As unpopular as pattern recognition is these days, I can’t help but spot one threaded all throughout political discourse, that’s almost as common as it is damaging. Commentators—pro and amateur alike—“deliberate” to the point of screaming, coming to blows, ending friendships, dismissing entire demographics as potential friends, becoming estranged from family members, and so on.
What are they arguing about? Things along the lines of America’s role on the world stage, Iran’s control of the Straits of Hormuz, Israel’s influence on the US’s foreign policy, how do we get society back on track, what economic policies best serve the public interest, how do we promote the general welfare, and what do we do about our national debt?
But what if these concepts and entities bringing about all this mental and emotional (sometimes physical) turmoil don’t actually exist? The problems are very real—and kudos to those motivated to discuss real issues—but this language used to delineate them obscures the dynamics of just who and what are involved, and therefore, the realities of what’s happening.
The plain facts are: There is no such thing as “America/the US,” “Israel,” “Iran,” “society,” or “the public.” There is no “general welfare,” and a nation does not, and cannot, have debt. Such claims indicate the linguistic/ideological/psychological disorder of collectivism: conceptualizing and interacting with human beings in terms of groups rather than as individuals.
These terms are often invoked, innocently enough, as shorthand abstractions; generalizations for conversational efficiency. But—lying, obfuscation, and other deceit aside—imprecision in your words can throw your assertions outside the bounds of objective reality, a realm where their truth and validity become impossible. So, purposefully or not, the assertions end up as tools of deception, meant to conceal the situation’s realities and context.
A “country” is a marked-out piece of geography, wherein many people live, presided over by a cabal of bureaucrats called a “state.” It does not have interests; it does not take actions; it has no will; it doesn’t attack things; it’s—and I hate using these words—a human construct. Only individuals do these things, and this is not just a semantic gripe.
When speakers refer to countries or nations this way they could mean the landmass itself, but probably not. They might be referring to the whole enclosed population, but that’s also unlikely. Almost always, they’re talking about the government. And this farce of conflating yourself and everyone you know with your government redistributes the responsibility for that government’s actions and policies among all parties within its borders, providing great cover for the actual guilty parties. (“We’ve accrued quite a national deficit, haven’t we? Good thing we owe it to ourselves!”).
Saying that America attacked Iran is incorrect. Saying that “we” attacked Iran is egregiously wrong. Elements of the US military did that, on orders from a few state actors, in the US and elsewhere.
On the social side of things: There is no public, there is no society, welfare, debt, interest, nor anything else, can be “general” or belong to a “public.” The mentality that accepts these ideas is the same one that brought us such charming sentiments as racism, Marxist classism, and xenophobia. It makes ardent sports fans declare an automatic hatred of rival cities’ residents, and marks inhabitants of certain neighborhoods as “one of those.”
Collectivism is a tool of misdirection and acquisition of the unearned, meant to indict the innocent and exonerate the guilty, to reward the lazy at the expense of the productive, to siphon virtue from the righteous to the wicked, and provide a general free ride to anyone who’s done nothing but craftily become associated with the right collective.
This notion expands all the way out to human consciousness itself, which is and can only ever be (as far as we know) an individual experience. There is no such thing as a collective brain. Murray Rothbard outlined this fallacy perfectly in For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto:
[O]ne of the prime errors in social theory is to treat “society” as if it were an actual existing entity. “Society” is sometimes treated as a superior or quasi-divine figure with overriding “rights” of its own; at other times as an existing evil which can be blamed for all the ills of the world. . . Treating society as a thing that chooses and acts, then, serves to obscure the real forces at work.
And he further concretized it in the more academic work Individualism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, which dives ultra-deep into this line of thought, its roots in scientism, and broader implications with this timeless example of what he calls the “organismic fallacy”:
[D]uring the gold-standard era, how often did the cry go up that “England” or “France” or some other country was in mortal danger because “it” was “losing gold”? What was actually happening was that Englishmen or Frenchmen were voluntarily shipping gold overseas and thus threatening the banks in those countries with the necessity of meeting obligations (to pay in gold) which they could not possibly fulfill. But the use of the organismic metaphor converted a grave problem of banking into a vague national crisis for which every citizen was somehow responsible.
This is a good example of the government framing an issue in collectivist terms to disperse the accountability so far and wide that it implicated the entire national population. Everybody was responsible, therefore, nobody was.
