The fallacy - and imminent death - of excessive individualism

In my younger days, I was a staunch libertarian (both politically and socially) and believed strongly in the freedom to do what you want, with minimal interference from the government and society.   To a college student just spreading his wings as an independent adult and drinking from the Fountainhead of writers espousing such beliefs, it was a heady, addicting mix and catered perfectly to the ego of youth with a long, blank canvas ahead:  it offered the promise of being able to do whatever one wanted.

Except for one slight problem:  the idea of complete individualism is a load of nonsense, a hangover from the Hellenic days.

Let's take a look at pack behavior in animals.    A pack is successful when all members of the pack put their interests subordinate to the interest of the pack as a whole.  And the species that have succeeded as pack animals are the ones where this principle works.

Now, we humans seem to have this inexplicable belief that our sentience means that we are above the laws of nature under which we have evolved, and that our individual liberties supersede the needs of society as a whole.    

As long as there was room for growth, this was not really an issue.   Society expanded and the needs of the individual never clashed significantly with the needs of the society, except in isolated cases here or there.    However, now that is changing - there is no further room for expansion.

Pack (tribal) identity involves shared values and beliefs - something that gives a sense of "Us".    Earlier, different packs could coexist because they had room to do so (physical as well as behavioral).   With population growth and the boom of the information era, that sense of space is disappearing.   And so matters are starting to come to a head, and there is a systemic conflict arising between these two elements.

The impending environmental disaster towards which we are hurtling is a good example of this.   We know steps need to be taken to fix it.   However, as it currently stands, the short-term cost to each individual of taking drastic steps to curb this exceeds the benefits, which are long-term and likely to be reaped by future generations.   And so what happens?   Nothing.  

As an example - for a country like India, with a relatively smaller land mass and one of the highest population densities in the world, the best long-term solution would be to institute measures to reduce the population.    This would be for the benefit of the society and future generations - but not so good for the people who would be denied the ability to have children.     The cost to the individual is deemed too high, even though no one can argue that the long-term benefit to society would be undeniable.

[Note - I am not advocating this.  I am using this as an example of the cost/benefit analysis]

To an extent, I can understand why we believe in the primacy of individual rights:  the idea that you or I could be crushed under the guise of expedite necessity is a frightening thought.    Nor am I espousing that there are no individual rights, period - without any individual benefit to being in a society (be it shelter from predators, ability to hunt successfully or have access to social media), no individual of any species would ever be a part of the pack.    The benefits of being in a pack (aka, society) must exceed the costs of being in that pack.

And that brings us to my point - the two have to be in balance:  in some cases, society's requirements may take priority over the rights of an individual, and in other cases, it is the other way around.    The idea that individual rights automatically take precedence over society is a socially untenable construct.

And this goes beyond just harming other people.    Society has implicit rules for behavior which go beyond "You cannot physically harm someone else".  

You cannot live in a society and realize all the benefits that come from this (technology, infrastructure, medical care, etc) and then say that you do not owe society anything beyond the bare minimum.   As i mentioned earlier, being a part of a pack or tribe goes beyond merely saying "I will not harm members of the pack".   It involves becoming a part of the shared values/beliefs of that pack.

As it stands - there are too many packs and the 'space' (physical or otherwise) to hold them is running out.     A study of animal behavior and history tells us that there are 2 potential solutions:

1)  Conflict, which will reduce the number of packs to a more sustainable number.

2)  Aggregation of packs into larger ones, thereby reducing the scope of conflict - for this to happen, some of the differences in idealogy and beliefs between various packs will have to be subsumed in the interest on greater good.

Interestingly, the trend in society seems to bear this out.   Look at what is happening to individual privacy, one of the biggest foundations of individualism.    A hundred years ago, people had virtually full control over their privacy.   Then came computers and Citizen ID Cards, passports and social security numbers.   Then came Google & advanced computing (facial recognition, location tagging, data mining).   We gave up significant chunks of our privacy (and hence individualism) in order to stay relevant in a changing world.  

At this point, most arguments for privacy (eg, Aadhar) are pretty much exercises in intellectual masturbation - the same people who decry this also submit their biometric data for passports and visas, provide their entire personal history to Google and accept that their earnings and spendings are being recorded for tax purposes - regardless of whether you like this or not, it is something that cannot be avoided.

To someone from a hundred years in the past, today's society is going to be frighteningly close to an Orwellian nightmare, where the government and private corporations have access to frightening amounts of personal data (did you know that Google's analytics are so advanced that, for shared household computers, they can tell who is using the computer based on their browsing habits?).      Yet for the new generation, this is pretty much how things have been.

Does anyone really think things will get better from here?