cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2409929

Everytime I here individualism brought up by someone from Hexbear or Lemmygrad, it gets talked about as if it’s categorically bad and wrong. Why is that?

This goes against everything I’ve learned in the states, where we consider individualism a necessary part of being a responsible and moral person, whereas collectivism strips us of our humanity and turns us into subhuman insectoid creatures incapable of thought.

  • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
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    5 months ago

    It’s wrong because it simply doesn’t and cannot exist in the way that bourgeois ideology expresses it. In your framing, you’re already the ‘insectoid’ so stop fighting it and accept your nature and destiny.

    I challenge you to try to survive one day without relying on thousands and thousands of other people, dead and alive.

    Time to get up and get dressed. If you didn’t make your own clothes, leave them behind. If you made your own clothes but didn’t weave the fabric, leave them behind. If you made your own clothes from fabric that you wove but you didn’t spin the threads, leave them behind. If you span the threads but didn’t grow the cotton or hemp, etc, leave them behind.

    You’re probably naked by now. Or maybe you had time to hide in a bush and strangle a bear, so you’re wearing a bloody pelt.

    Either way, it’s time for breakfast. Toast or cereal? I think you fancy buttered toast today. Did you bake the bread, knead the dough, grind the flour, harvest the wheat, nurture, water, or plant the crop or till the field? Did you portion the butter into it’s block or churn the milk or milk the cow or feed the cow and vaccinate the cow and help it’s mother give birth – or did vets and farmers do that work?

    Are you using an electric toaster or an electric or gas grill? If toast is your go-to breakfast, I reckon you’ll have an electric toaster. Did you build it? What with? Did you order the components from China? How did they arrive? Did you row or swim or did they come in a shipping container? Where did you get your schematics for the toaster design? An engineer? Or did you design them yourself? If so, who taught you or the engineer how to design and make things? Who built the buildings in which the teaching happend and who wrote and printed the textbooks? Who created the ink and turned pulp into paper and who chopped down the trees and built the chainsaw and the printer?

    Maybe you didn’t simply order your components. Maybe you went to Texas or Iraq and came back with a bit of oil in your cupped hands and refined it to make your plastic casing and insulation. Maybe you went to the Congo and Bolivia to mine for your precious metals and smelted your dig for the copper wire and steel frame?

    Let’s pretend you individually did all of this. Where do you get your energy supply? I doubt that you have time to run a power station, mine coal, and maintain a grid while you were busy building your toaster. You haven’t even had a wash yet or jumped in your car or on the bus or walked on a sidewalk or done any work whatsoever – what job do you even do that doesn’t rely on other people?

    Bourgeois individualism is nonsense.