Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Aug 02, 2019 4:12 pm
What individualists and collectivists (the middle ground) have in common is a lot: they agree on the importance of human beings. They agree that there are serious problems. They agree about what many of those problems are. They agree that the right thing to do is to help people out of bad situations. They agree that compassion is very good, and that things could and should be better than they are.
You apparently don't know any individualists personally. I don't mean someone who claims to be an individualist. I mean someone who really is an individualist, one who seeks nothing in this world he has not produced or earned by his own effort, who does not need or require the agreement or approval of any other human being, who would never harm another human being and enjoys his relationship with all those for whom the relationship is mutually beneficial, never judging how other's choose to live their lives, taking for responsibility for his ow choices and actions, gladly bearing the penalty for his wrong choices and proudly enjoying the fruits of his right one, fully confident in his competence to live his life successfully and happily, which he regards as the purpose of his life.
If you knew a true individualists like that, you would know they do not regard any human being important just because they exist or that anythig is "just important." Importance implies some value or purpose toward which something is crucial. Most human beings have very little positive importance to anything, and many are only important in the negative (criminals, drug addicts, and social parasites).
You would know that an individualist does no look at life as a series of problems to be solved, but as an endless potential of objectives to be achieved. There are only problems if something interferes with the achievement of an objective. Almost all of what are called "problems," in the world are the consequences of individuals' bad choices. An individualist regards all his own problems his own fault, and everyone else's problems their own fault and feels no obligation to help others out of the jams and difficulties they have gotten themselves into, even life-threatening ones.
An individualist would never agree that compassion is good, or that it, and it's sister ideas of sympathy, empathy, commiseration, and pity, for example are anything more than appeals to sentmentalism. Notice that all these words mean, "to feel with," which assumes that a feeling is a basis for a choice. Also notice it is always the feelings of those that are human failures and their grief, sadness, misfortune and despair. It is never the whole, the healthy, or successful one is supposed feel with. The reason an individualist does not regard anyone's feeling as a basis for any choice is because he does not regard his own feelings as a basis of any choice or an excuse for doing anything. Why should he worry about anyone else's feeling, he doesn't worry about his own, or want anyone else to, either.
Now the odd thing is, an individualist does not identify himself as an individualist, because he does not regard individualism as an ideology but simply what any individual who chooses to be fully human is.