Brownstone Institute
The Selfish Collective
Originally published by the Brownstone Institute
Much of the debate surrounding Covid — and increasingly now, other crises — has been framed in terms of individualism vs. collectivism. The idea is that individualists are motivated by self-interest, while collectivists put their community first.
This dichotomy paints the collective voice, or the community, as the prosocial option of two choices, where the threat lies with recalcitrant individuals holding everyone else back. The individual threatens the common good because they won’t go along with the program, the program everyone else has decided upon, which is what is best for everyone.
There are several immediate problems with this logic. It is a string of loaded assumptions and false equivalencies: first, it equates the philosophy of collectivism with the idea of prosocial motivation; secondly, it equates prosocial behavior with conformity to the collective voice.
Merriam-Webster defines collectivism as follows:
1 : a political or economic theory advocating collective control especially over production and distribution also : a system marked by such control
2 : emphasis on collective rather than individual action or identity
Note that there is no mention here of internal motivations — and rightly so. The philosophy of collectivism emphasizes collectively organized behavioral patterns over those of the individual. There is no prescription for these reasons. They could be prosocially motivated, or selfish.
After the past couple of years of analyzing collectivist behavior during the Covid crisis, I have come to the conclusion that it is just as likely as individualism to be motivated by self-interest. In fact, in many ways, I would say it is easier to attain one’s selfish interests by aligning oneself with a collective than to do so individually. If a collective composed primarily of self-interested individuals unites over a common goal, I call this phenomenon “the selfish collective.”
When “Common Good” is Not Collective Will
One of the most simple examples I can give of a selfish collective is that of a homeowner’s association (HOA). The HOA is a group of individuals who have unified into a collective in order to protect each of their own self-interests. Their members want to preserve their own property values, or certain aesthetic characteristics of their neighborhood environment. In order to achieve this they often feel comfortable dictating what their neighbors can and cannot do on their own property, or even in the privacy of their own homes.
They are widely despised for making homeowners’ lives miserable, and for good reason: if they claim the right to safeguard the value of their own investments, doesn’t it stand to reason that other homeowners, with perhaps different priorities, have a similar right to rule over the little corner of the world they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for?
The selfish collective resembles the political concept of “tyranny of the majority,” of which Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America:
“So what is a majority taken as a whole, if not an individual who has opinions and, most often, interests contrary to another individual called the minority. Now, if you admit that an individual invested with omnipotence can abuse it against his adversaries, why would you not admit the same thing for the majority?”
Social groups are made up of individuals. And if individuals can be selfish, then collectives made up of individuals with common interests can be equally selfish, attempting to steamroll their visions over the rights of others.
However, the selfish collective is not necessarily comprised of a majority. It could just as easily be a loud minority. It is characterized not by its size, but by its inherent attitude of entitlement: its insistence that other people must sacrifice increasingly high-level priorities in order to accommodate increasingly trivial priorities of its own.
This inverse relationship of priority valuation is what belies the true nature of the selfish collective, and distinguishes its motives from the true “common good.” Someone motivated by genuine social concern asks the question: “What are the priorities and goals of all community members, and how can we try to satisfy these priorities in a way that everyone finds acceptable?”
Social concern involves negotiation, tolerance of value differences, and the ability to compromise or see nuance. It involves genuinely caring about what others want — even (and especially) when they have different priorities. When this concern extends only to those in one’s “in-group,” it may appear to be prosocial, but is actually an extension of self-interest known as collective narcissism.
Collective Narcissism and Conformity
From the perspective of the selfish individual, collectivism provides a host of opportunities for achieving one’s goals — perhaps better than one could on one’s own. For the manipulative and calculating, the collective is easier to hide behind, and the ideal of the “greater good” can be weaponized to win moral support. For cowards and bullies, the strength of numbers is emboldening, and can help them overpower weaker individuals or coalitions. For more conscientious individuals, it can be tempting to justify one’s natural selfish inclinations by convincing oneself the group holds the moral edge.
In social psychology, collective narcissism is the extension of one’s ego beyond oneself to a group or collective to which one belongs. While not all the individuals involved in such a collective are necessarily narcissists themselves, the emergent “personality” of the group mirrors the traits of narcissistic individuals.
According to Dr. Les Carter, a therapist and creator of the Surviving Narcissism YouTube channel, these traits include the following:
- A heavy emphasis on binary themes
- Discouraging free thinking
- Prioritizing conformity
- Imperative thinking
- Distrusting or dishonoring differences of opinion
- Pressure to display loyalty
- An idealized group self-image
- Anger is only one wrong opinion away
What all of these traits have in common is an emphasis on unity rather than harmony. Instead of seeking coexistence among people or factions with differing values (the “social good” that includes everyone), the in-group defines a set of priorities to which all others must adapt. There is one “correct way,” and anything outside it has no merit. There is no compromise of values. Collective narcissism is the psychology of the selfish collective.
The Hidden Logic of Lockdown
Proponents of Covid restrictions and mandates have typically claimed they were motivated by social concern, while painting their opponents as antisocial menaces. But does this bear out?
I have no doubt that a great many people, motivated by compassion and by civic duty, genuinely strove to serve the greater good through following these measures. But at its core, I argue that the pro-mandate case follows the logic of the selfish collective.
The logic goes something like this:
- SARS-CoV-2 is a dangerous virus.
- Restrictions and mandates will “stop the spread” of the virus, thereby saving lives and shielding people from the harm it causes.
- We have a moral duty as a society to shield people from harm wherever possible.
- Therefore, we have a moral duty to enact restrictions and mandates.
Never mind the veracity of any one of these claims, which has already been the subject of endless debate over the past two and a half years. Let’s instead focus on the logic. Let’s assume for a second that each of the three premises above were true:
How dangerous would the virus have to be in order for the restrictions and mandates to be justified? Is any level of “dangerousness” enough? Or is there a threshold? Can this threshold be quantified, and if so, at what point do we meet it?
Likewise, how many people would restrictions and mandates need to save or shield before they are considered to be worthwhile measures, and what level of collateral damage from the measures is considered acceptable? Can we quantify these thresholds either?
What other “socially beneficial outcomes” are desirable, and from whose perspective? What other social priorities exist for various factions within the collective? What logic do we use to weigh these priorities against each other? How can we respect priorities that may weigh a lot to their respective advocates, but which directly compete or clash with the “socially beneficial outcome” of eliminating the virus?
The answers to these questions would help us organize our priorities within a larger, more complex social landscape. No one social issue exists in a vacuum; “Responding to SARS-CoV-2” is one possible social priority out of millions. What gives this priority in particular precedence over any of the others? Why does it get to be the top and only priority?
To date I have never seen a satisfactory answer to any of the above questions from proponents of mandates. What I have seen are abundant logical fallacies used to justify their preferred course of action, attempts to exclude or minimize all other concerns, rejection of or silence regarding inconvenient data, dismissal of alternative opinions, and an insistence that there is one “correct” path forward to which all others must conform.
The reason for this, I would argue, is that the answers don’t matter. It doesn’t matter how dangerous the virus is, it doesn’t matter how much collateral damage is done, it doesn’t matter how many people might die or be saved, it doesn’t matterwhat other “socially beneficial outcomes” we might strive for, and it doesn’t matter what anybody else might prioritize or value.
In the logic of the selfish collective, the needs and desires of others are afterthoughts, to be attended if, and only if, there is something left over once they get their way.
This particular collective has made “responding to SARS-CoV-2” their top priority. And in pursuit of that priority, all others can be sacrificed. This one priority has been granted carte blanche to invade all other aspects of social life, simply because the selfish collective has decided it is important. And in pursuit of this goal, increasingly trivial sub-priorities that are deemed relevant can now take precedence over increasingly higher-level priorities of other social factions.
The end result of this is the absurd micromanagement of other people’s lives, and the simultaneous cruel dismissal of their deepest loves and needs. People were forbidden from saying goodbye to dying parents and relatives; romantic partners were separated from each other; and cancer patients died because they were denied access to treatment, just to name a few of these cruelties. Why were these people told their concerns didn’t matter? Why did they have to be the ones to sacrifice?
The argument of the selfish collective is that individual freedom must end as soon as it risks negatively impacting the group. But this is a smokescreen: there is no unified collective perceiving “negative impacts” in a homogeneous way. The “collective” is a group of individuals, each with different sets of priorities and value systems, only some of whom have coalesced around a specific issue.
At the root of this entire discussion lies the following question: How, on a macro scale, should society allocate importance to the diverse, competing priorities held by the individuals that make it up?
The selfish collective, which represents a particular faction, attempts to obscure the nuance of this question by trying to conflate themselves with the entire group. They try to make it seem as if their own priorities are the only factors under consideration, while dismissing other elements of the debate. It is a fallacy of composition mixed with a fallacy of suppressed evidence.
By magnifying their own concerns and generalizing them to the whole group, the selfish collective makes it seem as if their goals reflect “the good of everyone.” This has a reinforcing effect because the more they focus attention on their own priorities relative to others, the more others will come to believe those priorities are worthy of attention, adding to the impression that “everyone” supports them. Those with different value systems are gradually subsumed into a collective unity, or erased.
This does not strike me as prosocial behavior — it is deception, egotism, and tyranny.
A truly prosocial approach would not shut out all other goals and insist on one way forward. It would take into account the different priorities and viewpoints of various factions or individuals, approach them with respect, and ask how to best facilitate some sort of harmony among their needs. Instead of prescribing behavior onto others it would advocate for dialogue and open debate, and it would celebrate differences of opinion.
A prosocial approach doesn’t elevate some nebulous, abstract, and misleading image of a “collective” above the humanity and diversity of the individuals who make it up.
A prosocial approach makes space for freedom.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.
People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?
More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.
The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.
Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.
Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.
The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.
Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.
What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.
As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.
There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.
After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.
The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.
The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.
It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?
For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.
In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.
The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.
No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.
Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.
In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.
And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.
The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.
Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.
It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?
The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.
Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.
That was nuts but it happened.
If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.
Author
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