Why is individualism a bad thing?

depends on what you mean. pursuit of one's self-interest is fine, and not actually avoidable.

misidentification of your individual self-interest as seperate from that of others is bad. The key is that "individualism" and "collectivism" aren't actually opposites.

If individualism is taking a shower, brushing your teeth and going to school then it's not a bad thing.

If individualism is blaming individuals for collective failures then its bad. Margaret Thatcher is infamous for saying "there is no such thing as a society".

Eg. Look at jobs. Let's say the market demands 100 jobs but the amount of people who want a job is 150. Then there is nothing any individual can do to ensure that there is full employment. 50 people will remain unemployed without collective action. The neoliberal "solution" would be to train the unemployed, turning it into an individual not having skills. However, training doesn't create more jobs because jobs are determined by various other factors like total demand for goods backed by ability to pay. You are just swapping people in and out of employment. One person gets a job another loses it, at the end 50 people stay jobless.

The cornerstone of Marxism, however, is the masses, whose emancipation, according to its tenets, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the individual. That is to say, according to the tenets of Marxism, the emancipation of the individual is impossible until the masses are emancipated. Accordingly, its slogan is: "Everything for the masses."

J.V Stalin, Anarchism of Socialism.

There is no, nor should there be, irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the collective, between the interests of the individual person and the interests of the collective. There should be no such contrast, because collectivism, socialism, does not deny, but combines individual interests with the interests of the collective. Socialism cannot abstract itself from individual interests. Socialist society alone can most fully satisfy these personal interests. More than that; socialist society alone can firmly safeguard the interests of the individual. In this sense there is no irreconcilable contrast between "individualism" and socialism. But can we deny the contrast between classes, between the propertied class, the capitalist class, and the toiling class, the proletarian class?

On the one hand we have the propertied class which owns the banks, the factories, the mines, transport, the plantations in colonies. These people see nothing but their own interests, their striving after profits.

They do not submit to the will of the collective; they strive to subordinate every collective to their will. On the other hand we have the class of the poor, the exploited class, which owns neither factories nor works, nor banks, which is compelled to live by selling its labour power to the capitalists which lacks the opportunity to satisfy its most elementary requirements. How can such opposite interests and strivings be reconciled? As far as I know, Roosevelt has not succeeded in finding the path of conciliation between these interests. And it is impossible, as experience has shown. Incidentally, you know the situation in the United States better than I do as I have never been there and I watch American affairs mainly from literature. But I have some experience in fighting for socialism, and this experience tells me that if Roosevelt makes a real attempt to satisfy the interests of the proletarian class at the expense of the capitalist class, the latter will put another president in his place. The capitalists will say : Presidents come and presidents go, but we go on forever; if this or that president does not protect our interests, we shall find another. What can the president oppose to the will of the capitalist class?

J.V. Stalin, Marxism vs. Liberalism

Doing shit that is for your benefit, fuck everyone else results in poor outcomes for society.

My life exists on the backs of millions of people I'll never meet. All of my personal and political actions impact them. If I serve myself at their expense, I degrade the ecosystem I'm dependent on. Rugged individualism is a marketing gimmick for weak and afraid misanthropes to turn them toward reactionary politics the same way hippie shit is.

strips us of our humanity and turns us into subhuman insectoid creatures incapable of thought.

Ah yes, because the states definitely doesn't have that problem.

To keep it simple, humans are a social species. Perhaps the most social in existence, given we developed language, sciences, and civilization...all of these have a base assumption of social relations.

It's a false dichotomy to pretend that the struggle is between the individual vs collective. Because the average individual is always part of society, and society functions for the sake of its members. The two developed interrelated, from before humans were biologically humans.

Ignoring this fact and portraying it like you need to choose one is wrong. This is the problem of idealism. Idealism just picks and chooses some idea because it sounds good at the time eg. "individualism" but refuses to acknowledge the historical context and dynamics.

A dialectical view would reveal that people tending towards individualism are reacting to the current dynamic which only appears like individualism vs collectivism. But stepping back and looking at this dynamic shows it's not really an eternal duel between dualities. They're not even dualities.

That's why we can predict a new stage in history, not just another move in a duel. Socialism is not collectivism getting its turn after individualism has its day. It's breaking past this false duality when people realize individualism in a vacuum doesn't work.

Because individualism goes against our biology, against human nature, and against the literal definition of society. Individualism is not natural for humans. Society cannot exist in a world where it's everyone for themselves. Humanity did not get to the good places we are by individualism; in fact I would argue that all of the bad parts of society sre because of individualism.

Being against individualism doesn't mean we all have to be the same person, it just means that we acknowledge that other people exist with other perspectives and wants and needs, and we cooperate with them and they cooperate with us.

Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Chapter 7:

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France's poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.

Brace Belden, TrueAnon, Episode 88:
https://youtu.be/w8D6QuLdZfY

Cui bono? Who benefits from the myth of individualism? We are not really individuals existing in a vacuum, we live together with billions of other humans on this planet. Are you able to choose to pay your landlord? Are you able to choose not to work for your boss? Sure you can choose not to pay a landlord or not work for a boss, but you have to pay some landlord and work for some boss because that's how capitalism works. Your individual responsibility, it turns out, is everybody's responsibility. Except the capital holders. What happens if we suddenly realize we are a collective?

Because we live in a society and are social animals. The only way to achieve something big is by cooperating with other people. Big groups of people working together are able to achieve amazing things. Individuals cannot even really built a modern house,by themselves. It is a collective societal effort that allows for modern homes to be constructed( for example).

The two negative uses of the term here:

• When liberals offer solutions they're often about placing "personal responsibility" on individuals to fix fundamentally systematic problems they can never fix. For example, plastic recycling. They offer an individualistic solution that's really meant to pass the buck on litter and pollution from producers (owner class) to consumers (more working class).

• The romantic mythology of men as islands etc etc. False ideas of independence and strength as a single person or family that's basically self-sufficient. Turns out, we live in a society. But the individualistic myth lives on and tells people that being a selfish asshole is good in and of itself.

"Individualism" is one of the cursed internet words which will have a different meaning for every person who uses it. Discussions about it tell you more about the community having the discussion than anything about the word. And it can cause arguments when interpretations differ within a single discussion.

The contrast you see between opinions about the word is just a reflection of the general contrast between liberals and leftists.

Because we aren't living in some videogame world, we're all here together and our actions affect one another. If we want to build a functional, fair and equitable society for all, we need to work together towards a common goal in an organized way. The capitalist mythology where everyone can get rich and live a luxurious life if they grind hard enough is mathematically impossible, the very word 'rich' implies the inequality of society, being rich is being rich at the expense of everyone else. Capitalist individualism also changes the way people think about society and the world, real solidarity between the members of society cannot exist in a society which needs greed and selfishness to survive. The kind of person capitalism breeds by its very nature is the "your pain is my survival" kind.

All that said, communists are not against personal traits and people having a different character. That is not the individualism we're against. The individualism we're against is the illusion that everyone must fight for themselves individually and somehow still have a society that is not brutal and cannibalistic. People by their very nature are different in their own special ways, have their own interests and lives, have things they're good and bad at. If anything, socialism increases a person's ability to reach for their personal interests because it breaks the class barriers for them. For example, in capitalism a bourgeois person has the money and time needed to do anything they like in their spare time, but a worker who is paid just enough to survive, who has barely enough time to do their own house work, who is drained of energy by the time they get home, obviously do not have that same ease as with the bourgeois person. In socialism all workers can get from society just as much as they give to it, the surplus value which capitalism exploits no longer exists. That's how Soviet people massively improved their cultural level in a very short time span after the revolution, the arts and science etc. that Soviet society produced can still be noticed today.

I'm going to copy a comment I posted a couple of weeks ago:

I hate the "collectivist" vs "individualist" framing, it's so loaded towards "individualism" when what people usually mean is atomization, meanwhile us so-called collectivists don't as the myth goes, believe in submitting one's individual interests to the Greater Good of The Collective, we believe that most people have most of their interests in common with other people and should work together to pursue those interests rather than against each other. Because of that, I prefer the framing that is loaded the other way of "pro-social" vs "anti-social". The people you describe are significantly anti-social and disliking individual corporations has no bearing on that.

aimixin:

"Collectivist" and "individualist" are nonsensical false dichotomies. "Individualists" love to criticize the "collectivists" for wanting to "sacrifice the individual for the collective" and insist that "the individual is more important than the collective". These nonsensical phrases see the individual as an "island unto themselves", that the individual is separate from society, and therefore you can speak of the individual and society as distinct entities.

Yet, this is just objectively not true, the individual is part of that very same collective. If you sacrifice the collective, you also sacrifice the individual, as the collective is merely the totality of individuals.

And, in practice, this is how all "individualists" behave in the real world. They advocate in favor of the sacrificing of the vast majority of individuals in order to promote the individuality of a very few number of individuals.

The most "individually free" society conceivable would be a dictatorship as the dictator would be individually free to dictate whatever he want without any hindrance, but this comes at the sacrifice of the collective's individuality.

The self-contradictory incoherent nature of "individualism" causes so-called "individualists" to advocate directly in favor of the enslavement of the vast majority of individuals to a few. It's an incoherent ideology as "collectivism" and "individualism" are inseparable, the individual is part of the collective, and you cannot sacrifice the collective without sacrificing the individual.

Take the issue of private property, for example. Marxists point out that capitalist societies deprive the vast majority of individuals of the means of production and destine them to work for others for their entire lives, so they advocate for collective control over the means of production so that individuals can actually have control in the economy.

"Individualists" respond to this by saying that this is "sacrificing the individual for the collective" and vehemently defend the massively unequal ownership of the majority of the economy by a small handful of oligarchs because to them, their individual right to be an oligarch is more important than the individuality of the millions of people underneath that oligarch.

Second Thought has a good video on it: The Problem With Hyper-Individualism

Look these are all good points but the LOONY LEFT needs to update its animal metaphors

Insects do a lot of thinking and the eusocial ones probably think more similarly to us (on a societal scale) than even other primates, go GET EDUCATED MORANS

And this is without getting into the REPEATED reptile slander that occurs here, equating sociopathic billionaires with them even though it is now well understood that reptiles do not lack the capacity for emotional experience in any way

(Also as others have said we are a highly social species with instinctive behaviors that both rely on a social structure and facilitate the further growth and propagation of these structures, there is no dichotomy between individualism and collectivism because we are functional but independent parts of a superorganism whole that we will never escape and should not seek to)

Try doing anything without other people being involved, is that even possible? How does that line of thinking tell us anything about how people should relate to each other? You can analyze atomized individuals, but you end up with really incoherent ideas like "humans are fundamentally selfish". Sure, humans can be raised to be selfish, but compassion has to be beaten out of people in order to maintain a system that relies on these ideas. Honestly, the problem with individualism is that it depends on people living in an extremely forgiving environment. Any amount of serious adversity will teach you that it fucking sucks to do hard or complicated shit by yourself.

Capitalism inherently causes large wealth gaps, with some people living in poverty while others waste resources that could have helped them. For capitalism to be a stable system, there needs to be something that solves this contradiction, and currently, a large part of the solution is individualist ideology. You can be fine with fellow humans living on the street if you believe everyone is in the end only responsible for themselves.

Furthermore, the good sides of individualism contradict the interests of capital, like strict hierarchies versus the value of individual expression. Here we can see how material interests are stronger than ideology. Liberals should as individualists believe in a person's right to freedom from police violence, but it can easily be justified with simple dehumanization. They should believe in freedom of gender expression and sexuality, but those can be opposed by being obsessed with children's "safety", because they are not yet full persons so the freedom of the individual does not extend to them.

So individualism is not bad in and of itself, but it is currently a tool of capitalist order, and also not very useful as a tool for liberation under capitalism.

subhuman insectoid creatures incapable of thought.

This sounds like some Hayekian Road to Serfdom or Randian Atlas Shrugged nonsense. In fact it sounds fascistic.