Are you an individual, or merely a member of a group?

Is it possible that we are more than our income percentile rank? Professor James Otteson of Wake Forest University has written a new book entitled, The End of Socialism. Socialism sees people as members of classes. Otteson says,

Once you start thinking about human beings as members of classes–so, even if it’s classes that sound initially plausible or neutral, like the rich and the poor, immediately what you begin to do is to see human beings within those classes as being more or less interchangeable.

But the danger that has actually issued real and horrible consequences in human history–once you begin to see people as being interchangeable, at least among classes, this religion, this nationality, this ethnicity, then you begin to dehumanize them. They don’t seem to you like individual centers of human dignity. And I think, looking at a lot of the horrible episodes of human history, that’s what you see. You see one group of people looking at another group of people as mere members of a group, mere members of a class.

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Thanks to Instapundit