Under most regimes—from Vladimir Lenin, to Adolf Hitler, to Josef Stalin, to Mao Zedong—it led to dictatorship and crimes against humanity.
Collectivist regimes under communism, fascism, and socialism make the individual’s rights secondary to the goals of a political system—the opposite of free societies, where the system acts to guard the rights of the individual. Collectivism holds that the individual should serve the interests of the state, and that any who oppose the interest of the collective should be ostracized or eliminated.
Despite the tyrannical nature of collectivism, people are fooled into following this system through its feigned benevolence, and through the system’s identification of “enemies” that its followers can struggle against.
The ideology of collectivism is built on a dysfunctional understanding of caring for others and on a narrow reinterpretation of history, according to Jordan Peterson, Canadian clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.
The Complexity of Caring
“Caring for someone or for a group of people is a very complicated thing,” Peterson said, noting that simply feeling sorry for a group because they’re downtrodden is “not good enough.”
Short-term solutions aim to comfort people in their current conditions, while long-term solutions aim to pull them out of suffering. The long-term process means that rather than give a man a fish, you teach him to fish—a process that takes effort on both sides.
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