Brownstone Institute
The Selfish Collective
Originally published by the Brownstone Institute
Much of the debate surrounding Covid — and increasingly now, other crises — has been framed in terms of individualism vs. collectivism. The idea is that individualists are motivated by self-interest, while collectivists put their community first.
This dichotomy paints the collective voice, or the community, as the prosocial option of two choices, where the threat lies with recalcitrant individuals holding everyone else back. The individual threatens the common good because they won’t go along with the program, the program everyone else has decided upon, which is what is best for everyone.
There are several immediate problems with this logic. It is a string of loaded assumptions and false equivalencies: first, it equates the philosophy of collectivism with the idea of prosocial motivation; secondly, it equates prosocial behavior with conformity to the collective voice.
Merriam-Webster defines collectivism as follows:
1 : a political or economic theory advocating collective control especially over production and distribution also : a system marked by such control
2 : emphasis on collective rather than individual action or identity
Note that there is no mention here of internal motivations — and rightly so. The philosophy of collectivism emphasizes collectively organized behavioral patterns over those of the individual. There is no prescription for these reasons. They could be prosocially motivated, or selfish.
After the past couple of years of analyzing collectivist behavior during the Covid crisis, I have come to the conclusion that it is just as likely as individualism to be motivated by self-interest. In fact, in many ways, I would say it is easier to attain one’s selfish interests by aligning oneself with a collective than to do so individually. If a collective composed primarily of self-interested individuals unites over a common goal, I call this phenomenon “the selfish collective.”
When “Common Good” is Not Collective Will
One of the most simple examples I can give of a selfish collective is that of a homeowner’s association (HOA). The HOA is a group of individuals who have unified into a collective in order to protect each of their own self-interests. Their members want to preserve their own property values, or certain aesthetic characteristics of their neighborhood environment. In order to achieve this they often feel comfortable dictating what their neighbors can and cannot do on their own property, or even in the privacy of their own homes.
They are widely despised for making homeowners’ lives miserable, and for good reason: if they claim the right to safeguard the value of their own investments, doesn’t it stand to reason that other homeowners, with perhaps different priorities, have a similar right to rule over the little corner of the world they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for?
The selfish collective resembles the political concept of “tyranny of the majority,” of which Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America:
“So what is a majority taken as a whole, if not an individual who has opinions and, most often, interests contrary to another individual called the minority. Now, if you admit that an individual invested with omnipotence can abuse it against his adversaries, why would you not admit the same thing for the majority?”
Social groups are made up of individuals. And if individuals can be selfish, then collectives made up of individuals with common interests can be equally selfish, attempting to steamroll their visions over the rights of others.
However, the selfish collective is not necessarily comprised of a majority. It could just as easily be a loud minority. It is characterized not by its size, but by its inherent attitude of entitlement: its insistence that other people must sacrifice increasingly high-level priorities in order to accommodate increasingly trivial priorities of its own.
This inverse relationship of priority valuation is what belies the true nature of the selfish collective, and distinguishes its motives from the true “common good.” Someone motivated by genuine social concern asks the question: “What are the priorities and goals of all community members, and how can we try to satisfy these priorities in a way that everyone finds acceptable?”
Social concern involves negotiation, tolerance of value differences, and the ability to compromise or see nuance. It involves genuinely caring about what others want — even (and especially) when they have different priorities. When this concern extends only to those in one’s “in-group,” it may appear to be prosocial, but is actually an extension of self-interest known as collective narcissism.
Collective Narcissism and Conformity
From the perspective of the selfish individual, collectivism provides a host of opportunities for achieving one’s goals — perhaps better than one could on one’s own. For the manipulative and calculating, the collective is easier to hide behind, and the ideal of the “greater good” can be weaponized to win moral support. For cowards and bullies, the strength of numbers is emboldening, and can help them overpower weaker individuals or coalitions. For more conscientious individuals, it can be tempting to justify one’s natural selfish inclinations by convincing oneself the group holds the moral edge.
In social psychology, collective narcissism is the extension of one’s ego beyond oneself to a group or collective to which one belongs. While not all the individuals involved in such a collective are necessarily narcissists themselves, the emergent “personality” of the group mirrors the traits of narcissistic individuals.
According to Dr. Les Carter, a therapist and creator of the Surviving Narcissism YouTube channel, these traits include the following:
- A heavy emphasis on binary themes
- Discouraging free thinking
- Prioritizing conformity
- Imperative thinking
- Distrusting or dishonoring differences of opinion
- Pressure to display loyalty
- An idealized group self-image
- Anger is only one wrong opinion away
What all of these traits have in common is an emphasis on unity rather than harmony. Instead of seeking coexistence among people or factions with differing values (the “social good” that includes everyone), the in-group defines a set of priorities to which all others must adapt. There is one “correct way,” and anything outside it has no merit. There is no compromise of values. Collective narcissism is the psychology of the selfish collective.
The Hidden Logic of Lockdown
Proponents of Covid restrictions and mandates have typically claimed they were motivated by social concern, while painting their opponents as antisocial menaces. But does this bear out?
I have no doubt that a great many people, motivated by compassion and by civic duty, genuinely strove to serve the greater good through following these measures. But at its core, I argue that the pro-mandate case follows the logic of the selfish collective.
The logic goes something like this:
- SARS-CoV-2 is a dangerous virus.
- Restrictions and mandates will “stop the spread” of the virus, thereby saving lives and shielding people from the harm it causes.
- We have a moral duty as a society to shield people from harm wherever possible.
- Therefore, we have a moral duty to enact restrictions and mandates.
Never mind the veracity of any one of these claims, which has already been the subject of endless debate over the past two and a half years. Let’s instead focus on the logic. Let’s assume for a second that each of the three premises above were true:
How dangerous would the virus have to be in order for the restrictions and mandates to be justified? Is any level of “dangerousness” enough? Or is there a threshold? Can this threshold be quantified, and if so, at what point do we meet it?
Likewise, how many people would restrictions and mandates need to save or shield before they are considered to be worthwhile measures, and what level of collateral damage from the measures is considered acceptable? Can we quantify these thresholds either?
What other “socially beneficial outcomes” are desirable, and from whose perspective? What other social priorities exist for various factions within the collective? What logic do we use to weigh these priorities against each other? How can we respect priorities that may weigh a lot to their respective advocates, but which directly compete or clash with the “socially beneficial outcome” of eliminating the virus?
The answers to these questions would help us organize our priorities within a larger, more complex social landscape. No one social issue exists in a vacuum; “Responding to SARS-CoV-2” is one possible social priority out of millions. What gives this priority in particular precedence over any of the others? Why does it get to be the top and only priority?
To date I have never seen a satisfactory answer to any of the above questions from proponents of mandates. What I have seen are abundant logical fallacies used to justify their preferred course of action, attempts to exclude or minimize all other concerns, rejection of or silence regarding inconvenient data, dismissal of alternative opinions, and an insistence that there is one “correct” path forward to which all others must conform.
The reason for this, I would argue, is that the answers don’t matter. It doesn’t matter how dangerous the virus is, it doesn’t matter how much collateral damage is done, it doesn’t matter how many people might die or be saved, it doesn’t matterwhat other “socially beneficial outcomes” we might strive for, and it doesn’t matter what anybody else might prioritize or value.
In the logic of the selfish collective, the needs and desires of others are afterthoughts, to be attended if, and only if, there is something left over once they get their way.
This particular collective has made “responding to SARS-CoV-2” their top priority. And in pursuit of that priority, all others can be sacrificed. This one priority has been granted carte blanche to invade all other aspects of social life, simply because the selfish collective has decided it is important. And in pursuit of this goal, increasingly trivial sub-priorities that are deemed relevant can now take precedence over increasingly higher-level priorities of other social factions.
The end result of this is the absurd micromanagement of other people’s lives, and the simultaneous cruel dismissal of their deepest loves and needs. People were forbidden from saying goodbye to dying parents and relatives; romantic partners were separated from each other; and cancer patients died because they were denied access to treatment, just to name a few of these cruelties. Why were these people told their concerns didn’t matter? Why did they have to be the ones to sacrifice?
The argument of the selfish collective is that individual freedom must end as soon as it risks negatively impacting the group. But this is a smokescreen: there is no unified collective perceiving “negative impacts” in a homogeneous way. The “collective” is a group of individuals, each with different sets of priorities and value systems, only some of whom have coalesced around a specific issue.
At the root of this entire discussion lies the following question: How, on a macro scale, should society allocate importance to the diverse, competing priorities held by the individuals that make it up?
The selfish collective, which represents a particular faction, attempts to obscure the nuance of this question by trying to conflate themselves with the entire group. They try to make it seem as if their own priorities are the only factors under consideration, while dismissing other elements of the debate. It is a fallacy of composition mixed with a fallacy of suppressed evidence.
By magnifying their own concerns and generalizing them to the whole group, the selfish collective makes it seem as if their goals reflect “the good of everyone.” This has a reinforcing effect because the more they focus attention on their own priorities relative to others, the more others will come to believe those priorities are worthy of attention, adding to the impression that “everyone” supports them. Those with different value systems are gradually subsumed into a collective unity, or erased.
This does not strike me as prosocial behavior — it is deception, egotism, and tyranny.
A truly prosocial approach would not shut out all other goals and insist on one way forward. It would take into account the different priorities and viewpoints of various factions or individuals, approach them with respect, and ask how to best facilitate some sort of harmony among their needs. Instead of prescribing behavior onto others it would advocate for dialogue and open debate, and it would celebrate differences of opinion.
A prosocial approach doesn’t elevate some nebulous, abstract, and misleading image of a “collective” above the humanity and diversity of the individuals who make it up.
A prosocial approach makes space for freedom.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
I’ve seen some crazy things over the last few years but this is off-the-charts insane.
Last week, Michael E. Mann spoke at the EcoHeath Alliance: Green Planet One Health Benefit 2024. Just to recap who each of these players are:
- Michael E. Mann is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that has driven the global warming debate for the last 25 years.
- EcoHealth Alliance is the CIA cutout led by Peter Daszak that launders money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create gain-of-function viruses (including SARS-CoV-2 which killed over 7 million people).
- “One Health” is the pretext the World Health Organization (WHO) is using to drive the Pandemic Treaty that will vastly expand the powers of the WHO and create economic incentives for every nation on earth to develop new gain-of-function viruses.
So a leader in the global warming movement spoke at an event to raise money for the organization that just murdered 7 million people and the campaign that intends to launch new pandemics in perpetuity to enrich the biowarfare industrial complex.
And then just for good measure, Peter Hotez reposted all of this information on Twitter, I imagine in solidarity with all of the exciting genociding going on.
Mann’s appearance at this event is emblematic of a disturbing shift that has been years in the making. Serious and thoughtful people in the environmental movement tried to address industrial and military pollution for decades. Now their cause has been co-opted by Big Tech and other corporate actors with malevolent intentions — and the rest of the environmental movement has gone along with this, apparently without objection. So we are witnessing a convergence between the global warming movement, the biowarfare industrial complex, and the WHO pandemic treaty grifters.
I wish it wasn’t true but here we are.
Before I go any further I need to make one thing clear: the notion that pandemics are driven by global warming is complete and total bullsh*t. The evidence is overwhelming that pandemics are created by the biowarfare industrial complex including the 13,000 psychopaths who work at over 400 US bioweapons labs (as described in great detail in The Wuhan Cover-Up).
Unfortunately “global warming” has become a cover for the proliferation of the biowarfare industrial economy.
Mann’s appearance at an event to raise money for people who are clearly guilty of genocide (and planning more carnage) made me realize that this really is World War III. They are straight-up telling us who they are and what they intend to do.
The different sides in this war are not nation-states. Instead, Team Tyranny is a bunch of different business interests pushing what has become a giant multi-trillion dollar grift. And Team Freedom is ordinary people throughout the world just trying to return to the classical economic and political liberalism that drove human progress from 1776 until 2020.
Here’s how I see the battle lines being drawn:
TEAM TYRANNY
Their base: Elites, billionaires, the ruling class, the biowarfare industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and bougie technocrats.
Institutions they control: WEF, WHO, UN, BMGF, World Bank, IMF, most universities, the mainstream media, and liberal governments throughout the developed world.
Economic philosophy: The billionaires should control all wealth on earth. The peasants should only be allowed to exist to serve the billionaires, grow food, and fix the machines when necessary. Robots and Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to replace most of the peasants.
Political philosophy: Centralized control of everything. Elites know best. The 90% should shut up, pay their taxes, take their vaccines, develop chronic disease, and die. High tech global totalitarianism is the best form of government. Billionaires are God.
Philosophy of medicine: Allopathic. Cut, poison, burn, kill. Corporations create all knowledge. Bodies are machines. Transhumanism is ideal. The billionaires will soon live forever in the digital cloud.
Their currency: For now, inflationary Federal Reserve policies. Soon, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that will put the peasants in their place once and for all.
Policy vehicles to advance their agenda: One Health; WHO Pandemic Treaty; social credit scores; climate scores; vaccine mandates/passports; lockdowns and quarantine camps; elimination of small farms and livestock; corporate control of all food, land, water, transportation, and the weather; corporate control of social movements; and 15-minute cities for the peasants.
Military strategy: Gain-of-function viruses, propaganda, and vaccines.
TEAM FREEDOM
Our base: The medical freedom movement, Constitutionalists, small “l” libertarians, independent farmers, natural meat and milk producers, pirate parties, natural healers, homeopaths, chiropractors, integrative and functional medicine doctors, and osteopaths.
Aligned institutions: CHD, ICAN, Brownstone Institute, NVIC, SFHF, the RFK, Jr. campaign, the Republican party at the county level…
Economic philosophy: Small “c” capitalism. Competition. Entrepreneurship.
Political philosophy: Classical liberalism. The people, using their own ingenuity, will generally figure out the best way to do things. Decentralize everything including the internet. If the elites would just leave us alone the world would be a much more peaceful, creative, and prosperous place. Human freedom leads to human flourishing.
Philosophy of medicine: Nature is infinite in its wisdom. Listen to the body. Systems have the ability to heal and regenerate.
Our currency: Cash, gold, crypto, and barter. (I don’t love crypto but lots of smart people in our movement do.)
Policy ideas: Exit the WHO. Boycott WEF companies. Repeal the Bayh-Dole Act, NCVIA Act, Patriot Act, and PREP Act. Add medical freedom to the Constitution. Prosecute the Faucistas at Nuremberg 2.0. Overhaul the NIH, FDA, CDC, EPA, USDA, FCC, DoD, and intelligence agencies. Make all publicly-funded scientific data available to the public. Ban insider trading by Congress. Support and protect organic food, farms, and farmers’ markets. Break up monopolies. Cut the size of the federal government in half (or more).
Our preferred tools to create change: Ideas, love for humanity, logic and reason, common sense, art and music, and popular uprising.
What would you add, subtract, or change in each of these lists?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
We all have a different starting place and journey but each of us has the following in common. We’ve realized that official sources, the ones we’ve trusted in the past, are not going to make any sense of the above for us. We have to seek out alternatives and put the story together ourselves. And this we must do because the only other choice is to accept that all of the above consists of a random series of disconnected and pointless events, which is surely not true.
The last few years can be tracked at two levels: the physical reality around us and the realm of the intellectual, mental, and psychological.
The first level has presented a chaotic narrative of the previously unthinkable. A killer virus that turned out to be what many people said it was in February 2020: a bad flu with a known demographic risk best treated with known therapeutics. But that template and the ensuing campaign of fear and emergency rule gave rise to astonishing changes in our lives.
Social functioning was wholly upended as schools, businesses, churches, and travel were ended by force. The entire population of the world was told to mask up, despite vast evidence that doing so achieved nothing in terms of stopping a respiratory virus.
That was followed by a breathtaking propaganda campaign for a shot that failed to live up to its promise. The cure for the disease itself caused tremendous damage to health including death, a subject about which everyone cared intensely before the shot and then strangely forgot about after.
Protests against the goings-on were met with media smears, shutdowns, and even the cancellation of bank accounts. However, and simultaneously, other forms of protest were encouraged, insofar as they were motivated by a more proper political agenda against structural injustices in the old system of law and order. That was a strange confluence of events, to say the least.
In the midst of this, which was wild enough, came new forms of surveillance, censorship, corporate consolidation, an explosion of government spending and power, rampant and global inflation, and hot wars from long-running border conflicts in two crucial regions.
The old Declarations of rules on the Internet put free speech as a first principle. Today, the hosting website of the most famous one, signed by Amnesty International and the ACLU, is gone, almost as if it never existed. In 2022, it came to be replaced by a White House Declaration on the Future of the Internet, that extols stakeholder control as the central principle.
All the while, once-trusted sources of information – media, academia, think tanks – have steadfastly refused to report and respond in truthful ways, leading to a further loss of public trust not just in government and politics but also in everything else, including corporate tech and all the higher order sectors of the culture.
Also part of this has been a political crisis in many nations, including the use of sketchy election strategies justified by epidemiologic emergency: the only safe way to vote (said the CDC) is absentee via the mails. Here we find one of many overlapping parallels to a scenario hardly ever imagined: infectious disease deployed as a cover for political manipulation.
Crucially and ominously, all of these mind-blowing developments took place in roughly similar ways the world over, and with the same language and model. Everywhere people were told “We are all in this together,” and that social distancing, masking, and vaxxing was the correct way out. Media was also censored everywhere, while anti-lockdown protestors (or even those who simply wanted to worship together in peace) were treated not as dissidents to be tolerated but irresponsible spreaders of disease.
Can we really pretend that all of this is normal, much less justified? The exhortation we receive daily is that we can and must.
Really? At what point did you realize that you had to start thinking for yourself?
We all have a different starting place and journey but each of us has the following in common. We’ve realized that official sources, the ones we’ve trusted in the past, are not going to make any sense of the above for us. We have to seek out alternatives and put the story together ourselves. And this we must do because the only other choice is to accept that all of the above consists of a random series of disconnected and pointless events, which is surely not true.
That leads to the second layer of comprehension; the intellectual, mental, and psychological. Here is where we find the real drama and incalculable difficulties.
At the dawn of lockdowns, what appeared to be a primitive public health error seemed to be taking place. It seemed like some scientists at the top, who gained an implausible amount of influence over government policy, had forgotten about natural immunity and were under the impression that it was good for health to stay home, be personally isolated, avoid exercise, and eat only takeout food. Surely such preposterous advice would be revealed soon as the nonsense it was.
How in the world could they be so stupid? How did they gain so much influence, not just nationally but all over the world? Did the whole of humanity suddenly forget about all known science in every field from virology to economics to psychology?
As time went on, more and more anomalies appeared that made that judgment seem naïve. As it turns out, what was actually taking place had something to do with a move on the part of security and intelligence services. It was they who were given rule-making authority on March 13, 2020, and that’s why so much of what we needed to know was and is considered classified.
There were early initial reports that the virus itself might have been leaked from a US-backed lab in Wuhan, which introduces the entire subject of the US bioweapons program. This is a very deep rabbit hole itself, thoroughly exposed in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s The Wuhan Cover-Up. There was a reason that topic was censored: it was all true. And as it turns out, the vaccine itself was able to bypass the normal approval process by slipping through under the cover of emergency. In effect, it came pre-approved by the military.
As the evidence continues to roll in, more and more rabbit holes appear, thousands of them. Each has a name: Pharma, CCP, WHO, Big Tech, Big Media, CBDCs, WEF, Deep State, Great Reset, Censorship, FTX, CISA, EVs, Climate Change, DEI, BlackRock, and many more besides. Each of these subject areas has threads or thousands of them, each connecting to more and to each other. At this point, it is simply not possible for a single person to follow it all.
To those of us who have been steeped in following the revelations day by day, and trying to keep up with putting them together into a coherent model of what happened to us, and what is still going on, the ominous reality is that the traditional understanding of rights, liberties, law, business, media, and science were dramatically overthrown in the course of just a few months and years.
Nothing operates today as it did in 2019. It’s not just that functioning broke. It was broken and then replaced. And the surreptitious coup d’état with no shots fired is still ongoing, even if that is not the headline.
Of this fact, many of us today are certain. But how common is this knowledge? Is it a vague intuition held by many members of the public or is it known in more detail? There are no reliable polls. We are left to guess. If any of us in 2019 believed we had our finger on the pulse of the national mood or public opinion generally, we certainly do not anymore.
Nor do we have access to the inner workings of government at the highest levels, much less the conversations going on among the winners of our age, the well-connected ruling elites who seemed to have gamed the entire system for their own benefit.
It’s so much easier to regard the whole thing as a giant confusion or accident on grounds that only cranks and crazies believe in conspiracy theories. The trouble with that outlook is that it posits something even more implausible; that something this gigantic, far-reaching, and dramatic could have happened with no real intentionality or purpose or that it all fell together as a huge accident.
Brownstone Institute has published more than 2,000 articles and 10 books exploring all over the above topics. Other venues and friends are out there helping us with this research and discovery, issue by issue. Even so, a great deal of responsibility falls on this one institution, the main work of which is providing support for dissident and displaced voices, which is implausible since it was only founded three years ago. We are deeply grateful for our supporters and would welcome you to join them.
As for the intellectuals we once revered for their curiosity and wisdom, most seem to have gone into hiding, either unable to adapt to the new realities or just unwilling to risk their careers by exploring hard topics. It’s understandable but still tragic. Most are happy to pretend like nothing happened or celebrate the change as nothing but progress. As for journalists, the New York Times publishes daily commentaries dismissing the Constitution as a dated anachronism that has to go and no one thinks much about it.
There is a lot to sort out. So much has changed so quickly. No sooner than the dust seems to be settling from one upheaval, there is another and then another. Keeping up with it all causes a level of psychological brain scramble on a scale we’ve never previously experienced.
It’s easier to wait for the historians to tell the next generation what happened. But maybe, just maybe, by stepping up and telling the story as we see it in real time, we can make a difference in stopping this madness and restoring some sane and normal freedom back to the world.
Author
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