On Promoting Individualism - by Frank Chodorov

I was talking to a group of deplorers. There is no dearth of them these days, what with the national passion for pushing power on the government. This group, however, was most concerned with the spread of collectivistic bilge in our schools and colleges. Of a certainty, what we are getting in the way of legislation and propaganda is the result of what has been learned and is being taught. It follows that any change in the direction of both legislation and public thought must begin with education. Something had to be done about it.

One man suggested the establishment of a College of Individualism, as a sort of intellectual powerhouse to feed ideas to other disseminators. Innocently, I asked the question: what is individualism?…

The thing to do, then, is to pack the faculty with dyed-in-the-wool individualists and let each formulate his own course. The students would get a full dose of individualism whatever they studied.

What is an individualist?

This idea posed a new question: what is an individualist? Is he born or made?…

If individualism is not an acquired characteristic, but is grounded in one’s personality, what can education do about it? Nothing more than to give articulation to what the student already feels.

For instance, if he instinctively finds regulation repugnant, he will be helped no end by an understanding of the doctrine of natural rights; conversely, if he is a regimenter at heart, he will rationalize that doctrine into a myth.

The purpose of teaching individualism, then, is not to make individualists but to find them. Rather, to help them find themselves.

If a student takes readily to such values as the primacy of the individual, the free market place, or the immorality of taxation, he is an individualist; if he swallows hard, he must be counted a recruit for the other side.

Their hatred of Communism does not make them individualist

At this point, someone brought up a current phenomenon: the increasing number of deserters from the Communist camp. If these recanters came to Communism by natural selection, how could they throw it off? Or, did they? Is an intellectual conversion capable of purging an innate inclination?

The books written by these “exes” give a clue to the answer. One does not get from their confessions of sin, or exposes of Soviet skulduggery, the idea that the authors are done with collectivism. Their sneering references to capitalism indicate that they are of the same opinion still. Communism, they will admit, is Socialism gone hog-wild, but they do not seem capable of recognizing this as an inevitable consequence. Their hatred of Communism does not make them individualists.

Consider another phenomenon: the increased number of refugees fleeing Putin’s Russia since 2022. Watching videos of those refugees who ended up in the West, you can often hear that one of the reasons they like it in the West is because they feel that “the State here takes care of their people.”

And so again, one does not get the idea that these refugees are done wtih collectivism. Their hatred of Putinism does not make them individualists. They do not seem capable of recognizing that Putinism is the consequence of collectivism. Putin, on the other hand, understands if well: “our people still have an element of collectivism very strongly present in their hearts and souls.” (Source)

The “right-wing” socialist is another case in point. The hatred he harbors for Communism is intense, but only because he looks upon it as treason. He condemns Stalin and his crowd because they have, forsooth, betrayed the Marxist ideal. In the hands of good and true Socialists—right-wingers, of course—the Russian “experiment” of 1918 would by now have come up with a shining demonstration of the Socialist promise. No amount of logic can convince him that the only possible result of Marxism in practice is Russia, as is.

All the evidence points to the collectivist as a breed, not a product. Which is also true of the individualist. The main characteristic of the one is an urge to ride herd on mankind, while the other is inclined to give mankind a wide berth. The collectivist idealizes group behavior because he feels an inadequacy in himself; he must be part of a mob and therefore he organizes and joins. The individualist abhors labels…

The function of education

Only education can give the right answer; for the function of education is to bring to the surface what nature has im- planted in the person. If the educational machinery of the country had not been overrun by the collectivists (operating under cover of “academic freedom”), if individualism were given a fair share of the curriculum, we could easily find out how many of us prefer freedom, how many of us are destined to be mob material.

Returning to our group of deplorers, we got around to the need of stirring up an interest in the individualistic philoso- phy on the college campus. To be sure, we knew that the younger children were being subjected to the cacophony of collectivism, and a thorough job of saving must include the lower grades, even the kindergarten. But, immediacy sug- gested throwing a lifeline to adolescent individualists, those who will have a hand in shaping the world directly ahead.