No, Individualism isn't Selfish

"Individualism is not an ideology of selfishness; it started out as and remains a social thing, a response to the anti-social unrestrained ego," writes Christopher Chantrill at the American Thinker.

Conservatives argue individualism is good, collectivism is bad. Liberal/progressives argue the opposite, Chantrill writes, because they know neither history nor biology. He explains:

According to Huston Smith, the individual ego was born over 2500 years ago as certain individuals began to question the world of unreflective tradition with: "What's in it for me?" In China this individual ego metastasized in the Warring States period, and after 500 years of egos warring all over east Asia it took a Confucius to invent a program of conscious tradition to replace the busted world of unconscious tradition and bring order back to China.

According to Robert Bellah, the individual emerged in the Axial Age about two to three thousand years ago as the "responsible self." ... According to Max Weber, the individual emerged in the period of the Hebrew prophets, where the idea got about that each individual was responsible to God for his or her actions. Mortals would no longer propitiate the immortal gods to favor their tribe, but be individually responsible to the monotheistic Him.

Later, it was Christianity that used individualism to make the city work by emancipating individuals from their tribal loyalties and teaching them to develop trusting relationships with strangers in the marketplace of the city. Just in case, God added divine justice as a backup to the new program to tame the raging individual ego into the responsible ego. The irresponsible ego might escape human justice, but not God's justice.

In our own age the classical economists broadened the understanding of the responsible ego with the invisible hand doctrine. The Methodists boiled it all down to a mantra: Work all you can; save all you can; give all you can. And this glorious achievement of the human spirit is what liberals want to tear down and utterly transform.

We can see how the left's fatuous opposition of individualism vs. collectivism that started in the 19th century has missed the point. Individualism is not an ideology of selfishness; it started out as and remains a social thing, a response to the anti-social unrestrained ego.