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Brownstone Institute

The Selfish Collective

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17 minute read

Originally published by the Brownstone Institute

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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:

  1. SARS-CoV-2 is a dangerous virus.
  2. Restrictions and mandates will “stop the spread” of the virus, thereby saving lives and shielding people from the harm it causes.
  3. We have a moral duty as a society to shield people from harm wherever possible.
  4. 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

  • Haley Kynefin

    Haley Kynefin is a writer and independent social theorist with a background in behavioral psychology. She left academia to pursue her own path integrating the analytical, the artistic and the realm of myth. Her work explores the history and sociocultural dynamics of power.

Storytelling is in our DNA. We provide credible, compelling multimedia storytelling and services in English and French to help captivate your digital, broadcast and print audiences. As Canada’s national news agency for 100 years, we give Canadians an unbiased news source, driven by truth, accuracy and timeliness.

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Brownstone Institute

The White House Makes Good on Its Antitrust Threats

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jeffrey A. TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER

On May 5, 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued a mob-like warning to social-media companies and information distributors generally. They need to get with the program and start censoring critics of Covid policy. They need to amplify government propaganda. After all, it would be a shame if something would happen to these companies.

These were her exact words:

The president’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation and misinformation, especially related to Covid-19 vaccinations and elections. And we’ve seen that over the past several months. Broadly speaking, I’m not placing any blame on any individual or group. We’ve seen it from a number of sources. He also supports better privacy protections and a robust antitrust programSo, his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life threatening information is not going out to the American public.

On the face of it, the antitrust action against Apple is about their secure communications network. The Justice Department wants the company to share their services with other networks. As with so many other antitrust actions in history, this is really about the government’s taking sides in competitive disputes between companies, in this case Samsung and other smartphone providers. They resent the way Apple products all work together. They want that changed.

The very notion that the government is trying to protect consumers in this case is preposterous. Apple is a success not because they are exploitative but because they make products that users like, and they like them so much that they buy ever more. It’s not uncommon that a person gets an iPhone and then a Macbook, an iPad, and then AirPods. All play well together.

The Justice Department calls this anticompetitive even though competing is exactly the source of Apple’s market strength. That has always been true. Yes, there is every reason to be annoyed at the company’s hammer-and-tongs enforcement of its intellectual property. But their IP is not the driving force of the company’s success. Its products and services are.

Beyond that, there is a darker agenda here. It’s about bringing new media into the government propaganda fold, exactly as Psaki threatened. Apple is a main distributor of podcasts in the country and world, just behind Spotify (which is foreign controlled). There are 120 million podcast listeners in the US, far more than pay attention to regime media in total.

If the ambition is to control the public mind, something must be done to get those under control. It’s not enough just to nationalize Facebook and Google. If the purpose is to end free speech as we know it, they have to go after podcasting too, using every tool that is available.

Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation. These are the two main guns that government can hold to the head of these private communications companies. Apple is the target in order to make the company more compliant.

All of which gets us to the issue of the First Amendment. There are many ways to violate laws on free speech. It’s not just about sending a direct note with a built-in threat. You can use third parties. You can invoke implicit threats. You can depend on the awareness that, after all, you are the government so it is hardly a level playing field. You can embed employees and pay their salaries (as was the case with Twitter). Or, in the case of Psaki above, you can deploy the mob tactic of reminding companies that bad things may or may not happen if they persist in non-compliance.

Over the last 4 to 6 years, governments have used all these methods to violate free speech rights. We are sitting on tens of thousands of pages of proof of this. What seemed like spotty takedowns of true information has been revealed as a vast machinery now called the Censorship Industrial Complex involving dozens of agencies, nearly one hundred universities, and many foundations and nonprofit organizations directly or indirectly funded by government.

You would have to be willfully blind not to see the long-run ambition. The goal is a mass reversion to the past, a world like we had in the 1970s with three networks and limited information sources about anything going on in government. Back then, people did not know what they did not know. That’s how effective the system was. It came about not entirely because of active censorship but because of technological limitations.

The information age is called that because it blew up the old system, offering hope of a new world of universal distribution of ever more information about everything, and promising to empower billions of users themselves to become distributors. That’s how the company YouTube got its name: everyone could be a TV producer.

That dream was hatched in the 1980s, gained great progress in the 1990s and 2000s, and began fundamentally to upend government structures in the 2010s. Following Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 – two major events that were not supposed to happen – a deep establishment said that’s enough. They scapegoated the new systems of information for disrupting the plans of decades and reversing the planned course of history.

The ambition to control every nook and cranny of the Internet sounds far-flung but what choice do they have? This is why this machinery of censorship has been constructed and why there is such a push to have artificial intelligence take over the job of content curation. In this case, machines alone do the job without human intervention, making litigation nearly impossible.

The Supreme Court has the chance to do something to stop this but it’s not clear that many Justices even understand the scale of the problem or the Constitutional strictures against it. Some seem to think that this is only about the right of government officials to pick up the phone and complain to reporters about their coverage. That is absolutely not the issue: content curation affects hundreds of millions of people, not just those posting but those reading too.

Still, if there is some concern about the supposed rights of government actors, there is a clear solution offered by David Friedman: post all information and exhortations about topics and content in a public forum. If the Biden or Trump administration has a preference for how social media should behave, it is free to file a ticket like everyone else and the recipient can and should make it and the response public.

This is not an unreasonable suggestion, and it should certainly figure into any judgment made by the Supreme Court. The federal government has always put out press releases. That’s a normal part of functioning. Bombarding private companies with secret takedown notices and otherwise deploying a huge plethora of intimidation tactics should not even be permitted.

Is there muscle behind the growing push for censorship? Certainly there is. This reality is underscored by the Justice Department’s antitrust actions against Apple. The mask of such official actions is now removed.

Just as the FDA and CDC became marketing and enforcement arms of Pfizer and Moderna, so too the Justice Department is now revealed as a censor and industrial promoter of Samsung. This is how captured agencies with hegemonic ambitions operate, not in the public interest but in the private interest of some industries over others and always with the goal of reducing the freedom of the people.

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

Journalistic Malpractice at The New York Times

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From the Brownstone Institute

The federal bureaucracy has hijacked our information centers to protect their own interests. They’ve stifled dissent to perpetuate their power, and the mainstream press has bowed to the Leviathan. Supreme Court Justices, perhaps the last line of defense against the tyrants’ aspiration to codify totalitarianism into law, appear primed to abandon the First Amendment.

An obsequious press corps now serves as the mouthpiece for the country’s vast censorship apparatus. Last Sunday, The New York Times ran a front page story “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.”

The Gray Lady covered the battle for the First Amendment in familiar doublethink. As we’ve covered throughout the Missouri v. Biden (now Murthy v. Missouri) proceedings, the censors deny the censorship exists while insisting we should be thankful that it does.

Government lawyers have argued that plaintiffs manufactured the case, and the allegations of censorship are nothing more than “an assortment of out-of-context quotes and select portions of documents that distort the record to build a narrative that the bare facts simply do not support.” At the same time, they insist the censorship is necessary “to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.”

Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe followed their lead, arguing that the private-public censorship apparatus is a “thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory” but that eliminating it “will make us less secure as a nation and will endanger us all every day.”

Now, The New York Times and other news outlets have joined in supporting the censors. The piece cites Nina Jankowicz, the aspiring tyrant known for her Mary Poppins-themed calls for censorship, who claimed there was “no shred of evidence” behind allegations that the Biden administration called to stifle dissent.

The article describes the censorship apparatus as a farcical right-wing fever dream in which President Trump “casts himself as victim and avenger of a vast plot to muzzle his movement.” At the same time, the authors cite the American Intelligence Community’s leading advocates for restricting the flow of information.

Jankowicz headed the Department of Homeland Security’s board on disinformation until the Biden administration suspended the Domestic Ministry of Truth in response to reports that Jankowicz was a prolific spreader of misinformation, including the Steele Dossier and the Hunter Biden laptop.

Jankowicz complained, without irony, to the Times that the resistance to online censorship created a “chilling effect.” She explained, “Nobody wants to be caught up in it.”

The Times also quoted Katie Starbird, who said that “the people that benefit from the spread of disinformation have effectively silenced many of the people that would try to call them out.” The Gray Lady did not note the irony that Starbird claimed to be “silenced” as the paper of record quoted her on the front page of the Sunday edition, nor did they explain her role at CISA, the Department of Homeland Security agency at the center of the censorship industry.

While serving on CISA’s “Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee, Starbird lamented that many Americans seem to “accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms.” Of course, those “norms” have been protected by the First Amendment for over 200 years. But CISA – led by zealots like Dr. Starbird – appointed themselves the arbiters of truth and worked with the most powerful information companies in the world to purge dissent.

The Times, Starbird, and Jankowicz represent the foundational lie underpinning the entire censorship complex: that the government and its bureaucrats hold a monopoly on truth. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson apparently shared this view in oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri, as she advocated for the right to abridge free speech provided the government offers a “compelling state interest.”

The First Amendment does not discriminate between true and false ideas; it offers a blanket protection of speech regardless of veracity. But notwithstanding legal protections, the Government has been the most prolific spreader of “misinformation” in the last four years. From natural immunity, to lockdowns, to vaccine efficacy, to mask mandates, to travel restrictions, to fatality rates, the “trust the science” crowd has silenced dissent that has often been more accurate than their government decrees.

In this process, left-wing institutions have abandoned their liberal values in the pursuit of power. As Brownstone outlined in “A Close Look at the Amici Briefs in Murthy v. Missouri,” supposedly liberal groups like Stanford University and Democratic Attorneys General urged the Court to promote censorship while the ACLU remained derelict in silence.

Journalists – once heralded as the Fourth Estate – have joined forces with the regime to disparage its challengers. In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern referred to Murthy v. Missouri as “inane” and “brain-meltingly dumb.” He made no effort to report the hundreds of pages in discovery that revealed the coordinated censorship campaigns directed from the White House, the Intelligence Community, and Big Tech, nor did he grapple with the laundry list of follies that flourished under government-sponsored censorship, including the Iraq War, Covid lockdowns, or Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Instead, he declares definitively that the Biden administration – the same one that proudly ignores the Court’s orders on student loans and demands the censorship of its political enemies – acted within its powers in response to “a once-in-a-century pandemic.”

These conclusory statements, utterly detached from the truth, are nothing new for Stern, whose work reveals him to be little more than a spokesman for the Democratic Party. In the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, he called for increased investigations into Julie Swetnick’s easily-debunked allegation that Kavanaugh was a ring leader for a group of high school gang rapists. He described Christine Blasey Ford, a serial liar who has no evidence she ever met Kavanaugh, as a “folk hero to the left for the rest of time.” He chastised justices for not wearing masks as late as 2022 and derided judicial review of the nonsensical airline mask mandate as evidence of a “power-drunk juristocracy” and “badly broken” system.

Like so much of the authoritarian left, there is no nuance or variety to the power-seeking gambits. From mail-in voting to vaccine mandates to lockdowns to Elon Musk to affirmative action, the Slate author moves in lockstep with the mindless herd.

Stern is in no way remarkable, but he represents the transformation of the American left, which has ushered in a new era of authoritarianism draped in progressive language. Like Justice Jackson, the wolf comes in sheep’s clothing, dressed in politically correct standards of affirmative action and diversity politics. But the rainbow veneer cannot overcome the insidious threat to our republic.

The federal bureaucracy has hijacked our information centers to protect their own interests. They’ve stifled dissent to perpetuate their power, and the mainstream press has bowed to the Leviathan. Supreme Court Justices, perhaps the last line of defense against the tyrants’ aspiration to codify totalitarianism into law, appear primed to abandon the First Amendment.

A ruling for the government in Murthy v. Missouri could permanently transform the nation, the relationship between Government and private businesses, and Americans’ right to information. Even more alarmingly, it would suggest that due process no longer reigns supreme over political favoritism.

In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More asks his son-in-law, William Roper, if he would give the Devil the protection of the law. Roper responds that he’d “cut down every law in England” to get to the Devil.

“Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” More asks. “This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down…do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

Justice Jackson, the Biden Administration, Katie Starbird, and their allies in the media may believe they have a divine mission to censor alleged misinformation, that the Devil’s reincarnation has taken multiple forms in the bodies of RFK Jr., Alex Berenson, Jay Bhattacharya, and others; under our Constitution, however, the self-professed nobility of their missions does not excuse violations of the First Amendment.

Let us hope the Court realizes the graveness of the threat.

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  • Brownstone Institute

    Brownstone Institute is a nonprofit organization conceived of in May 2021 in support of a society that minimizes the role of violence in public life.

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