Selflessness and collectivism are not prerequisites for being a good person

Individualism

I define individualism and collectivism as follows: individualists believe that you should do what is right and good for yourself, and collectivists believe you should do what is right and good for society/your in-group. I claim that you should be an individualist if and because it’s easier for you to be one, which I think should be the case for most people. I’ll address the exceptions first in hopes of demonstrating the rule.

In a few cases (pretty rare in the US), someone will grow up in a small, tight-knit community with the right cultural context that their identity is that they are a member of the community. I’d imagine this was the case in some (but not all) tribal cultures, but probably also happens occasionally for small towns and/or religious groups (I’m told this is common for Mennonites, for example). If this is you, embracing individualism will probably lead to worse short-term outcomes for you and maybe worse long-term outcomes too, because on top of having to rewrite your identity from scratch, you’ll have to learn the practical and social skills everyone else uses to exist in the world. Luckily, I suspect no Mennonites read my blog.

If you haven’t grown up such that being a member of a specific community is your identity, odds are that you basically conceive of yourself as an individual - and once you understand this, it’s an extremely hard thing to forget, which is why this blog is a memetic hazard to Mennonites. If, as an individual, you believe that you’re supposed to be doing what’s right and good for society, you need some way to make yourself do what you’re supposed to be doing even when it doesn’t align with your interests. The psychological and social technologies for this usually target your fear of rejection (“if I don’t do thing, I’ll be a bad role (and people will like me less)”). This presents an obvious problem, which is that being a collectivist who thinks of themselves as an individual is only semi-stable: if your mental health improves to the point that you stop being sufficiently afraid of rejection, there isn’t enough external force keeping you in your role. You can keep playing it if you want to, but now you’re just doing what you think is right and good for yourself.

And this is where individualism comes in. Individualism - or, more specifically, what I’ll call “skillful individualism” - is far more stable than collectivism, in that the only direction in which it’s unstable is the direction of transformative practice aimed at dissolving the individual. Skillful individualism is, for a vast majority of people, the final stage of a developmental progression I just made up:

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to ignore stage 4 for now. The other stages might remind you of Kegan’s stages 1-4, which I discuss in my post on arrested development. From this perspective, “individualism” is at least a subset of “being able to reason about relationships” (Kegan stage 4). This might actually be a useful way to think about skillful individualism: it involves moving your relationships with others from a set of constraints (“I have to act within the bounds of these relationship templates”) to your metaphorical objective function (obviously, real life isn’t an optimization problem, so don’t take this too literally).

Accordingly, skillful individualists still operate in groups. In fact, most of them probably spend significant amounts of time in group settings because that’s how humans operate: we love and need each other. To the extent that they want to (perhaps because they value the group or enjoy helping others), skillful individualists will even donate their time and resources to benefit the collective. In the same way, skillful individualism doesn’t preclude moral behavior, but rather provides the opportunity to establish your own moral standards. A skillful individualist does this because he realizes that promoting a community of flourishing, happy people is in his own self-interest. Eventually, the distinction between individualism and collectivism dissolves.

Selfishness

Selfishness is, in some ways, a specific case of the individualist/collectivist dynamic. The definition of selfishness is incredibly socially contingent and I’m not satisfied with the dictionary definitions. Wikipedia says, “Selfishness is being concerned excessively or exclusively, for oneself or one’s own advantage, pleasure, or welfare, regardless of others.” The problem with this is the implicit dualism of self-advantage and the well-being of others. If a skillful individualist, out of a desire to live in a clean neighborhood, picks up some litter, are they being selfish? Probably not in the way we typically mean the word, anyway.

In the podcast The Art of Accomplishment, Joe Hudson defines selfishness as “anything your parents told you was selfish when they wanted to control your behavior as a kid.” I think this is fair and gets at a good point, which is that the definition of selfishness we use in real life, the voice in our head that tells us we’re being selfish and are therefore bad, is usually based on some mental model of our parents. But we have a concept of selfishness for a reason: selfishness is used to describe behavior which ignores or bypasses social conventions designed to protect resources. Not picking up your dog’s poop is selfish, because cleaning up after yourself is mostly a social convention designed to protect common space. Stealing from someone is more or less selfish depending on the specific social conventions being broken; stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family is illegal, but not terribly selfish.

Notice the distance between how we think of selfishness and the actual point of it. Having the impulse to avoid and/or punish selfishness prevents exploitation (to some degree), but for a lot of people their parent’s voice in their head goes way beyond just stopping them from gaming the system. Ever go to a restaurant and end up with the last piece of an appetizer sitting in the middle of the table until it’s eventually cleared away because everyone was too polite to take it? That’s value literally left sitting on the table because of your parents’ voices in your heads.

Young children are selfish in impractical and unethical ways, because they don’t know any better and lack impulse control. You can think of the idea of selfishness as being something you install in children (more or less skillfully) to get them into the habit of considering others before they act. But once you’ve established your own ethics, the part of your mind that punishes perceived defection against imagined authority figures has outlived its usefulness and can only create problems. When I say that you should be selfish, I don’t mean that you should do things you think are morally wrong, I mean you should do things that you think are morally fine but activate that voice in your head. As you learn to stop being afraid of being selfish, to stop punishing yourself, you will become freer, lighter, and less stuck in your head.