THE DILEMMA OF COLLECTIVISM


"After conjuring up this vision of a Qualityless world, he was soon attracted to its resemblance to a number of social situations he had already read about. Ancient Sparta came to mind, Communist Russia and her satellites. Communist China, the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley and the 1984 of George Orwell. He also remembered people from his own experience who would have endorsed this Qualityless world. The same ones who tried to make him quit smoking. They wanted rational reasons for his smoking and, when he didn't have any, acted very superior, as though he'd lost face or something. They had to have reasons and plans and solutions for everything. They were his own kind. The kind he was now attacking. And he searched for a long time for a suitable name to sum up just what characterized them, so as to get a handle on this Qualityless world."

-Robert M. Pirsig, "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
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Organic Collectivism

Imagine that you are on vacation with the family and friends that you feel most comfortable with. Maybe some people who you'd love to see, but haven't seen in years are there as well. You've spent a great day together and now sit around a bonfire, tired, talking and laughing. Perhaps you've all had a bit, but just a bit, too much to drink. Somehow or another, someone works up the spirit to start singing a song, loud and clear. Then a second person, feeling up for anything, also jumps in. Then a third and then, you, enjoying all of this, join in as well. Soon, everyone is singing in a great singalong and no one feels embarassed or silly or has any personal inhibitions about the whole thing because everyone is feeling good and its a spontaneous, genuine moment. It should seem corny and silly, but you even find yourself a bit choked up. You're with people you love and this is what life is about. You won't forget this small moment, because life offers few and precious of them, and life, for everyone, is too short.

This is an example of natural, spontaneous, and welcome collectivism. This feeling of "togetherness" is exhilarating, intoxicating and perhaps transcendent. Probably such moments are better left without being put under the microscope, but I'd say that the exhilaration we feel at these moments quakes something ancient within us; the power of genuine and spontaneous communion in the moment. I suspect that such moments reverberate with us because they are reflective of the the natural collectivist side of our human nature.

There are larger examples of our collectivist nature.

In a small city of 70,000 people there will be board meetings, ordinances, laws, regulations, taxes, institutions, traditions, communities and a whole plethera of trends and activities that constantly take place to ensure that everything runs smoothly for 70,000 people.

The same doesn't seem to apply, though, in a situation like this:


This is not, by definition, a peaceful environment. Generally speaking, though, 70,000 people can gather together and watch a sporting event without too much of a problem and without being handed a guidebook on how to behave when they come through the door. It's also useful to note that many of those attending the game are in a high state of excitement with adrenaline pumping, ready for action and open to new experience. Many are heavily invested in devotion that leads to an extremely divided environment; the people attending are adamantly rooting for opposing teams. Not to mention that the people rooting for the visiting team are probably outnumbered 5 to 1. Isolated incidents do occur because no human system is perfect. Still, peace prevails overall. The worst has occurred in this scenario, but 9,999 out of 10,000 times, no one has to pick up bodies after the game.1

This is spontaneous, organic collectivism taking place. Those attending have come with a common purpose; to see the game. They've done so of their own free will and haven't been inundated with 10,000 rules and regulations. Usually, everything runs smoothly from there. The people attending the game are cooperating around the common purpose of watching the game. The common purpose itself seems to keep everything in order. This scenario is desirable and having an ultimate shared goal, just peacefully watching the game, while still rooting for your team, wins the day. This phenomenon has occurred with many millions of people participating each and every week for decades.

So, when we look at these completely organic, spontaneous scenarios it seems that collectivism is a very desirable state for humans to exist in. I don't think its necessary to engage in overly idealistic babble regarding the whole phenomenon, but it does seem to reinforce within us the positive notion that we are a human family and that such occurrences are desirable. The stadium scenario also exemplifies that we are able, in the vast majority of such scenarios, to recognize distinct differences between us, even when those differences are right in our face.

In the 1960s, young people looked to their future and saw drudgery in the capitalistic American lifestyle that had been laid out for them in the prosperous years following World War II. They rebelled against a society that defined a ritualized lifestyle as prosperity while demanding that blacks sit at the back of the bus and young people die in an interventionist war against communism on the other side of the world.

This fired spontaneous, communal spirit among many of the youth of America. In the spirit of the time, a relatively small, fenced in ticket-selling concert venture in upstate New York turned into a spontaneous gathering of hundreds of thousands of people attending a three day concert that shut down the New York State Thruway system.



Not long after, Coca-Cola produced perhaps what is the most famous American television commercial of all time. One of the greatest forces of capitalism in the world grabbed hold of the power of spontaneous collectivism and displayed it to the world in a powerful and meaningful display. The commericial included a very catchy tune emphasizing companionship, peace and harmony with the refrain "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" being sung by a crowd of young people from a multitude of races and nationalities.


It's troubling and confusing to realize that these lovers of peace, equality and freedom were the originators of the authoritarian, closed minded political forces we found ourselves up against today. How did this happen?

At the time, such people were considered to be "Liberals". They smoked cigarettes (amongst other things), embraced America's founding principles of freedom and equality and rebelled against rigid and unreasonable American traditionalism and authoritarianism, including government authoriatarianism. I'm not aware of any widespread, articulated, anti-capitalist notions circulating within this movement at the time. In at least a sense, these people were what we would consider today to be, not "liberals", but "Libertarians", despite the notion of Libertarianism not quite being born yet, but conceived in this time.

Somehow, though, I don't get the sense that most of those who remain from this peaceful, chain-smoking movement are today Libertarians, or chain smoking. Today, they are called what they've always been called; "Liberals". The ideas around the movement of that time have changed, but the label has stuck and the people in question seem to have, quite inexplicably, followed the label despite the completely different ideas that the label today represents. Same people. Same label. Completely different thoughts and ideas. (In fact, the term "liberal" has been rendered meaningless by overuse.)

There's an inexplicable, but undeniable thread here.

You can not reduce the thoughts and ideas to the people holding these thoughts and ideas. The thoughts and ideas have changed, but the indentities of the people in question have not. If you can not reduce a common phenomena to its constituent elements, you have Emergence. At the same time, if you can group a common set of thoughts and ideas into a comprehensible sytem, you have a memeplex.

Memeplexes follow rules similar to natural selection. The people are still the same people. They haven't "grown" or "progressed", rather a memeplex has emerged and acted downward upon them, like a puppetmaster of their own unconscious construction.


The drawing above is an unconscious doodle, drawn by the hand of President Richard Nixon. Nixon spent his hours endlessly pondering the problem of Communism and the war in Vietnam. He saw that the peace loving young people who were gaining continual acceptance in America appeared to be the same people who were gathered by the thousands outside The White House to protest the Vietnam War. Nixon found himself perplexed and paranoid. He sent his "plumbers" out to find the communist agents behind the protest uprising. No one was able to report a communist connection to the peaceful demonstrations. Nixon's paranoia spiraled until he dragged the American presidency down with him in the Watergate scandal.



Nixon is said to be one of the most intelligent men ever to hold the office of President. He's also been portrayed in terms that seem contradictory. He was a pensive ponderer, but seemed to lack a calling card of people with such a mindset; scruples, or moral hesitancy. The shadow that has been cast by Nixon's crimes against America seems to have left the man himself inponderable as anything other than self-obsessed and paranoid. Is it possible, though, that Nixon knew something intuitively about the nature of communism that he couldn't ever explain? Could it be that Nixon's intuition told him that a powerful memeplex was forming its emergent pattern in the form of those protesters, and he had no way and no words to explain such a thing? Could it be that this feeling enveloped Nixon to the point that he wasn't able to deny it and this feeling took control of him?

Then again, maybe he was just a paranoid jerk.

Coerced Collectivism

So, what is the problem with Collectivism?

The problem is that this isn't the correct question.

There's nothing wrong with spontaneous, organic collectivism.It's completely natural and we wouldn't be here without it. Perhaps nothing could be more desirable. Collective behavior will occur, even when individuality is given primary emphasis, but it will occur because it represents the selfish interest of those participating. It is an emergent phenomenon. When people have a shared goal or interest, this phenomena is extremely powerful and emotionally arresting. Spontaneous collectivism is natural and desirable. It has a network effect, like the first person to stand for a standing ovation or the fourth of fifth person down the line to break the barrier of personal embarassment to engage in a collective song. Such scenarios make for transcendent emotional moments.

Some people, though, only see the ends in these moments and have no appreciation for the means that created them. If you've ever spontaneously treated your wife to a bouquet of flowers and both her and you very happy, nothing would kill the pleasant memory of that moment more than her saying two weeks later "I liked that when you bought me flowers. Tomorrow, buy me flowers again."

The whole thing is rendered fake and forced and it loses all quality and you suddenly have no desire to do any such thing.

Similarly, anti-smoking demands that you quit smoking but refuses you the pleasure of ever feeling as if you made this choice, or any choice, yourself. The issue isn't so much smoking, but the fact that some force has decided that it is going to trump up any excuse it can come up with to negate your autonomy for the sake of coercing colectivism. Also, it uses the example of those with a weaker sense of individuality, who come by the barrel, to justify your treatment.

If you have cultivated nothing else in your life, you've probably sought to cultivate the ability to be autonomous, to do things on your own, to have a mind that is properly prepared to deal with situations as a matter of personal growth and maturity. Nothing could be more insulting than institutionalizing the idea that you are somehow none of these things by scrutinizing your personal indiosyncracies... and everyone has personal idiosyncracies.

This pattern seems to be the result of a force of its own, and it is observable throughout society and throughout history, but it does not occur in nature. It is a uniquely human tendency to overemphasize form as an end in itself, rather than emphasizing form as a natural product of function.

For instance, rather than admitting that functional items like cell phone towers and towels are simply going to have to exist as a matter of progress and utility, we force such things into being assinine attempts at form, thereby killing any of the future creative potential that exists for improvement that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing.





The franken-pine cell phone tower just looks stupid. It screams of a hatred of technology and progress. I can't tell you how many times I've found myself in a bathroom with decorative towels, but no functional towel to wipe my wet hands on.

This is forced emergence and forced collectivism. It emphasizes form over function. It emphasizes the ends without any acknowledgement of the means. It's like making yourself a doctorate degree to hang on the wall with a word processing program, rather than having gone through the tough work of earning it. It's built out of a mentality that's all about destination, and has no regard for at all for journey. It's like taping wings on a caterpillar and calling it a butterfly.

Modern collectivist political reasoning seems to be born of the same overemphasis on form. A spontaneous sing-along or the chanting of lyrics at a rock concert give us a feeling of communality around freely shared emotions. To engage in such a thing by the direction of others or by force seeks to take on the form of spontaneous communion, without recognizing that it has robbed the communal effect of any sincere, spontaneous collective meaning. Forcing such occurences isn't communion or cooperation; it's slavery.

I believe that confusing means with ends, confusing effects with causes, and confusing forms with functions is what has caused Evil to exist in the world, whether it be 5000 years ago or today. This tendency appears to me to be what we commonly call "Evil".

Anti-smoking appears to share all of its characteristics. More specifically, anti-smoking has the characteristics of coerced collectivism. In turn, coerced collectivism seems to be the constant path of least resistance that this Evil virus exploits and uses to overwhelm the entire system of human affairs. Somehow, though, we fail to acknowledge its existence. Instead, we call it names; fascism, totalitarianism, communism. In our effort to stop such phenomenon, we look at the causes and effects, as if they are individual anomalies that can be avoided by the simple recognition of what brings them about. Meanwhile, history seems to keep bashing us over the head with the fact these occurrences aren't anomalies; they're the normal course of affairs, the actual paradigm that we live in. Only our unwillingness to accept this fact and our willingness to create defenses against it creates the illusion that is somehow unreal, an abstraction of worst case scenarios.

A singalong, a communal spirit, is a natural and desirable form of collectivism. Collectivism is not "evil". Rather, "Evil" is a force of its own, akin to a virus, and it seeks out collectivism to exploit itself. Why? For the same reason that is easy to herd cattle or sheep. The natural collectivist nature of such creatures make them easy to cage and control. Collectivism creates a path of least resistance that invites the easy spread of the memetic virus via imitation and proximity, whether it be physical or ideological, can only help.

Communism didn't begin with Stalin; it began with Marx. Marx didn't want to kill over 50 million people.

Stalin wasn't a maker of Communism, he was a product of it, and he exploited his environment.

Hitler was not the originator of race supremacy and anti-semitism. Rather, he exploited these things and rose from them.

How did they accomplish such attrocities?

They promised a utopia of organic collectivism. They promised a flock.

They delivered via coerced collectivism. They created a herd.

Herds, in and of themselves, aren't evil. Evil, though, seems to love herds.
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1. Europeans may be scoffing at this notion of sporting events being peaceful. I write in terms of the American phenomena. The reason that a disparity arises between the two cultures is relevant for consideration in the context of what I've written, but I'm purposely sidestepping it here.

2. The History Channel documentary "Nixon: A Presidency Revealed" is my source for drawing this thread between the use of Nixon's "plumbers" to both seek out communists in student uprisings and commit the Watergate break-in. I was not able to find a source on the internet that drew the same causal chain, though I am under the impression that it exists in some books. Nixon's Vice President, Spiro Agnew, definitely drew such communist connections to the student protests. This is not to say that such connections existed and I believe that they probably didn't, at least not in a way that had any kind of long term intention.

Additional Note: I wrote an entire post that gives a down and dirty summation of how Collectivists will often use Game Theory to justify collectivism as a productive system, while conveniently making no distinction between what I call "Organic Collectivism" and "Coerced Collectivism". I will post this later as an afternote to "Evil: Part V". I can promise you that few or none will read it. I will post it later, nonetheless, for the sake of completeness.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: WinstonSmith,

Just a recollection, for what it's worth. Winston's Evil, Part V reminded me of a story my ex-wife was fond of telling.

When Hurricane Hugo hit this coast, the traffic lights were out. Minor accidents were common, and the police were too busy to do anything about them. In every instance she witnessed, people comported themselves better on their own than they would have under normal circumstances. Everyone was civil... good-humored, even. People got out of their cars and helped clear the streets. Everyone laughed. Everyone helped. They did what had to be done.

Maybe anarchy isn't such a bad idea after all.

Excellent point Robert! Societies with strong family and community ties, such as Greece, have far less crime and less need for actual cops because everyone feels accountable to each other. When this is self-organinizing system is disrupted and we don't know or trust our neighbors and feel we can rely only on the police, there is a distrust of everyone including law enforcement because we have given them unlimited power. The net result is the loss of freedom and security, which Ben Franklin warned about.

Thanks, Nick.

Something else I remember about my ex's story: in a routine accident, under normal circumstances, somebody (or multiple somebodies) takes out their cellphone and calls the police, because insurance companies want you to do that. The cars sit where they are, blocking traffic, until an officer arrives to take statements and measure skidmarks and stuff. Time elapsed for the cop to get there and finish doing his thing: usually at least an hour, maybe two.

Time elapsed when people simply exchanged their insurance information and cleared the street: five minutes, maybe ten.

In the time spent waiting for the police to show up, the drivers rarely talk. They get away from each other and sit around looking glum. (When I was a teenager my mom used to tell me, "If you're in an accident, DON'T BABBLE! Don't say 'It was my fault,' or anything like that. Keep your mouth shut.")

Without the cops, there was no such nonsense. The drivers and the witnesses sorted things out themselves.

I don't know how long those conditions would survive if that was standard procedure. Certainly, something about a disaster draws people together. There's a bonding under adversity thing. It's a shame, really.

I wonder if it's possible to instill that kind of sense of community without a catastrophe being necessary. Seems it would require a totally different social model than what we have now.

It'll probably take a catastrophe to build one, assuming we even can.

quote:

I don't know how long those conditions would survive if that was standard procedure.

Excellent. This a great observation that gets straight to my point in "Evil Part V".

You'll notice even in popular culture that there's a powerful resistance threshold to monopolizing or institutionaling an organically collective phenomena thereby transforming it into a coerced collective phenomena.

We even have words and phrases to express this. We call it "backlash", "selling out" or "jumping the shark". It's what separates what is "cool" from what is "uncool". This happens with music all the time. A great song is transformed into tired crap almost exclusively by the virtue of its mass popularity.

I remember when I was in high school and chance brought me into contact with the mayor of my small town. He told me that he was interested in the thoughts of people my age and wanted to know why teenagers weren't visiting the youth center he'd set up. I pointed out that young people are somewhat resistant to the idea of being recognized as such. So, he said "So, what if we just called it 'The Center'?" I told him that I wasn't sure why, but I didn't think that would work. There was nothing wrong with his youth center except for the fact that it was an institutional entity and young people try to avoid institutional entities without really having any articulated reasons for doing so. The youth center just wasn't "cool". The word "cool" isn't even "cool" anymore because of its recognition by institutions.

Things don't even have to be touched by institutions, they lose something intangible and likeable simply by virtue of becoming viewable on the institutional radar. The engine of the phenomena dies somehow. It's like the crowd intuitively knows--"this collective phenomena is now in a realm where it can be coerced. Drop it immediately."

I was too young to think about such things at the time, but I now wonder if that Coca-Cola commercial was the nail in the coffin of the sixties movement.

Regarding the traffic scenario that Robert points out, it seems in this way that the actual knowledge of institutional rules may in fact create the disparities that he points out.

WinstonSmith: "The word 'cool' isn't even 'cool' anymore because of its recognition by institutions."

Your post made me laugh, Winston, because I'm an old fart--old enough to remember the fall from grace of a similar word at about the same time: "groovy." When the Saturday morning TV ads for hyper-sweetened children's cereal started tossing that word out at every opportunity (usually via trash-talking snot-noses wearing eye-watering bright colors and wearing goofy hats with sunglasses built into the brims and stuff), it was all over for "groovy." I understood this instinctively at the age of eight, although at the time I wouldn't have been able to articulate it beyond saying "That's dumb," and thinking that grown-up ad executives who thought they were "hip" and understood "The Youth Of Today" were pathetic. Those ads were created by middle-aged rich executives for middle-aged rich executives, and the only thing about them that was not pathetic, I am certain, was their astronomical salaries.

This phenomenon amuses me, because as I pointed out somewhere else on this board, when I was in high-school, only the hoods smoked. Now, every single person I know between the ages of fourteen and twenty--most of them high achievers with solid records of academic excellence--are smokers. Every. Single. One.

I do have to wonder, are the antis that stupid? The politicians? The pharmaceutical and non-profit executives who fund this stuff? They made this backlash. Surely they are smart enough to see it....

...but, maybe not, because another thing stands out about the young people I know today: when it comes to those idiotic, snoopy questionnaires they hand out in the schools ("Do you smoke? Do you drink? Do you smoke pot? Are you sexually active? How often do you....?") they will cheerfully lie through their teeth. They actually seem to get a kick out of buggering the statistics. It's not so much that they're trying to hide (those questionnaires are supposedly anonymous), it's just that they're sophisticated enough (in entirely different ways than my own generation was sophisticated--in some ways they are more naive) that it amuses them to give their enemies erroneous data.

The Blinkered Guardians of Morality and Public Health are probably stupid enough to think they're getting accurate data. Or maybe it doesn't matter much to them in any event, because if they want to ban smoking, drugs, this, that, or you name it, they will. Bottom line, they don't have to worry about how many people they put out in the street or even in prison, because they are big swinging dicks, and things like "health" and "the children" are not really the name of the game.

Protecting their own money rivers and phony-baloney jobs, is.

They don't have to fool the kids. They only have to fool other middle-aged imbeciles, and keep the ever-growing snowball of lies and fascism rolling.

They are doing a very effective job of that.

In relation to your point, Nick M's point regarding organic traditional community values and the loss of them has come to my mind.

I watched Michael Moore's "Sicko" last night and it reinforced these thoughts. Without going into great detail regarding the film (which I may in a separate post), I found the problem with "Sicko" to be more than a lie by omission; the film is blissfully unaware of any ommission. The film seems to be asking "Why not have universal health care?" Other countries have it? "Why not?"

This brought to mind the Robert Kennedy quote:

"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask "Why?". I dream of things that never were, and ask "Why not?".

It's becoming very clear to me that there's a problem with proceeding forward just because no one can say definitively "why not?".

I think this plays into my theme here. We kind of live under the delusion that trends occur because there's some group of people who intended everything to be just as it is and that any imperfections are intended as well. Rather, these trends are a result of "the course of human events"; just like Jefferson wrote.

I think the sixties had alot of people running around asking "Why not?" They were demanding there to be reasons and explanations for the rigid traditions set in place. In the absence of reasons and explanations, they said "well, there's no reason to listen to any of this. I'm off to find a new way of doing things."

The conservative side of me is really shining through here, I know. Please don't misunderstand. I'm not trying to say that we should all dogmatically follow tradition. Anything but. I am saying, though, that this "Why not?" mentality that sees all traditionalism as an enemy doesn't seem to recognize that organic values come about by organic means. For instance, I don't think that our society was coerced into the tradition of a "nuclear family". Certainly there was need for some common sense tolerance, but somehow the tolerance became confused with destroying the whole institution to suit the needs of those who couldn't fit into it or didn't want to.

Now, right here, at this moment while your reading what I just wrote, you'll notice some discomfort with what I've just said. 1. It seems narrowminded, and perhaps it is. 2.There's another side to this scale though; if the traditional family unit is destroyed, it leaves people to rely more and more on institutions.

This tough sticking point is what I mean by a "path of least resistance". Moral ambiguity seems to leave a hole wide open for the consequences of making "Why not?" the sole justification for doing things in the world. It does this via incrementalism. We call this the path of "unintended consequences." (See Evil Part III).

That's enough. I'm leaving myself open a bit to keep it short and, perhaps, to provoke a response.