Forbidding individualism

David Greenfield shows how individualism is a danger to institutionalism.

In the face of chaos, Muslims chose not liberal institutionalism but Islamic institutionalism. What this means in practice, beyond women with covered faces and more bombs going off on buses, is that the state and its economic monopolies will be in the hands of the devout who will nobly take care of the needs of the people. The practical difference between Islamism and Socialism is that the former is more backward, more tyrannical and more violently disposed toward us. But these are distinctions in degree, not in essence. Both Islamists and Socialists institute tyrannies based on theorists from the last few centuries that recreate a more ancient feudalism in the name of an absolute call for justice.

Americans with Obama, like the Egyptians with Morsi, chose a collective leader who would inspire and take care of them. A leader who would make them feel united into one single group. The promise of transcendence lingered over Tahrir Square and the United States Capitol, a promise that individual differences and divisions would melt away leaving only a perfect collective that would be capable of doing anything it set its mind to.

Institutionalists like Obama do not believe in the individual, they believe that the individual is the root of all evil. They see him as an exploiter, a free rider, a breaker of commitments, a smasher of idols and a disruptor of their plans. They wrongly believe that the individual owes them something for the privilege of living under their rule and they are wrong in this. It is they who are indebted for their parasitism, for their free ride on his back, for the muzzle they have put in his mouth and the spurs they have planted in his side.

The art of building things is a simple art. It is the art of learning about the world as it is, of learning what one's own hands and mind are capable of. And above all else it is the art of being free.