Excessive Individualism

[Zoltan_Cobalt]

Those statements are unclear. Without shared values - which I actually lived through - we cannot have communities. What we have today is tribalism. Radical individualism creates separation. I’m against it. A society is made up of individuals with shared values. If we can’t have that, so be it.

Privacy has been abandoned by too many.

Catholics, at least, need strong communities based on shared values.

Ed

Values are the motivating power of an individual’s actions and a necessity of his survival, psychologically as well as physically. Shared values are great. They bring individuals together to form communities. As long as the community respects individual rights, it is a wonderful thing.

I don’t like the term “Radical Individualism” It sounds bad and it really is not. A man can be a “Lone Wolf” if he wants. He can reject a community or society based on his individual values. Many people do not want to conform. It is their choice…if they are really free.

 

[CommonWeal]

Umm, yes.

 

[CommonWeal]

Right, but what are the alternatives? Highly communal countries like Japan and China are examples that come to mind where folks there are much more aware of their place in society and the role they play in maintaining the public order (or at least older generations were). Can we learn anything from these societies? Or perhaps we should look to the centuries before the reformation. Is there anything we can learn from our own history in terms of the balance between individual rights and communal responsibilities? Do we want to return to a society where it was a crime to be a heretic? Or where the whim of a monarch could determine the religious identity of an entire kingdom?

God bless,
Ut

Distributism for the win! I know, I’m not being realistic, and the same might be said about Hilaire Belloc, but I don’t think so. Belloc was very realistic and saw clearly what is needed to restore true freedom to the people, rather than the “Servile State” in which millions labor and die today.

Just like in families, the larger community presumes a shared identity, which most Western nations lack today. In previous centuries that shared identity was the Catholic faith, with its shared morals and anthropological vision, as well as its widely observed customs, traditions and feasts. So yes, I do believe (as Belloc did) that only a restoration of a Catholic culture (if not a Catholic state) can supply the antidote for Western societies mired in excessive individualism, not to mention hedonism and moral relativism.

 

[CommonWeal]

What we have today is tribalism.

… and Plutocracy.

 

[edwest2]

Values are the motivating power of an individual’s actions and a necessity of his survival, psychologically as well as physically. Shared values are great. They bring individuals together to form communities. As long as the community respects individual rights, it is a wonderful thing.

I don’t like the term “Radical Individualism” It sounds bad and it really is not. A man can be a “Lone Wolf” if he wants. He can reject a community or society based on his individual values. Many people do not want to conform. It is their choice…if they are really free.

Freedom was the big lie behind a lot of social experiments starting in the late 1960s. “Freedom from Fear” (title of article for Time magazine cover story about The Pill, 1967). The Hippies were 100% non-comformist. Not true. My Hippie friend wore the regulation length hair, the regulation clothes, spoke Hippie-speak, and smoked dope. He was more Orthodox than any Orthodox religious group. It was if he had just left Hippie Boot Camp. He was a super-conformist. Jimi Hendrix singing about freedom, George Michael singing about freedom.

I lived through the fragmentation and I and other Catholics will never change. We can and are rejecting the Culture of Death even though people around us are not. We can and are rejecting the media that fuels it.

Ed

 

[Zoltan_Cobalt]

Freedom was the big lie behind a lot of social experiments starting in the late 1960s. “Freedom from Fear” (title of article for Time magazine cover story about The Pill, 1967). The Hippies were 100% non-comformist. Not true. My Hippie friend wore the regulation length hair, the regulation clothes, spoke Hippie-speak, and smoked dope. He was more Orthodox than any Orthodox religious group. It was if he had just left Hippie Boot Camp. He was a super-conformist. Jimi Hendrix singing about freedom, George Michael singing about freedom.

I lived through the fragmentation and I and other Catholics will never change. We can and are rejecting the Culture of Death even though people around us are not. We can and are rejecting the media that fuels it.

Ed

Hey man…if you remember the 1960’s…you weren’t really there…man! Like “far out”.

 

[utunumsint]

Technically speaking…there is no such thing as “Excessive” Individualism. In fact…there really cannot be enough Individualism.

Individuals are an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to our own life, a right derived from our Creator, as well as our nature as a rational being.

**Individualism **holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a group, (Tribe, collective or state) has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.

But freedom, I hope you will agree, is not absolute. Right? No one has freedom to do something that is morally wrong or to overturn the objective moral order and define some other moral order the works for them, right?

And you as a Catholic, believe in the stain of original sin, right? It isn’t as if people, left to their own devices, will invariably make the right choices. Just look at the covenants God made with his people, which they freely entered into and bound themselves to under curse, and how many times God had to step in to correct his people, up to the act of sending his son on a cross to die for them.

God bless,
Ut

 

[Zoltan_Cobalt]

But freedom, I hope you will agree, is not absolute. Right?

Not exactly…

Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state—and nothing else.

I was speaking about Individual Rights. They are moral principles defining and sanctioning an individual’s freedom of action in a social context.

If one upholds freedom, one must uphold man’s Individual Rights; if one upholds man’s Individual Rights, one must uphold his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness—which means: one must uphold a political system that guarantees and protects these rights.

No one has freedom to do something that is morally wrong or to overturn the objective moral order and define some other moral order the works for them, right?

Again…not exactly. As long as man can to choose to do wrong…he is free to do it. A government would have to deny a man ALL freedom to insure that moral order is not overturned.

And you as a Catholic, believe in the stain of original sin, right?

Yes I do.

It isn’t as if people, left to their own devices, will invariably make the right choices. Just look at the covenants God made with his people, which they freely entered into and bound themselves to under curse, and how many times God had to step in to correct his people, up to the act of sending his son on a cross to die for them.

God made covenants in the Old Testament. But to insure the people’s respect of those covenants…God should not have given man a free will.