Key ideas: Published in 1952. Back to: One Is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist - by Frank Chodorov
Our own revolution, the one that seems to have started on the first day of January, 1900, is identified by the doctrine of collectivism. Briefly, the doctrine holds that improvement in our way of living is attainable only if we discount the individual. The mass is all that matters.
The doctrine does not deny the existence of the individual, but relegates him to the status of a means, not an end in himself. To support itself, the doctrine insists that the individual is only the product of his environment, which is the mass, that he could not exist outside of it, that he could not function except as an accessory to the mass.
The mass, on the other hand, is lacking in self-propelling force, and needs pushing. For this purpose a political machinery comes into existence, presumably by way of something called the democratic process. The individual serves the march of progress by submitting himself to the direction of that device. In the end, the doctrine holds, the individual will prosper because of the equal distribution of the abundance that comes from collective action.
That is the central idea of our current tradition. It is the idealization of the mass and the negation of the individual; its panacea, its method of realization, is political direction; its goal, as always, is the undefined Good Society…
The end-result of this kind of thinking, the practical result, is the worship of the State. This is a necessary consequence of the idealization of the mass, for since the mass can operate only under political power, then that power becomes the necessary condition of all life.
Just how far our revolution has gone along this path is seen when we make comparison with that of the nineteenth century. The dominant doctrine of that era held the individual to be the be-all and end-all of all life. He was the only reality.
Society was not a thing in itself, but was merely an agglomeration of individuals working cooperatively for their mutual betterment; it cannot be greater than the sum of its parts. The individual was not the product of his environment, but the responsible master of it.
The nineteenth century had a dogma, too, and it went by the name of “unalienable rights.” These were held to be personal prerogatives, inhering in the individual by virtue of his existence and traceable to God alone. Government had nothing to do with rights except to see that individuals did not transgress them; and that was the only reason for government. Its functions were entirely negative, like a watchman’s, and when it presumed to act positively it was not minding its business; it must be called to account…
The individualism of the nineteenth century suffered considerable mayhem, even from those who paid it most homage—the advocates of laissez-faire. Their insistence on their right to do as they pleased turned out to be the right to exploit others, a right they could not exercise without the help of the very State which they were pledged to hold in leash. They built up the power of the State by demanding privilege from it.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, this privilege-business had given individualism a bad character. The reality was far short of the earlier dream. Youth was quick to detect the fallacies in individualism as it was practised, condemned it and went to work on a replacement.
The cureall they hit upon was the doctrine of equalitarianism. Curiously, they promoted this new idea in the name of natural rights: if we are all endowed with equal quantity of natural rights then it follows that we all have an equal right to what everybody else has.That was, at bottom, not only a revolt against the injustices of privilege, but also a rationalization of covetousness. At any rate, equalitarianism called for an extension of privilege, not the abolition of it; and since privilege is impossible without political enforcement, the equalitarians turned to State power for help. All kinds of reforms were advocated, and all of them strengthened political power at the expense of social power
It never occurred to those who, like Dickens, struck a blow for bigger and better “poor laws” that they were preparing the ground for social security, which reduces the individual to wardship under the State. Meanwhile, Karl Marx was developing his rationale for collectivism. The collectivistic revolution was born in the matrix of individualism.
Take the case of liberalism, which was the political expression of the individualistic thought-pattern. At the beginning of the last century, when liberalism was emerging from adolescence, its only tenet was that political intervention in the affairs of men is bad. It traced all the disabilities that men suffered from to the power of the State. Hence, it advocated the whittling away of that power, without reserve, and proposed to abolish laws, without replacement.
This negativeness was all right until the liberals got into places of power, and then it occurred to them that a little positive action might be good; they discovered that only the laws enacted by non-liberals were bad.
The fact is—and this is something the State worshippers are prone to overlook—that the comforts, emoluments and adulation that go with political office have great influence on political policy; for the State consists of men, and men are, unfortunately, always human. And so, liberalism mutated into its exact opposite by the end of the nineteenth century. Today it is the synonym of Statism.
It appears that the bitcoiners (especially those calling themselves “maximalists”) are repeating the same mistakes. When Bitcoin emerged, bitcoiners believed that government control over money is bad. They traced many problems in Society to the power of the State to create and control money. Hence, they advocated for Peer-to-Peer Digital Cash (i.e. outside of government control).
Today the bitcoiners got into the place of power: “The day Bitcoiners have been waiting for is finally here. Donald Trump, the first-ever pro-Bitcoin president of the United States, is officially being inaugurated today, January 20, 2025.” and they are “eagerly watching to see his promises come to life.”
And just like the liberals of the 19th century, bitcoin-maximalists overlook the fact “the comforts, emoluments and adulation that go with political office have great influence on political policy; for the State consists of men, and men are, unfortunately, always human.” Bitcoin, as it is today, has a high chance of mutating into the exact opposite and becoming the government surveillance coin. In fact, due to its public ledger, it is on that path already.To predict with any accuracy the tradition of the twenty-first century would require the equipment of a prophet. But, and here again relying on the evidence of history, we are on safe ground in anticipating a renaissance of individualism. For, the pendulum of socio-political thought has swung to and fro over the same arc since men began to live in association, and there is no warrant for believing that it will fly off in a new direction.