Collectivism

 Here's a word that is quite new to my vocabulary, so new that whenever I want to use it, the word fails to come to mind. I hate when that happens.

The word is "collectivism".

Wikipedia seems like an ideal source for a definition of this particular word: Collectivism

The thing is, collectivism is new to my worldview. It's not that it has been foreign to my life. I have been surrounded by it from the first time I entered a public school or for that matter a church... any church... any school. It wasn't until I was enlisted in the military, though, that it became all consuming. I am by nature an individualist. Collectivism carries with it an air of authoritarianism. Collective ideas tend to be enforced. Individuals would naturally rebel against ideas that suggest that they need to submit to the "greater good" of the group rather than the group seeking that which is best for its individual members. Collective thinkers tend to discourage individual ideas and initiative. For my entire life I have imagined that individual initiative was a good thing. I guess, not so much anymore. These days it's the group that matters.

But imagine a world where all songs had to be composed by groups, where individual songwriters were shunned and disparaged. Imagine a world where all books written by individual authors were never published, where any book had to be the result of a collaborative group effort. Imagine science turning its collective back on individual research, where engineering labs turned their backs on individual insight, where expert medical groups had nothing but disdain for the results of gifted individual doctors.

When I was in school back in the 1950's and 1960's if you were a good athlete and you were on a sports team they would play you till you were ready to drop from exhaustion because that raised the likelihood of the team winning games. By the time my kids were in school if you were on a team, it didn't matter if the team won or lost. What mattered was that you got to play in the game even if you weren't all that good at the sport.

My wife once had a business and rented a room in a school building that had been abandoned by the town and trusted to a committee. If you had problems with the heat, take it to the committee and let them deal with it. If you had stained and damaged ceiling tiles and there were vacant rooms with better tiles, take it to the committee and let them decide. For god's sake don't act on your own. The committee might meet every other week and a common refrain would be, "Can we deal with this next time we meet?" If the whole back outside wall of the building, just outside the back door of my wife's room, is covered with black mold, for goodness sake don't wash it yourself, the way I did. Take it to the committee or else they will scold you for cleaning up black mold without their consent. Smart, well-managed business relies as much as possible on talented individual leaders, not group think.

All of a sudden, though, society has come to the point where individual talent and initiative are to be shunned and group think is king.

God help us all.

It's not that I don't see the need for group thinking. I'm not an anarchist. Quite often I am tempted to imagine that the world had life figured out when society was tribal, when people lived in small collectives, communities, tribes, where everybody learned to work together to assure their survival. Tribal leaders who took individual inspiration too far - to the point of expanding the tribe's power or domain - were recognized as troublemakers and were dealt with accordingly. Individualism too often can be fatal. Following a self-oriented leader is a prescription for failure. But so is group think. Talent needs to be recognized and utilized, not forced to submit to and conform to mundane collectivism.

Collectivism, by the way, is a hallmark of socialism and Communism. Individuals hoping to achieve anything in a collective society always need to reach out to influential members of the collective control group opening up a Pandora's box of bribery, another hallmark of socialism and Communism. If the group leaders want more control over the group, one tool they use is to promote scarcity which increases dependence on the group controllers. Scarcity and the dependence it brings are both hallmarks of socialism and Communism.

So gee, I wonder why the word "collectivism" can't seem to find a foothold in my vocabulary. Go figure.