| INDIVIDUALISM
"Individualism is at once an
ethical-psychological concept and an
ethical-political one. As an
ethical-psychological concept,
individualism holds that a human being
should think and judge independently,
respecting nothing more than the
sovereignty of his or her mind; thus,
it is intimately connected with the
concept of autonomy. As an
ethical-political concept,
individualism upholds the supremacy of
individual rights
..." -- Nathaniel Branden HERE
"Individual
rights are not subject to a public
vote; a majority has no right to
vote away the rights of a
minority; the political function
of rights is precisely to protect
minorities from oppression by
majorities (and the smallest
minority on earth is the
individual)." -- Ayn
Rand
"Individual rights are
the means of subordinating society to
moral law." -- Ayn Rand
"The
foundation of individualism lies in
one's moral right to pursue one's own
happiness. This pursuit requires a
large amount of independence,
initiative, and self-responsibility.
"But true
individualism entails cooperating with
others through trade, which
facilitates the pursuit of each
party's happiness, and which is
carried out not just on the level of
goods but on the level of knowledge
and friendship. Trade is essential for
life; it provides one with many of the
goods and values one needs. Creating
an environment where trade flourishes
is of great importance and great
interest for the individualist.
"Politically,
true individualism means recognizing
that one has a right to his own life
and happiness. But it also means
uniting with other citizens to
preserve and defend the institutions
that protect that right." -- Shawn E.
Klein HERE
"INDIVIDUALISM: The term
'individualism' has a great variety of
meanings in social and political
philosophy. There are at least three
types that can be distinguished: (1)
ontological individualism, (2)
methodological individualism, and (3)
moral or political individualism.
Ontological individualism is the
doctrine that social reality consists,
ultimately, only of persons who choose
and act. Collectives, such as a social
class, state, or a group, cannot act
so they are not considered to have a
reality independent of the actions of
persons. Methodological individualists
hold that the only genuinely
scientific propositions in social
science are those that can be reduced
to the actions, dispositions, and
decisions of individuals. Political or
moral individualism is the theory that
individuals should be left, as far as
possible, to determine their own
futures in economic and moral matters.
Key thinkers include Ludwig von Mises,
Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman,
Robert Nozick, John Locke, and Herbert
Spencer." -- Stephen Grabill and
Gregory M. A. Gronbacher HERE
"Individualism regards man -- every
man -- as an independent, sovereign
entity who possesses an inalienable
right to his own life, a right derived
from his nature as a rational
being. Individualism holds that
a civilized society, or any form of
association, cooperation or peaceful
co-existence among men, can be
achieved only on the basis of the
recognition of individual rights
-- and that a group, as such, has no
rights other than the individual
rights of its members." -- Ayn Rand HERE
Relevant Comments
"This right to life, this right to
liberty, and this right to pursue
one’s happiness is unabashedly
individualistic, without in the
slightest denying at the same time our
thoroughly social nature.
It’s only that our social relations,
while vital to us all, must be chosen
- that is what makes the
crucial difference." -- Prof. Tibor R.
Machan, HERE and HERE
"...individualism
is not antithetical to community.
Rather, it can involve free
association and a belief in an
over-arching harmony of interests.
In a free socety, individuals join
with others because of love and
mutual benefit, not because they are
programmed or coerced." -- Prof. Clifford Thies
"One byproduct
of individualism is benevolence -- a
general attitude of good will
towards one's neighbors and fellow
human beings. Benevolence is
impossible in a society where people
violate each others' rights."
-- Glenn
Woiceshyn
"Paradoxical as
it may seem, men and women who are
free to pursue individualism and
material wealth turn out to be the
most compassionate of all." --
Financial
Times,
London, Nov 22, 2001
"We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
--That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed, --That
whenever any Form of Government
becomes destructive of these ends, it
is the Right of the People to alter or
to abolish it, and to institute new
Government, laying its foundation on
such principles and organizing its
powers in such form, as to them shall
seem most likely to effect their
Safety and Happiness." -- Jefferson et
al, The Declaration of
Independence
"The fact that most people think that
... pursuing one's own self-interest
equates to behaving brutally or
irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a
'psychological confession' on their
part. In fact it is against
one's own long-term
self-interest to behave irrationally
or trample others. Such actions
are the exact opposite of selfish
-- they're self-destructive."
-- Wayne Dunn
(Emphasis added. Criminals and
other sociopaths do not think in terms
of how their actions affect the
society around them and set bad
examples for others. Nor do they
empathize with others, certainly not
their victims. And they
certainly don't feel the pride of
honest achievement or of helping to
build civilization.)
"Individualism is a concept which the
advocates of most political systems
try desperately to avoid. They'd
prefer that political contests,
debates and symposia were limited to
answering loaded questions such as, 'WHICH
type of powerful government should
we have?', 'WHICH type of
dictatorship do you tend to
prefer?", 'WHAT KINDS of
intrusiveness should government
engage in?' and, 'WHICH
type of control freaks are best
suited to run your life for you?'
... They often get upset, even
hysterical, if you point out that socialism, fascism,
communism and mixed-economy
welfare-states have a lot in common.1
They carry on and on as if non-essentials
such as style(!) or WHAT
anybody sacrifices individual rights in
the name of (the master
race, the proletariat, the society,
the common good, the majority, the
country, the fatherland, the
motherland the brother-in-law-land,
the revered leader or savior or god or
whatever) is a big freakin' deal,
especially as only in their
particular fantasies do they imagine
everyone, the enforcers and even their
victims, acting forever polite
and cooperative in the
sacrifice-extracting rituals (as have
many fledgling and would-be dictators,
including the incredibly bloody Pol
Pot at first)." -- Rick Gaber
"Freedom is an intellectual
achievement which requires disavowal
of collectivism and embrace of
individualism." -- Onkar Ghate
"The right to be let alone is indeed
the beginning of all freedom." --
U.S. Supreme Court Justice
William O. Douglas
"They conferred, as against the Government, the
right to be let alone--the most
prehensive of rights and the right
most valued by civilized men." -- U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
(Olmstead v. U.S.)
"The right to be let alone is the
underlying principle of the
Constitution's Bill of Rights." --
Erwin N. Griswold
"You have to ask yourself, 'Who
owns me? Do I own myself or am I
just another piece of government
property?' " -- Neal Boortz
"The crucial distinction between
systems...was no longer
ideological. The main political
difference was between those who did,
and those who did not, believe that
the citizen could -- or should -- be
the property of the state." -- Adam
Michnik in Letters to a Young
Contrarian by Christopher
Hitchens
"In principle, there are only two
fundamental political viewpoints.
That
is, two contradictory ends of the
'political spectrum.' Those two
principles are freedom and slavery."
-- Mark Da Cunha
"There is nothing to take a man's
freedom away from him, save other men.
To be free, a man must be free of his
brothers." -- Ayn Rand
"A man's rights are not violated by a
private individual's refusal to deal
with him." -- Ayn Rand, The Virtue of
Selfishness
"Collective judgment of new ideas is
so often wrong that it is arguable
that progress depends on individuals
being free to back their own judgment
despite collective disapproval." --
W.A. Lewis
"There is no greater stupidity or
meanness than to take uniformity for
an ideal.'' -- George Santayana, The Life of Reason
"The majority, oppressing an
individual, is guilty of a crime,
abuses its strength, and by acting on
the law of the strongest breaks up the
foundations of society." --Thomas
Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de
Nemours, 1816
"There can be no such thing, in law
or in morality, as actions forbidden
to an individual, but permitted to a
mob." -- Ayn Rand
"It is strangely absurd to suppose
that a million of human beings,
collected together, are not under the
same moral laws which bind each of
them separately." -- Thomas Jefferson
"We hold that what one man cannot
morally do, a million men cannot
morally do, and government,
representing many millions of men,
cannot do." -- Auberon Herbert
"The people cannot delegate to
government the power to do anything
which would be unlawful for them to do
themselves." -- John Locke
"The policy of seeking values from
human beings by means of force, when
practiced by an individual, is called
crime. When practiced by a government,
it is called statism
..." -- Nathaniel Branden HERE
"Over himself, over his own mind and
body, the individual is sovereign" --
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
(1859), "Introductory"
"The case for a free society rests on
individualism. ... Every form of
totalitarianism has sought control
over the minds of individuals, and has
understood that it must first
undermine the individual’s confidence
in the validity of his own faculties.
Remember O’Brien’s speech to Winston
Smith in Orwell’s 1984 ... "
-- David Kelley HERE
"Whatever crushes individuality is
despotism, whether it professes to be
enforcing the will of God or the
injunctions of men."-- John Stuart
Mill, On Liberty
"It is embarrassing to have to remind
people of this in the United States of
America. In the Declaration of
Independence, Thomas Jefferson singled
out three natural rights: life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The last phrase, appearing instead
of 'property,' has prompted much
discussion. I cannot say what
Jefferson was thinking. But here's a
plausible theory: Property is already
implicit in liberty. If you are free,
you can use your belongings as you see
fit. But by specifying the pursuit of
happiness Jefferson might have been
pointing out that the blessing of
liberty need not be justified through
selfless service to others. One's life
and happiness on earth are
justification enough." -- Sheldon Richman
"The right to the pursuit of
happiness IS the right to be selfish.
You'd think Americans, of all people,
would take pride in that, and in
precisely what that really
means." -- Rick Gaber
"The meaning ascribed in popular
usage to the word 'selfishness'
is not merely wrong: it
represents a devastating intellectual
'package-deal,' which is responsible,
more than any other single factor, for
the arrested moral development of
mankind." -- Ayn Rand
"The right to the pursuit of
happiness means man's right to live
for himself, to choose what
constitutes his own, private, personal
happiness and to work for its
achievement. Each individual is the
sole and final judge in this choice. A
man's happiness cannot be prescribed
to him by another man or by any number
of other men. ... These rights are the
unconditional, personal, private,
individual possession of every man,
granted to him by the fact of his
birth and requiring no other
sanction. Such was the
conception of the founders of our
country, who placed individual rights
above any and all collective claims."
-- Ayn Rand
"America's abundance was not created
by public sacrifices to the common
good, but by the productive genius of
free men who pursued their own
personal interests and the making of
their own private fortunes." -- Ayn
Rand
"The idea that 'the public interest'
supersedes private interests and
rights can have but one meaning: that
the interests and rights of some
individuals take precedence over the
interests and rights of others." --
Ayn Rand
"America was founded on the principle
of inalienable rights, not dictated
duties. The Declaration of
Independence states that every human
being has a right to life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness. It does not
state that he is born a slave to the
needs of others." -- Alex Epstein
"The smallest minority on earth is
the individual. Those who deny
individual rights cannot claim to be
defenders of minorities." -- Ayn Rand
"Contrary to
what leftists want us to believe,
individualism does not mean looting
others to satisfy one's desires. Nor
does it mean unconcern for others.
...Individualism, not
collectivism or altruism, is the
root of benevolence and good
will among men." --
Glenn Woiceshyn, HERE
"State-mandated compassion produces,
not love for ones fellow man, but
hatred and resentment. The
breakdown of 'basic civility'
and the rise of the welfare state
occur concurrently." -- Lizard
"The Nazis are well remembered for
murdering well over 11 million people
in the implementation of their slogan,
'The public good before the private
good,' the Chinese Communists
for murdering 62 million people in the
implementation of theirs, 'Serve
the people,' and the Soviet
Communists for murdering more than 60
million people in the implementation
of Karl Marx's slogan, 'from each
according to his ability, to each
according to his needs.'
Anyone who defends any of these, or
any variation of them, on the grounds
of their 'good intentions' is an
immoral (NOT 'amoral') enabler of the
ACTUAL (not just the proverbial) road
to hell." -- Rick Gaber
"If men want to oppose war, it is
statism that they must oppose.
So long as they hold the tribal notion
that the individual is sacrificial
fodder for the collective, that some
men have the right to rule others by
force, and that some (any) alleged
'good' can justify it -- there can be
no peace within a nation and no peace
among nations." -- Ayn Rand, The
Roots of War
"Comrades!
We must abolish the cult of the
individual decisively, once and for
all." -- Soviet Premier Nikita S.
Khrushchev, addressing the 20th
Congress of the Soviet Communist
Party, 2-25-56
"The unity of a
nation's spirit and will are worth
far more than the freedom of the
spirit and will of an individual;
and that the higher interests
involved in the life of the whole
must here set the limits and lay
down the duties of the interests of
the individual." -- Adolph Hitler
"We need to
stop worrying about the rights of
the individual and start worrying
about what is best for society." --
Hillary Clinton
"...we
understand only the individual's
capacity to make sacrifices for the
community, for his fellow men." --
Adolf Hitler, 10-7-33
"We're going to take things away from
you on behalf of the common good." --
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, June
28, 2004.
"To be a
socialist is to submit the I to the
thou; socialism is sacrificing the
individual to the whole." -- Joseph
Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda,
National Socialist German Workers'
("Nazi") Party
"What,
actually, is the difference between
communism and fascism? Both
are forms of statism,
authoritarianism. The only
difference between Stalin’s
communism and Mussolini’s fascism is
an insignificant detail in
organizational structure." -- Leonard E. Read
"Racism, as a set of beliefs based
upon the arbitrary assertion that the
content of one's mind and one's
character are inherited and
unchangeable, is something I can
demonstrate to be complete and total
bullspit just from my own personal
experience. You see, I disagree
with more than half the teachings of
my own parents, and probably 90% of my
other ancesters. And I'm a
cheerful, friendly optimist, while the
vast majority of them have been
cynical, suspicious pessimists.
The only people who can consistently
claim racism could be valid are those
people who agree with and act like
their parents and ancestors 100% of
the time, have accepted everything
they believe on blind faith, and have
done absolutely no thinking, let alone
corroborating, of their own. Who
in their right minds would ever want
to take seriously whatever such a
pathetic creature has to say anyway?"
-- Rick Gaber
“An individualist is a man who says:
'I will not run anyone’s life—nor let
anyone run mine. I will not rule nor
be ruled. I will not be a master nor a
slave. I will not sacrifice myself to
anyone—nor sacrifice anyone to
myself'.” - Ayn Rand
"Republicans don't know how to defend
morally an individual's right
to achieve wealth and to keep it, and
that is why they fail. ... It's part
and parcel with their ambivalence over
the individualist heritage of the
nation. ... One of the things that
people have to understand is that the
American Revolution was truly an epic
revolution in the way individuals were
perceived in relation to the rest of
the society. Throughout history
individuals had always been cogs in
some machine; they'd always been
something to be sacrified for the
king, the tribe, the gang, the
chieftain, the society around them,
the race, whatever, and the real
revolution, in America especially, was
a moral revolution. It
was a moral revolution in that ...
suddenly, with the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution, the
individual, his life, his
well-being, his property, his
happiness became central to
our values, and that is what
really made America unique.
People came here from all over the
world to try to escape the kind of
oppression they had and experienced in
the past. They came here for freedom;
they came here for self-expression and
self-realization, and America offered
them that kind of a place." --
Robert Bidinotto
"Most modern intellectuals
congratulate themselves for having
achieved the allegedly momentous
insight that capitalism and altruism
are ultimately incompatible. Yet
they're still too damned ignorant to
realize, or too damned stubborn to
acknowledge, that altruism is
definitely NOT the only moral code
available to mankind; it is, in fact,
the bloodiest and most
counter-productive one of all.
Such stunted thinking on the part of
the intelligentsia has resulted in
their committing the intellectual
atrocity of rejecting the capitalism
and freedom instead of the altruism
and coercion." -- Rick
Gaber
"Collectivism, as an intellectual
power and a moral ideal, is
dead. But freedom and
individualism, and their political
expression, capitalism, have not yet
been discovered." -- Ayn Rand
"Intellectual freedom cannot exist
without political freedom; political
freedom cannot exist without economic
freedom; a free mind and a free market
are corollaries." - Ayn Rand
"The basic issue in the
world today is between two
principles: Individualism and
Collectivism.
"Individualism
holds that man has inalienable rights
which cannot be taken away from him by
any other man, nor by any number,
group or collective of other men.
Therefore, each man exists by his own
right and for his own sake, not for
the sake of the group.
"Collectivism holds
that man has no rights; that his work,
his body and his personality belong to
the group; that the group can do with
him as it pleases, in any manner it
pleases, for the sake of whatever it
decides to be its own welfare.
Therefore, each man exists only by the
permission of the group and for the
sake of the group.
"These two
principles are the roots of two
opposite social systems. The basic
issue of the world today is between
these two systems." -Ayn Rand, Textbook
of Americanism
"It is not as late as you think. It
is merely early -- in the age of the
rebirth of individualism." -- Ayn Rand
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