So sacrifice the collective for the sake of the individual?
I’m saying how’s about we cooperate & mutually respect each other’s consents & outdo each other in bringing the good, beautiful, & true.
8 posts were split to a new topic: Ecmandu is the new god
Here’s something more my speed:
Concurring with Plato’s Republic, etc:
I have this paper regarding the Republic^ if anyone wants to discuss
Plato’s take… I’ve posted it before.
This is an interesting topic and one about which I think a lot. It takes one back to the old debate between Marx and Stirner, the socialist (collectivist) and the egoist (individualist). I’m currently developing a whole philosophy based on this, and my side is with individualism.
This is one thing contemporary society got right. Encouraging individualism and one’s perception that the whole world can’t be carried on one’s shoulder. If one has no sense of self worth, he won’t be able to attribute worth to the collective, and then the collective becomes a collection of perennially dissatisfied individuals.
I know you’re not part of this community anymore, but this is good. It touches on the core of the subject. The individual is the bodily reality. The collective is fiction, or rather, it’s a collection of other individuals perceived as a conscious whole.
That is an individuo-collectivist perspective that sees the value of a unified whole, versus a mere aggregate of individuals. The unity recognizes the value of the individuals, rather than dividing them into an aggregate. (Everyone also maintains their bodily integrity… rather than being smushed together into a playdough ball of formerly humanlike playdough bodies, heh.)
It’s an individualistic perspective that also take into account the existence of others.
…in a very wholesome, unified way.
That’s the core of it, but let me go deeper. The “collective” is an abstraction and our whole relation to it revolves around how we perceive/interpret our relationship with real, flesh and blood individuals who, in our imagination, it consists of. The “others” become something increasingly blurred and undefined the more we try to distance ourselves from the material reality of the body. That’s our starting point, our reference point. When we forget that the “others” are a physical reality, and just think of them in terms of abstraction, generalization, the “collective”, they really disappear. That’s why collectivist thinking oftentimes lead to a complete subjugation of individuals, the same individuals it is supposedly concerned about.
Marx, for instance, believed the subject is nothing without the collective. Ayn Rand believed the collective is nothing without the individual. Stirner had a more balanced view than both.
Happy Individual=1 person whose desires are governed by self=other
Mad Individual=1 person whose desires are at war with each other
Happy Collective=people who agree
Mad Aggregate=many bodies… maybe every body having a different reason they are mad at all the other bodies…agreeing on NOTHING…and so it’s this crazy warzone.
I thought you were evolving, but here we are again with this self=other delusion.
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Joke’s on you, ‘cause I understood that communication, just as (=) you (self) would want to understand the language someone (other) is speaking to you.
Yes girl, but understanding the other is understanding that’s another unique piece of existence.
hence… other… my guy
You equate the two. There are eight billion selfs in this world.
…aka others 
Pertinent:
For me, the individual self comes and must come first. But for a long time, it doesn’t come to the full perception of itself. So it interprets existence from top to bottom, and can even be indoctrinated to believe individual existence is a myth. That’s the Eastern heritage of humankind, freely adopted and reinterpreted by a plethora of Western thinkers. But if things were so straightforward and simple, no social tension would exist, and we would all be Chinese. It’s the perception that I am one thing and the outside world is another that gives birth to all sorts of social unrest.
I don’t think you should interpret different races as being necessarily the result of social unrest. Perhaps they were respecting each other’s VERY large, VERY extended families’ spaces so much that they spread far enough apart yada yada yada? That is why the different tribes of Israel had their own land allotments, and also respected their very distant relatives’ previous land allotments (unless they were instigated first).