parasitism within their value set as a transcendent group interest to which “individualism” (what they call actualism) must be subordinated. This shows why ideologization is so dangerous. Ideology per se is simply the desire for something in the big picture to differ from the status quo. Changing the big picture is often a dangerous endeavor, and there is nothing wrong with danger either per se. The problem is the human tendency to erect entire ideologies based on the naturalistic fallacy, ones that force values on or from reality, rather than those based on a robust differentiation between facts generally and the subset of facts that are values. Sound ideologies take value sets as a given and give careful consideration to descriptive cause-effect relationships germane to actualizing certain of those sets. Both collectivism and individualism can be used in a purely descriptive sense to emphasize behavior of an individual as distinct from a group and vice-versa. If a term contains a both a meaning that is bad and one that is good/neutral/non-value-laden, however, it should not be used at all because the principle that “one bad apple spoils the bunch” is as applicable to rhetoric as to anything else. If you have to explain “no, that’s not what X ‘really means’”, you’ve already lost.
Although it need not be explicitly religious, collectivism’s appeal is of a similarly transcendent character, what people describe as “belonging to something greater than oneself”. There is a world of difference, however, between having a sense of belonging to something physically or temporally bigger than oneself and treating something other than yourself as of greater moral significance, as collectivism does. Because the only true morality can be actualization of one’s own value set, it is impossible for anything external to that set to be of greater moral significance. Collectivism is evil because it demands the impossible.
Collectivists often sanitize collectivism by defining it descriptively as “people working together for a common purpose”. Working together by itself, however, necessitates common purpose, which is the project being worked on, the project being the proximate purpose of the work. The correct term for working together is “collaboration”. Absent collectivism, the ultimate purpose beyond the project that the project serves each collaborator is subjective to that individual. Collectivism, however, requires that the ultimate purpose of the project be held in common. This creates needless conflict. For example, if one collaborator’s motive is financial and the other’s is spiritual, it is counterproductive for the latter to insist that the former’s motive also be spiritual. Effort put into attempting to change a collaborator’s motive is effort that could have been put into the project instead. Regardless of motive, if collaboration is voluntary, each individual expects that the project will make him better off. If collaboration is collectivist, however, the purpose is a supposed group interest that is something other than the interests of the collaborators. This means that at least one of the collaborators is made worse off by working on the project. Because no one can voluntarily make himself worse off in terms of actualist wellbeing, collectivism necessitates coercion.
Individualism in its best form is really actualism, but a broader benign form of it is simply rejection of collectivism. An individualist of this latter type dismisses collectivist demand for the unearned as a naturalistic fallacy: “You owe me this property because I am X group” rather than “Giving me or others in group X property is consistent with these of your values because…” Because collectivist demand for unearned property is persuasive, it is very frequently issued, frequently enough that individualists will often reactively refer to natural rights in property as “individual rights”. This is mistaken, however. It is hardly a leap for a leftist to go from “a society must be judged based on how it treats its most vulnerable people” to “…most vulnerable person”. An individual demand for the unearned based on what a unique special snowflake someone is is no more valid than a collectivist demand. The unnecessary emphasis on the individual of the term “individual rights” biases its proponents toward atomism. Atomism is a serious perversion of individualism because all else equal, irreciprocity toward more than one person is worse for that individual than irreciprocity toward him alone. The term “individualism” should not be used for the same reason that collectivism should not be used. It can be taken to mean reactive atomism. That a reaction to a bad thing can go too far does not make that bad thing good, however. We should also stress that rejecting both individualism and collectivism terminologically does not imply an equivalence between them. Living as a hermit, to the extent that it is bad at all, is not at all comparable to the mass slaughter that collectivism is responsible for.
Collectivists may object that because most of humanity cannot be rationally persuaded to abandon collectivism, it is rational for the rest of us to embrace collectivism. If europeans are attacked as such, their argument goes, it is rational for us to defend ourselves as such. A problem with this argument is that it does not make the case for why defending ourselves as europeans is superior to defending ourselves regardless of the reason we’re attacked. Another problem with it is that it is merely an argument from popularity, which is easily refuted by the fact that the minority of humanity disinclined toward collectivism is overwhelmingly european, and european superiority in a number of endeavors is attributable to this disinclination. The drive to exploration, for example, is one that requires a individual and his crew to be able to reject the plea “we need you back home!” Saying “I want to climb that mountain because it’s there” is simply a less egotistical way of saying “because I want to”. Science advances by the insight of individuals that deviates in some way from group consensus. This behavior is commonly called “individualism” but what europeans actually have is a superior affinity for is actualism. Failure to understand this distinction is a significant reason why europeans have been subverted by a form of collectivism impersonating individualism, which is humanism.
Humanism substitutes the collective of humanity for the collective of the tribe. Humanists believe natural tribalism is bad for humanity, so they often advocate that we identify as “just individuals” rather than as tribesmen. This appeals to the european eye toward the universal, which is present even in weak and foolish europeans. To be an individual, however, is to be an individual something. The very word “individual” literally means “not divided”1, which implies at a minimum the potentiality of a group. What “just individuals” implies is “just humans”. When other traditional group components of individual identity such as family, community, nation, and race are suppressed for the supremacy of human identity, individuals are left weak and hollow. The tribalistic instinct always massively persists, however, so the kind of weak individuals attracted to humanism end up substituting non-traditional tribal identities such as sex, sexual identity, class, and ethnomasochism. Right-wing collectivism is a reaction to humanist collectivism, which is almost uniformly left-wing. Right-wing collectivism substitutes a transcendent group interest at the level of the natural groups. Because collectivism requires rights violations and because strength in numbers applies to capacity to violate rights, the purported interests of larger groups such as nation and race takes precedence over smaller ones such as family and community. In this regard right-wing collectivists are also humanists despite pretension to the contrary, they are humanists for subspecies of humanity, and given the size of such subspecies, there is little practical difference between them and their left-wing counterparts. Because the individual and family are the fundamental building blocks of nation and race, the latter also suffer under collectivism. Because strength is found much more in concentration of political power rather than numbers, however, what right-wing collectivism results in is a monopolistic state ruling in the name of all these natural groups, emphasizing one group’s “interest” versus another’s however expedient to furthering its racket. Collectivism of the state over all of humanity and its myriad of natural subgroups is the worst collectivism of all.
The challenge in writing this article lies in articulating a case for non-articulation. In-group preference is something so natural, normal, and deeply-ingrained, not just to man but all biology, that there is no rational basis for labeling action in accordance with such preference. Value set individuation is something so obvious that most people, in their hysterical moralism, cannot help but miss. We zeroth positionists are not most people however. Our collective efficacy as a vanguard requires a highly superior objectivity about the human condition and resultingly handsome optics. Actualist triangulation against the false dialectic of collectivism versus individualism is just this.
Practical applications:
- Political collectivism is downstream from cultural collectivism. Rejection of cultural collectivism, such as an heir being told he has a duty to run a family farm business regardless of his aptitude, is an example (the NSDAP’s farm laws were a historical instance of the downstream effect). The counter to this is to show, for example why pursuing an area of superior of aptitude not only makes that heir but his family better off, both in terms of absolute and comparative advantage.
- Avoid, in our public presentation (and even private to some degree for the purpose of building public-facing habits) using othering terms like “white nationalist”. Use terms that other the enemy instead like “globalist”, “socialist”, “neoliberal”, “great replacer” and everyone’s favorite, “gay race communist”. The racial animus of our enemies will come up in discourse naturally. For ourselves use terms that are familiar and normie-friendly like “patriot”, “conservative”, “right-wing”, or “libertarian” in some combination, while taking reactionary absolutism as a matter of course in the policies we advocate. This “conscious conflation” we could call it, helps us appeal to normies while pulling them into our ideological gravity well on a subconscious level. An example is preferring “patriot” to “nationalist”, while maintaining that patriotism entails a certain nationalism (environmental quality includes genetic environment, so wanting your country to be the best place it can be requires eugenics).
- Add meritocratic nuance to issues such as immigration policy, such as a points-based system that weights both genetic assimilability and outlier talent. This would not be racially exclusive, but would make it effectively impossible for any non-white to immigrate who isn’t in contention for a Nobel Prize. The libertarian insight that citizenship is a statist construct is helpful here; what should be emphasized regarding ethnic identity is the non-negotiability of supermajority status. Pursuant to this is limiting policymaking roles in the West to our own, in government and elsewhere, while rejecting the arbitrary privileges of ethnostatism. Transitional measures that feature such privileges are to be both commended as significant improvements while criticized in terms of comparison with the superior system of neighbortarianism.
- Point out that even from a “white nationalist” standpoint, collectivism is unbecoming of white people because actualism is what makes us great. Also point out that other races’ evolving of actualism would make everyone better off, while also emphasizing the imperative of preserving the purity of our ethnic aesthetic within our countries.
- Just as individualism versus collectivism is a false dialectic, so too is “civic nationalism” vs “ethnonationalism”. Not even hardcore third positionists want immigration to our countries to be open to any white person; they wish to exclude libertarians and socialists of a flavor they view as too semitic. In having an ideological litmus test in addition to the standard tests of disease and criminality, they too are civic nationalists. It is therefore important for zeroth positionists to emphasize the ideological litmus tests of our own that we wish to impose on top of racial ones, especially tests that screen out all socialists, “national” or otherwise.
1 As does “atom”, which is another reason why individualism creates a bias toward atomism.
