Me too, David Thunder.
Thunder’s well thought-out comparative piece shows how collectives are not healthy places to be. Unless you live at the top, defining what the ‘greater good’ is and determining what the collective is to do to achieve that ‘good’.
There are numerous historical examples of the horrors of collectivism. But there are emerging modern day examples too. Like Canada.
There politicians have just declared an emergency and announced that anyone protesting their dictates, and supporters of those protesters, can be fined, arrested and have their bank accounts tampered with – for supporting terrorism.
It no longer matters that those politicians were, and are, creating a climate where they and the media, police, colleges, hospitals, shops and more can infringe on human rights for ‘the greater good’ – with no direct consequences for them.
It also no longer matters that the measures they imposed (masks, distancing, injections, privilege passes etc) were, and still are, demonstrably useless at managing the virus. 1
The spirit of collectivism is alive and well in political leaders like Trudeau, Macron, Sánchez, Biden, Ardern, Daniel Andrews (premier of Victoria, Australia) and plenty of other public officials, and they have made a scary amount of progress in installing collectivism as the reigning philosophy of their governments.
We Must Dare to Dream and Hope for a Better World
But we cannot afford to give up hope or resign ourselves to defeat. We must give ourselves the chance to dream and hope, against all odds, for a better world, just as civil rights activists like Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King did. We need to open up our imagination to what is best and most inspiring in humanity. We need to think beyond this dark moment in our history, when cruel, inhumane, and anti-scientific authorities seem to rule the roost.
We must engage in forward-looking thinking, and dare to conjure in our mind’s eye the sort of society we want to live in, and the sort of society we want our children and grandchildren to grow up in, once authoritarian and collectivist governments finally collapse under their own weight.
David Thunder, Feb 18th
