FA Note: Excel­lent com­men­tary on the focused effort by much of soci­ety to destroy indi­vid­ual rights

Some­times in the lib­er­ty move­ment — with dis­cus­sions of poten­tial col­lapse, war, rev­o­lu­tion, social desta­bi­liza­tion, etc. — it is easy to get so caught up in the periph­er­al con­flict between the elites and the cit­i­zen­ry that we for­get what the whole thing is real­ly about. That is to say, we tend to over­look the very core of the con­flict that is shap­ing our epoch.

Some would say that it is a sim­ple mat­ter of good ver­sus evil. I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly dis­agree, but good and evil are not defined method­olo­gies; rather, they are inher­ent arche­types — facts born in the minds and hearts of all men. It’s a gift of com­pre­hen­sion from some­thing greater than our­selves. They are felt, rather than defined, and attempts by insti­tu­tions (reli­gious, sci­en­tif­ic, legal or oth­er­wise) to force moral­i­ty away from intu­itive rea­son and into a realm of arti­fi­cial hier­ar­chi­cal and math­e­mat­i­cal stan­dards tend to lead only to even more imbal­ance, destruc­tion, inno­cent deaths and gen­er­al immorality.

There have been many night­mare regimes through­out his­to­ry that have claimed to under­stand and obey moral “laws” and stan­dards while at the same time hav­ing no per­son­al or spir­i­tu­al con­nec­tion to those stan­dards. In oth­er words, some of the most heinous acts of immoral­i­ty are often stamped with the approval of sup­pos­ed­ly moral social and gov­ern­men­tal institutions.

This is why a per­son who calls him­self a moral Chris­t­ian, a moral Mus­lim, a moral athe­ist, a moral leg­is­la­tor, a moral con­ser­v­a­tive, a moral lib­er­al, a moral social jus­tice war­rior, etc. is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a per­son who ulti­mate­ly acts with moral con­vic­tion. It is not enough for one to mem­o­rize and fol­low the code of a belief sys­tem or legal sys­tem blind­ly. One must also under­stand the tenets of inborn nat­ur­al law and of the human soul that make those codes mean­ing­ful (if they have retained any mean­ing), or he will even­tu­al­ly fall prey to the vicious calami­ties of dog­ma and the col­lec­tive shadow.

If I were to exam­ine the core method­olo­gies that are at odds in our soci­ety today, I would have to say that the whole fight comes down not only to good ver­sus evil, but to col­lec­tivism ver­sus indi­vid­u­al­ism. The same demands of under­stand­ing also apply to this dichotomy.

Near­ly all human beings nat­u­ral­ly grav­i­tate toward social struc­tures. This is not under debate. The best of us seek to work with oth­ers for the bet­ter­ment of our own posi­tion in terms of sur­vival and suc­cess, but also the bet­ter­ment of our species as a whole, if pos­si­ble. Beyond this, peo­ple often find solace and a sense of epiphany when dis­cov­er­ing con­nec­tions to oth­ers; the act of recog­ni­tion and shared expe­ri­ence that is in itself a reli­gious expe­ri­ence. This is what I would call “com­mu­ni­ty,” as opposed to “col­lec­tivism.”

Col­lec­tivism is a bas­tardiza­tion and manip­u­la­tion of the inher­ent desire most peo­ple have to build con­nec­tions to those around them. It takes the con­cept of com­mu­ni­ty to the extreme end of the spec­trum, and in the process, removes all that was orig­i­nal­ly good about it. In a col­lec­tivist sys­tem, indi­vid­u­al­ism becomes a threat and a detri­ment to the func­tion­al­i­ty of soci­ety. In a com­mu­ni­ty, indi­vid­u­al­ism is seen as a valu­able resource that brings a diver­si­ty of ideas, skills and unique views, mak­ing the group stronger. Col­lec­tivism believes the hive mind is more effi­cient. Com­mu­ni­ty believes vol­un­tary action and indi­vid­ual achieve­ment makes soci­ety health­i­er in the long run.

Our cul­ture in gen­er­al today is being bom­bard­ed with mes­sages that aggran­dize col­lec­tivism and stig­ma­tize com­mu­ni­ty and indi­vid­u­al­ism. This is not by mere chance; it is in fact a pro­gram of indoc­tri­na­tion. I came across a rather strange and in some ways hilar­i­ous exam­ple of this while sift­ing through the pro­pa­gan­da plat­form known as Reuters.

As most lib­er­ty move­ment activists are well aware, Reuters is a long­time haven for Fabi­an social­ists who despise hon­est report­ing (to them media is a means of con­trol­ling the pop­u­lace, not inform­ing it) and who con­sis­tent­ly inject con­cepts of col­lec­tivist (i.e., glob­al­ist) ide­ol­o­gy into their articles.

The Reuters opin­ion piece linked here and writ­ten by Lynn Stu­art Par­ramore presents itself as a kind of social exam­i­na­tion of film and its reflec­tion of the decline of Amer­i­can civ­i­liza­tion. Rather odd­ly, the film cho­sen as a lit­mus test was “Fast And Furi­ous 7.” Yes, that’s right. The “Fast and Furi­ous” fran­chise appar­ent­ly con­tains social com­men­tary so dis­turb­ing to Reuters’ con­tribut­ing “cul­tur­al the­o­rists” that they felt com­pelled to write a short the­sis on it.

First, I would like to point out that when I first read the arti­cle the orig­i­nal title was “‘Fast decline of post­war Amer­i­ca & furi­ous desire to cling to ‘fam­i­ly.’”

It appears that Reuters has since “amend­ed” the title to stand out a lit­tle less as a col­lec­tivist expose. Just to be clear, I have no inter­est in dis­cussing the con­tent of the “Furi­ous 7″ film. My com­men­tary will focus not on the film but on Reuters’ com­men­tary regard­ing the film…if that makes sense to you.

So what about the newest Furi­ous film has the col­lec­tivists so con­cerned? As the arti­cle states, “some­thing alarm­ing lurks at the heart of ‘Furi­ous 7.’” The film’s depic­tion of Amer­i­ca as an eco­nom­i­cal­ly wound­ed nation in which good men can­not find a means to make an hon­est and ade­quate liv­ing doesn’t seem to both­er them as much as the response of the main char­ac­ters to such cir­cum­stances. The arti­cle almost rev­els in the post­war degra­da­tion of Amer­i­can liv­ing stan­dards, out­lin­ing how fis­cal decline has led to the dis­rup­tion of the Amer­i­can fam­i­ly and posits that the gold­en era of the 1950’s eco­nom­ic boom is a rel­ic, erased by the rise of a severe “haves and have-nots” divi­sion in the Amer­i­can class sphere. This is, of course, a decid­ed­ly sim­plis­tic view that appeals more to Marx­ists than to any­one with true knowl­edge of the break­down of the U.S.

Reuters takes issue with “Furi­ous 7″ because of what it refers to as the “1950’s fan­ta­sy” nar­ra­tive it clings to, in which the heroes long for a return to the mid­dle-class dream, turn­ing away from the cor­rupt struc­ture of the sys­tem and revert­ing to the “trib­al­ism” of fam­i­lies and poss­es. The “myth of the posse,” they state, “ignores the inter­con­nect­ed­ness of the broad­er soci­ety” and “the idea of a com­mon cul­ture of cit­i­zen­ship recedes into the back­ground, as does faith in a soci­ety based on shared prin­ci­ples of justice.”

I find this con­clu­sion rather fas­ci­nat­ing in its col­lec­tivist bias. We are led to believe by Parramore’s arti­cle that it is the “Ayn Ran­di­an” code of con­tem­po­rary eco­nom­ics and mar­ket effi­cien­cy that has led Amer­i­ca astray. To put it sim­ply, the free mar­ket did this to us.

This is the great lie pro­mot­ed ad nau­se­am by col­lec­tivists today — col­lec­tivists who would like to divert blame for eco­nom­ic fail­ure on more indi­vid­u­al­is­tic mar­ket ideals. The real­i­ty is that Amer­i­ca has NOT sup­port­ed free mar­ket meth­ods for at least a cen­tu­ry. The advent of par­a­sitic cen­tral bank­ing as an eco­nom­ic core in the Fed­er­al Reserve and con­stant gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion and reg­u­la­tion that have only destroyed small busi­ness rather than kept large busi­ness­es in check has caused the very neg­a­tive finan­cial envi­ron­ment that Par­ramore at least rec­og­nizes as the source of our ills. Cor­po­ra­tions them­selves exist only because of gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­to­ry license, after all, but you won’t ever catch Reuters crit­i­ciz­ing that.

It was col­lec­tivism and the rise of the sta­tist mod­el that bled Amer­i­ca dry, not free-mar­ket meth­ods that have not exist­ed in this coun­try for more than 100 years. The delu­sion that free mar­kets are the prob­lem was the same delu­sion that helped bring down Occu­py Wall Street; the move­ment failed in part because its foun­da­tion­al phi­los­o­phy was built on dis­in­for­ma­tion that rang false with oth­er­wise sym­pa­thet­ic people.

So an action movie presents a com­pet­ing mod­el to col­lec­tivism, because col­lec­tivism has always been the prob­lem, despite what Reuters has to say. That mod­el is a return to clas­sic human com­mu­ni­ty in the form of fam­i­ly and “trib­al­ism” where reg­u­lar indi­vid­u­als mat­ter, a point the Reuters arti­cle sub­tly mocks as a “fan­ta­sy.” But here we find the col­lec­tivists using the kind of rhetoric one would come to expect from social Marx­ists. The arti­cle continues:

“When the per­son­al posse replaces civic spir­it, and the us-against-them men­tal­i­ty pre­vails, mon­sters can breed…”

“This is what is now hap­pen­ing in many cor­ners of the world, where neglect­ed groups have formed poss­es pos­i­tive­ly blood­thirsty in their quest to assert that they mat­ter on the glob­al stage to show they are not just vic­tims of a rigged game…”

I’m not exact­ly sure what “blood­thirsty groups” Par­ramore is refer­ring to as “poss­es,” but I sus­pect this is a ref­er­ence to the rise of ISIS, among oth­ers. And here we find the Fabi­an social­ist-style pro­pa­gan­da at play.

You see, the Fabi­an ide­ol­o­gy is the dri­ving force behind glob­al­iza­tion — the same glob­al­iza­tion that trig­gered the vast down­ward slide in Amer­i­can pros­per­i­ty; the same glob­al­iza­tion that has gen­er­at­ed anger and dis­sen­sion among the down­trod­den and pover­ty-strick­en; the same glob­al­iza­tion that has cre­at­ed arti­fi­cial eco­nom­ic inter­de­pen­den­cy among nations and the domi­no effect of fis­cal cri­sis around the globe; and the same glob­al­iza­tion that has led to the pre­dom­i­nance of covert agen­cies, covert agen­cies which have been fund­ing “blood­thirsty poss­es” like ISIS for decades. And the source phi­los­o­phy behind glob­al­iza­tion has always been col­lec­tivism — the “inter­con­nect­ed­ness of broad­er soci­ety” that Par­ramore pro­claims as lost in the pages of the “Furi­ous 7″ screenplay.

Par­ramore ends with a stark warn­ing to us all:

“… a return to trib­al instincts and the let­ting go of the broad­er com­mon bonds and the wel­fare of the greater human fam­i­ly has a dark side. It is ulti­mate­ly a dan­ger­ous road to travel.”

Those of us who sup­port the idea of local­ized com­mu­ni­ty (i.e., trib­al­ism) and the val­ue of the indi­vid­ual over the arbi­trary col­lec­tive are, sup­pos­ed­ly, play­ing with fire; and we should be scared, very scared. We would not want to be labeled as “blood­thirsty mon­sters” hell-bent on dis­turb­ing the tran­quil­i­ty of the “greater human fam­i­ly.” Oh, boy.

When I read this kind of agen­da-based garbage, I am remind­ed of the insan­i­ty of slight­ly more open social Marx­ists, such as fem­i­nists, who have through dis­hon­or­able tac­tics con­jured an atmos­phere of col­lec­tive and legal pres­sure designed not to present a bet­ter argu­ment, but to make all oppos­ing argu­ments a sin against the group. That is to say, social Marx­ists do not have a bet­ter argu­ment, so their only option is to make ratio­nal coun­ter­ar­gu­ments social­ly taboo or even illegal.

If you want to know where social Marx­ism (col­lec­tivism) is head­ed, this is it: the label­ing of indi­vid­u­al­is­tic philoso­phies as dan­ger­ous thought crimes and trib­al com­mu­ni­ties as time bombs wait­ing to explode in the face of the wider glob­al vil­lage. They des­per­ate­ly hope to con­quer the world by dic­tat­ing not only nation­al bound­aries and civ­il lib­er­ties, but the very moral code by which soci­ety and indi­vid­u­als func­tion. They wish to bypass nat­ur­al law with fear, fear that the col­lec­tive will find you abhor­rent and bar­bar­ic if you do not believe exact­ly as they believe. Indi­vid­u­al­ism will one day be the new misogyny.

Think of it this way: If an undoubt­ed­ly for­get­table movie like “Furi­ous 7″ can’t even por­tray a fic­tion­al step away from the abyss of col­lec­tivist cultism with­out a prophe­cy of doom from Reuters, then is any­one real­ly safe from these lunatics?