You’ve made a little caricature and premise your judgements on it. You poison your own well. Then you froth and seethe wherever I appear despite claiming you don’t care. Clearly you do.

I don’t see politicians as more than job holders. They certainly aren’t avatars of any one ideology. You’re just trying to make a last-ditch efforts to ascribe to me views I do not espouse and do not hold. If you want to know my real views, I’ll tell you, but unfortunately I’m faced with this weird posturing.

Nope. Most people are collectivists, I wager.

Apparently not. After all my rhetoric you haven’t figured out that I’m opposed to collectivism. All we have are these weird gymnastics.

I voted for Trump. You never Figured Trump as a collectivist. But somehow I voted for a collectivist. The weirdest contortions.

According to you and your imagination.

Proof positive.

Nice. So you're a proud fascist and collectivist. Yet you rail against the latter. :chin: I guess Freud was right.

You’re just making stuff up now. I invite you to grapple with the ideas, if you can. Let’s see an argument.

I’m glad I did vote for it. It achieved all I ever wanted and more.

There are plenty collectivist capitalists, conservatives, liberals, libertarians, anarchists. It’s the going rate.

It is questionable to what extent others can be viewed as objects, because it is partly about external reality. Even one's own body, or parts, such as hands can be regarded as objects in the sense of being able to view their existence in the outer, material world.

Part of the importance of viewing others as subjects rather than simply as objects is recognising their values and meanings. It is the issue of people being ends rather than being seen as means. I remember going to see a careers officer just after I left school and during discussion he said to me, 'By now you should have got to the stage of just seeing other people as objects, like chairs and tables'. I simply didn't know what to say, to a careers officer who had such a philosophy approach...

The brute fact is that we are objects, not unlike tables and chairs. Human history, I think, has yet to come to terms with this. We have continually refused to place any value on the object itself. It’s ugly, it excretes foul substances and smells, it engages in lewd and shameful activities, it ages and deteriorates. So we posit a subject, a soul, or some other thing untethered from all this so that we can easily find value in it. In so doing we have made holy everything we are not, at the expense and slander of everything we are.

So, rather than the importance of democratic participation, I'd say I'd emphasize the importance of class power and organization.

There is some great insight in what you wrote.

It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it. So long as the State makes the seizure and distribution of wealth a matter of legalized privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.

Whether it’s workers or owners who benefit from the State, it matters little; all we’ve done is shifted from one beneficiary of state power to another, from one exploited class to another, and so on. Class power and organization spent in the pursuit of State power and the privilege to seize and distribute wealth might be in that respect a lost cause, when it might be better spent regaining the opposite of state power, social power, so that each class and organization will have the opportunity to determine the path of their own lives. Until then, achieving the means of exploitation appears to be the only solution on offer.

Again, fascism is the direct result of you kind of politics. I wonder if you’ve thought any of this through.

Racism and slavery, fascism and communism, war and nationalism, were some of the worst products of collectivism. We’re still crawling from the rubble of these disasters. It’s not something to be proud of, that’s for sure.

My interpretation - the senses receive the material form - color, dimensions, texture, and so on - while the intellect "receives" the intelligible species which is the type, which allows us to know what it is. "Knowing what [x] is" is the point.

In my interpretation the intellect doesn’t receive it so much as it generates it, like a caricature, by including some properties and excluding others. It isn’t able to grasp the entirety nor the particularity of any one thing so it makes do with what little resources it can offer.

Why this resentment towards the most natural drive imaginable?

It’s pure, reactionary fanaticism. The idea that people aren’t living their lives according to the fanatic’s own ideology is repugnant to him. They must be brought, through force, to conform, so meddling becomes his idea of good and compassionate conduct while not meddling is the height of evil.

He willingly turned them in a decade later. What a hero!

Rousseau implies this point when he takes pain to differentiate between the “general will” and the “will of all”. His contrast between these two sets of interests serve well as a primary distinction between collectivism on the one hand and individualism on the other. Unlike the “will of all” the “general will” refuses to take into account the private and particular interests of all individuals involved. It excludes them. Instead, it takes account of something called the “common interest”.

We can figure out the common interest through a sort of calculation. It is the sum of the differences left over after we subtract from the wills of all “the pluses and minuses that cancel one another”. “The agreement of all interests is formed by opposition to that of each”.

Arguably, even with the most exhaustive census a calculation of such magnitude would not be impossible. So inevitably we get the factions Rousseau warns about.

That is the error of Mussolini, Mao, and Xtrix: they pretend that their good, their interests, are found at the end of this calculation, which they never make in any case.

I agree that individualism is a personal belief, but so is collectivism. And it is no collective decision if others accept either of these principles. These are personal, individual decisions made by real, flesh-and-blood human beings, not arbitrary and abstract groupings.

Any collection of people is a collection of individuals. Each of these individuals adopt beliefs and principles on their own accord, and not by any collective agreement.

It’s not true, I accept any individual to have his own beliefs and interests, and defend his right to have them, whether communist, fascist, theocratic, or any collectivist doctrine. What I do not accept is any individual to infringe on the rights of another individual, and this is the direct result of individualism, not collectivism.

You seem to be confusing empirical and absolute truth. Since thinking is only known to be practiced by (some) entities it is a plausible conclusion that wherever thinking is occuring there will be an entity doing it.

But this is a truth of dualistic thinking. Since entities are formal collective representations of dualistic thinking and since we can say that reality is not beholden to suvh thinking, from the 'perspective ' of non-duality there is no thinking and there are no entities.

I think from the perspective of non-duality the activity (thinking) and the entity (the thinker) are one in the same. There is no difference between a backflip and the one that performs it, for instance. The entity is the backflip. It's entity all the way down and any action is just the movements and contortions of that entity. So it is with consciousness.

Collectivism and individualism are protean political terms and are always subject to debate, so the notions of "true individualism" and "true collectivism" are not true in any sense. A collectivist interpretation of individualism are those that come from the mouths of collectivists, like Rousseau, Mao, and Mussolini, so we can take them at their word.

But if the individualist regards the individual as the primary unit of concern in any political society, he necessarily regards each individual in that way. He affords each individual primacy, rights, and as such a certain dignity. If the collectivist regards the individual as subordinate to the collective, he necessarily disregards the individual as the primary unit of concern, does not afford him rights, and denies him a certain dignity.

I’m not sure any sort of affirmative action is needed. The surest way to corrupt the youth with Communism would be for the government to outlaw it, and McCarthyism served that effect. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx appears more in university syllabi than any analytic works. Had McCarthy and his ilk left it all alone we might have been rid of it long ago.

You didn’t mention the length of time Biden had them for, and that Biden was only Vice President when he took the documents and did not have the sort of declassification powers Trump had. Biden’s history with others who took classified documents betrays his own actions with them.

https://theintercept.com/empire-politician/biden-and-jimmy-carters-cia-nominee/

I didn’t say I was unsure about the practice. I was unsure about the answer to your quibbling question.

Does “effective” entail being easily controlled?

So, for example, if you declare a particular universal right you are expressing your primacy? Wouldn’t everyone need to agree with whatever right that you declare and also agree to your primacy?

You are expressing every individual’s primacy. If you realize the primacy of the individual you afford him rights and defend those rights against infringement. I’m not sure everyone has to agree to that.

It’s true. I just don’t know the answer to that question for those particular arraignments.

Right, I’m curious how this works out in practice. Can you not give an example?

Any declaration of universal human rights.

Though I can can see a benefit in both, the question of what happens to those who do not wish to conform to those ideals remains a problem.

If everyone is an individual, and the individual is given primacy, it follows that no one is excluded.

Not to mention the wars on the First Nations, colonialism, manifest destiny. Collectivism, through and through.

I suspect through family and kinship.

If true, you should be able to give an example of this in practice.

Chairman Mao makes this explicit in his diagnosis of The Party discipline, of which he sees the failure of the minority to submit to the majority as one of its primary defects. A minority is a faction. A majority is a faction. Either way the interests of each and all are subordinated to the interests of the Party.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_5.htm

Strictly speaking, no. A collective of some sort is required for the defense of civil rights.

But collectivism isn’t.

It means to me that individualism is more inclusive, that it concerns itself with more human beings, even all human beings, whereas collectivism is exclusive, that it inevitably pits individuals against other individuals.

I cannot see from your picture that a lack of collectivism leads to might means right.

Yeah. I think one satisfies the desires of both, while the other is incalculable, leads to factionalism, is self-contradictory and dangerous. One is just and the other isn’t. For these reasons I would choose one principle rather than the other, and I cannot see myself wavering between them.

“What’s best” is what concerns me. For the individualist one would violate another’s rights if he violates the rights of an individual. For the collectivist one would violate another’s rights should he violate the rights of the group.

Rousseau suggests that the “general will” is paramount, and that the “will of all”, which is the sum total of particular wills, should conform to it. In order to determine what the general will is, though, Rousseau has to make absurd calculations in order to determine “what’s best”.

So “what’s best” in your eyes?

collectivism, any of several types of social organization in which the individual is seen as being subordinate to a social collectivity such as a state, a nation, a race, or a social class. Collectivism may be contrasted with individualism (q.v.), in which the rights and interests of the individual are emphasized.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/collectivism

Yes. Men afford others rights and they also take them away.

That was a good read, Baden. Thanks for sharing it.

The freedoms we afford to other individuals.