INDIVIDUALISM
"Individualism is at once an ethical-psychological concept and an ethical-political
one. As an ethical-psychological concept, individualism holds that a human
being should think and judge independently, respecting nothing more than
the sovereignty of his or her mind; thus, it is intimately connected with
the concept of autonomy. As an ethical-political concept, individualism
upholds the supremacy of individual
rights ..." -- Nathaniel Branden HERE
"INDIVIDUALISM: The term 'individualism' has a great variety of meanings
in social and political philosophy. There are at least three types that
can be distinguished: (1) ontological individualism, (2) methodological
individualism, and (3) moral or political individualism. Ontological individualism
is the doctrine that social reality consists, ultimately, only of persons
who choose and act. Collectives, such as a social class, state, or a group,
cannot act so they are not considered to have a reality independent of
the actions of persons. Methodological individualists hold that the only
genuinely scientific propositions in social science are those that can
be reduced to the actions, dispositions, and decisions of individuals.
Political or moral individualism is the theory that individuals should
be left, as far as possible, to determine their own futures in economic
and moral matters. Key thinkers include Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek,
Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, John Locke, and Herbert Spencer." -- Stephen
Grabill and Gregory M. A. Gronbacher HERE
"The foundation of individualism lies in one's
moral right to pursue one's own happiness. This pursuit requires a large
amount of independence, initiative, and self-responsibility.
"But true individualism entails cooperating
with others through trade, which facilitates the pursuit of each party's
happiness, and which is carried out not just on the level of goods but
on the level of knowledge and friendship. Trade is essential for life;
it provides one with many of the goods and values one needs. Creating an
environment where trade flourishes is of great importance and great interest
for the individualist.
"Politically, true individualism means recognizing
that one has a right to his own life and happiness. But it also means uniting
with other citizens to preserve and defend the institutions that protect
that right." -- Shawn E. Klein HERE
"Individualism regards man -- every man -- as an independent, sovereign
entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived
from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized
society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence
among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual
rights -- and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual
rights of its members." -- Ayn Rand HERE
"Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law."
-- Ayn Rand
"Individual
rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote
away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely
to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority
on earth is the individual)." --
Ayn
Rand
Relevant Comments
"This right to life, this right to liberty, and this right to pursue
one’s happiness is unabashedly individualistic, without in the slightest
denying at the same time our thoroughly social nature. It’s
only that our social relations, while vital to us all, must be chosen
- that is what makes the cruciial difference." -- Prof. Tibor
R. Machan,
HERE
"One byproduct of individualism is benevolence
-- a general attitude of good will towards one's neighbors and fellow human
beings. Benevolence is impossible in a society where people violate each
others' rights." -- Glenn
Woiceshyn
"Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who
are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the
most compassionate of all." --
Financial
Times, London, Nov 22, 2001
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That
to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of
the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such
form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
-- Jefferson et al, The
Declaration of Independence
"The fact that most people think that ... pursuing one's own self-interest
equates to behaving brutally or irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a
'psychological confession' on their
part. In fact it is against
one's own long-term self-interest
to behave irrationally or trample others. Such actions are the exact
opposite of selfish -- they're self-destructive." -- Wayne
Dunn
(Emphasis added. Criminals and other sociopaths do not think
in terms of how their actions affect the society around them and
set bad examples for others. Nor do they empathize with others, certainly
not their victims. And they certainly don't feel the pride of honest
achievement or of helping to build civilization.)
"Individualism is a concept which the advocates of most political systems
try desperately to avoid. They'd prefer that political contests,
debates and symposia were limited to answering loaded questions such as,
'WHICH
type of powerful government should we have?', 'WHICH type of dictatorship
do you tend to prefer?", 'WHAT KINDS of intrusiveness should government
engage in?' and, 'WHICH type of control freaks are best
suited to run your life for you?' ... They often get upset, even hysterical,
if you point out that socialism,
fascism, communism and mixed-economy welfare-states have a lot in common.1
They carry on and on as if non-essentials such as style(!)
or WHAT anybody sacrifices individual rights in the name of
(the master race, the proletariat, the society, the common good, the majority,
the country, the fatherland, the motherland the brother-in-law-land, the
revered leader or savior or god or whatever) is a big freakin' deal, especially
as only in their particular fantasies do they imagine everyone,
the enforcers and even their victims, acting forever polite and cooperative
in the sacrifice-extracting rituals (as have many fledgling and would-be
dictators, including the incredibly bloody
Pol
Pot at first)." -- Rick
Gaber
"Freedom is an intellectual achievement which requires disavowal of
collectivism and embrace of individualism." -- Onkar Ghate
"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."
-- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Williamm O. Douglas
"They conferred, as against the
Government, the right to be let alone--the most prehensive of rights
and the right most valued by civilized men." -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Louis Brandeis (Olmstead v. U.S.)
"The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution's
Bill of Rights." -- Erwin N. Griswold
"You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I
just another piece of government property?' " -- Neal Boortz
"The crucial distinction between systems...was no longer ideological.
The main political difference was between those who did, and those who
did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property
of the state." -- Adam Michnik in Letters
to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
"In principle, there are only two fundamental political viewpoints.
That is, two contradictory ends of the 'political spectrum.' Those
two principles are freedom and slavery." -- Mark Da Cunha
"There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other
men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers." -- Ayn Rand
"A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to
deal with him." -- Ayn Rand, The
Virtue of Selfishness
"Collective judgment of new ideas is so often wrong that it is arguable
that progress depends on individuals being free to back their own judgment
despite collective disapproval." -- W.A. Lewis
"There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for
an ideal.'' -- George Santayana, The
Life of Reason
"The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses
its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations
of society." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816
"There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden
to an individual, but permitted to a mob." -- Ayn Rand
"It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected
together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally
do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do." -- Auberon
Herbert
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which
would be unlawful for them to do themselves." -- John Locke
"The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when
practiced by an individual, is called crime. When practiced by a government,
it is called statism ..." -- Nathaniel Branden
HERE
"Over himself, over his own mind and body, the individual is sovereign"
-- John Stuart Mill, On
Liberty (1859), "Introductory"
"The case for a free society rests on individualism. ... Every form
of totalitarianism has sought control over the minds of individuals, and
has understood that it must first undermine the individual’s confidence
in the validity of his own faculties. Remember O’Brien’s speech to Winston
Smith in Orwell’s 1984 ... " -- David Kelley HERE
"Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, whether it professes to
be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men."-- John Stuart
Mill,
On
Liberty
"It is embarrassing to have to remind people of this in the United States
of America. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson singled
out three natural rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The last phrase, appearing instead of 'property,' has prompted much
discussion. I cannot say what Jefferson was thinking. But here's a plausible
theory: Property is already implicit in liberty. If you are free, you can
use your belongings as you see fit. But by specifying the pursuit of happiness
Jefferson might have been pointing out that the blessing of liberty need
not be justified through selfless service to others. One's life and happiness
on earth are justification enough." -- Sheldon
Richman
"The right to the pursuit of happiness IS the right to be selfish.
You'd think Americans, of all people, would take pride in that, and in
precisely what that really means." -- Rick Gaber
"The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness'
is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,'
which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested
moral development of mankind." -- Ayn
Rand
"The right to the pursuit of happiness means man's right to live for
himself, to choose what constitutes his own, private, personal happiness
and to work for its achievement. Each individual is the sole and final
judge in this choice. A man's happiness cannot be prescribed to him by
another man or by any number of other men. ... These rights are the unconditional,
personal, private, individual possession of every man, granted to him by
the fact of his birth and requiring no other sanction. Such was the
conception of the founders of our country, who placed individual rights
above any and all collective claims." -- Ayn
Rand
"America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common
good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal
interests and the making of their own private fortunes." -- Ayn Rand
"The idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and
rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some
individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others." --
Ayn Rand
"America was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, not dictated
duties. The Declaration of Independence states that every human being has
a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not state
that he is born a slave to the needs of others." -- Alex
Epstein
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny
individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities." -- Ayn Rand
"Contrary to what leftists want us to believe,
individualism does not mean looting others to satisfy one's desires. Nor
does it mean unconcern for others. ...Individualism, not collectivism
or altruism, is the root of benevolence and good will among men."
-- Glenn Woiceshyn,
HERE
"State-mandated compassion produces, not love for ones fellow man, but
hatred and resentment. The breakdown of 'basic civility' and
the rise of the welfare state occur concurrently." -- Lizard
"The Nazis are well remembered for murdering well over 11 million people
in the implementation of their slogan, 'The public good before the private
good,' the Chinese Communists for murdering 62 million people in the
implementation of theirs, 'Serve the people,' and the Soviet Communists
for murdering more than 60 million people in the implementation of Karl
Marx's slogan, 'from each according to his ability, to each according
to his needs.' Anyone who defends any of these, or any variation
of them, on the grounds of their 'good intentions' is an immoral (NOT 'amoral')
enabler of the ACTUAL (not just the proverbial) road to hell." -- Rick
Gaber
"If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose.
So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial
fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others
by force, and that some (any) alleged 'good' can justify it -- there can
be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations." -- Ayn Rand, The
Roots of War
"Comrades! We must abolish the cult of
the individual decisively, once and for all." -- Soviet Premier Nikita
S. Khrushchev, addressing the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party,
2-25-56
"The unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth
far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual; and
that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must
here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual."
-- Adolph Hitler
"We need to stop worrying about the rights of
the individual and start worrying about what is best for society." -- Hillary
Clinton
"...we understand only the individual's capacity
to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men." -- Adolf Hitler,
10-7-33
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
-- Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, June 28,, 2004.
"To be a socialist is to submit the I to the thou;
socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole." -- Joseph Goebbels,
Minister of Propaganda, National Socialist German Workers' ("Nazi") Party
"What, actually, is the difference between communism
and fascism? Both are forms of statism, authoritarianism. The
only difference between Stalin’s communism and Mussolini’s fascism is an
insignificant detail in organizational structure." -- Leonard
E. Read
"Racism, as a set of beliefs based upon the arbitrary assertion that
the content of one's mind and one's character are inherited and unchangeable,
is something I can demonstrate to be complete and total bullspit just from
my own personal experience. You see, I disagree with more than half
the teachings of my own parents, and probably 90% of my other ancesters.
And I'm a cheerful, friendly optimist, while the vast majority of them
have been cynical, suspicious pessimists. The only people who can
consistently claim racism could be valid are those people who agree with
and act like their parents and ancestors 100% of the time, have accepted
everything they believe on blind faith, and have done absolutely no thinking,
let alone corroborating, of their own. Who in their right minds would
ever want to take seriously whatever such a pathetic creature has to say
anyway?" -- Rick Gaber
"I have often lamented that with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the
forces of liberalism did not spend nearly enough time ruthlessly driving
intellectual stakes through the hearts of all those who supported the 'Evil
Empire' or preached appeasement or claimed that the Soviet system was 'just
another way of living' rather than a mass murderous tyranny." -- Perry
de Havilland
"Most modern
intellectuals congratulate themselves for having achieved the allegedly
momentus insight that capitalism and altruism are ultimately incompatible.
Yet they're still too damned ignorant to realize, or too damned stubborn
to acknowledge, that altruism is definitely NOT the only moral code available
to mankind; it is, in fact, the bloodiest and most regressive one of all.
Such stunted thinking on the part of the intelligentsia has resulted in
their committing the intellectual atrocity of rejecting the capitalism
and freedom instead of the altruism and coercion." -- Rick
Gaber
"The three values which men held for centuries and which have now collapsed
are: mysticism, collectivism, altruism. Mysticism -- as a cultural
power -- died at the time of the Renaissance. Collectivism -- as
a political ideal -- died in World War II. As to altruism -- it has
never been alive. It is the poison of death in the blood of Western
civilization, and men survived it only to the extent to which they neither
believed nor practiced it. ..." -- Ayn
Rand
"[Altruism]
is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own
sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence,
and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This
is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships." -- Ayn
Rand
"Republicans don't know how to defend morally an individual's
right to achieve wealth and to keep it, and that is why they fail. ...
It's part and parcel with their ambivalence over the individualist heritage
of the nation. ... One of the things that people have to understand is
that the American Revolution was truly an epic revolution in the way individuals
were perceived in relation to the rest of the society. Throughout
history individuals had always been cogs in some machine; they'd always
been something to be sacrified for the king, the tribe, the gang, the chieftain,
the society around them, the race, whatever, and the real revolution, in
America especially, was a moral revolution. It was a moral
revolution in that ... suddenly, with the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution, the individual, his life, his well-being,
his
property,
his happiness became central to our values, and
that
is what really made America unique. People came here from all over
the world to try to escape the kind of oppression they had and experienced
in the past. They came here for freedom; they came here for self-expression
and self-realization, and America offered them that kind of a place."
-- Robert
Bidinotto
"Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead.
But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism,
have not yet been discovered." -- Ayn
Rand
"It is not as late as you think. It is merely early -- in the age of
the rebirth of individualism." -- Ayn Rand |