- Joined
- Apr 8, 2019
- Messages
- 1,093
- Reaction score
- 229
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Slightly Liberal
Like I said, your obsession with collectivism is very 1950's. Try the 21st Century out for size. It's kind of cool. We have these little computers now that they call phones. Neat stuff.
Although we both know TurtleDude meant to be insulting, you could be the bigger man and be more generous when reading his claim. People on the far left tend to adopt a collectivist perspective on social issues.
On college campuses, what you have is a rather strong adherence to an intersectional narrative whereby issues are analyzed at the level of groups of people. Your ethnic background, your gender, your gender identity and expression, your sexual orientation, your religious beliefs, etc. define an intersection to which you belong. The idea is that each variable provides you with a world view and interests, much as in Marx' theory whereby your productive function determined the content of your consciousness, except a broader array of variables are held to be meaningful. In this view, groups fight with groups and individuals can be seen as mere avatars of the group pinned down by the intersection to which they belong. The point is not to criticize this view, nor to claim all people on the left adhere to it. The point is that the perspective here is about collections of people as opposed to individual people. At a moral level, you can hurt groups.
Other things can be said to be collectivist on the left, though this applies to a much wider range of the political spectrum. More often than not, when someone on the left perceives a situation to be a problem, they propose a centralized program to deal with it. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the question of sexual education in public schools was highly debated in the US. Traditionally, parents decided when and how to introduce their children to discussions about sexuality. Almost everyone on the right preferred to let parents decide, an admittedly highly heterogeneous group. Almost everyone on the left preferred to let the government officials decide for all parents. That is one (old) example, but it makes something salient. When introducing policy choices, a neglected aspect of the discussion concerns who get to choose. More often than not, government programs mean one small set of people decide in lieu of everyone else. That can also be called "collectivist."
The point is that you can read TurtleDude's claims very narrowly as if it was about communist regimes, making them largely irrelevant. Or, you can think about it more broadly, in which case it might be relevant. I am not sure either of you trying to preempt discussion by calling the other foolish is going to serve anyone. There are enough people who shout "racist" to silence others or calling everything "fake news" in the US. I doubt more of that is needed.