The title of this post comes from Evgeny Zamiatin’s We, a dystopian novel written in the 1921 Soviet Russia. The story is set in the distant future in the One State: a totalitarian society where “all live for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist.”

Zamiatin’s We had a big influence on Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. Of the three novels, though, We is more relevant to our current world. 2020 has been a year when individual rights of many people were violated and individual freedom taken away from them in the name of the “collective good.” Irrational, total lockdowns, quarantines, isolations, restrictions, curfews, (possibly-soon-forced-vaccinations), etc., are all examples of the Benevolent Yoke of the State: all done in the name of the “collective good.”

But what is a collective? Collective is simply a number of individuals. So, the “collective good” cannot be taken apart from the individual good. The “collective good” can only be attained through individual good. And the individual good is achieved only when individual rights are recognized, respected, and protected.

When individual rights become subordinate to the “collective good”, tyranny supplants democracy. Zamiatin’s We shows what the world of the “collective good” at the expense of personal rights looks like. It’s not the world I would want to live in:

Right is a function of might. Here we have our scale: on the one side an ounce, on the other a ton. On one side “I,” on the other “We,” the One State. Do you not see? To assume that I may have any “right” as far as the State is concerned, is like assuming that an ounce may equilibrate a ton in a scale! Hence the natural distribution: tons—rights, grams—duties. And the natural road from nothingness to greatness, is to forget that one is a gram and to feel that one is one-millionth of a ton!¹