If You Are a Collectivist, You Don't Believe in Human Rights

There are five specific questions that I believe define the primary principles separating collectivism from individualism:

1. What is the source and nature of human rights,

2. Which takes priority when dealing with rights, the individual or the group?

3. Who bears the responsibility of the individual?

4. What is meant by equality?

5. What is the proper role of government?

As I see it, how you answer these five questions will identify whether you are an individualist or a collectivist.

In this post, I want to tackle the first question in greater detail. What is the source and nature of human rights?

There are two specific options: rights are existential and intrinsic to the individual or rights are conditional and granted to an individual.

In an admittedly poor paraphrase of Descartes, I define the individualist approach as; “I exist, therefore I have rights.”

This approach can be seen clearly in the Declaration of Independence, one of the foundational documents of American political thought, by the acknowledgment that all humans come into this world equal and are granted by their existence certain unalienable rights. In other words, human right as understood by our founders, are existential and intrinsic to the individual and in their minds the only proper role of government is to defend those individual rights. You have to admire the simply beauty of it. Every single person is a minority of one. Therefore, to protect all of those minority individuals, government must defend and protect their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as individuals.

What the founders did was establish the first country where, as long as you were not encroaching on the rights of another individual, you were free to live as you see fit.

Contrast that with the approach of the collectivist. Human rights are not intrinsic to the individual, but are instead granted to individuals if they belong to specific groups and meet certain criteria. Additionally what is meant by human rights can be changed by the "powers that be" at their discretion. This is clearly illustrated in the language of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this declaration.” In other words, the UN grants your entitled rights to you because they voted on them and determined what they are. Your rights have been agreed to, voted on, approved and therefore passed on to you.

It does not matter how closely they seem to agree with the prior version, the difference is in the source of the rights. For the individualist, the source is their own existence. For the collectivist, the source is the highest governing political body. See the difference?

Notice that it is the political class that retains the authority in the collectivist approach. Which means, if you change the appropriately legalized documents, you can change the rights. Whereas with the individualist approach, it does not matter whether or not a political body agrees, the rights of an individual still exist because the individual exists. To put it more sharply, in an individualist state the role of the government is to guard the rights of the individual, but in a collectivist state, the role of the government is to not only grant rights to the individual but also to determine who qualifies to receive these granted rights.

However, what we are really distinguishing here is not the difference in source of human rights. You are justified in asking "But didn't we just spend several paragraphs arguing that very point?" Not actually.

Collectivists don't actually believe in human rights. They only recognize and grant certain freedoms of behavior and only as it is expedient for the collective control of individuals.

How do I arrive at this conclusion? Simple - All individuals have rights - plain and simple. They are intrinsic and existential. You have the right to your life, to say what you want, to do as you please and to do what makes you happy. You have the right to make what you will of your limited time on this planet. You have the right to fully realize your individual potential in life or not. It is your human right! The question now is, does your government protect your rights and your freedom to express those rights?

What the collectivists do is subtly change the concept of "freedom" for the term "human right". They don't really care about the actual human rights of the individual. They only want to exercise power over the individual and they accomplish this by setting themselves up as the grantors of freedoms. They do not believe you have the right to say what you want to say as an individual, but they will begrudgingly grant you the "freedom" to say certain things within the limits of their approved speech codes.

You see, the collectivists really are all about controlling other people. They are the modern Puritans. They proscribe allowable behaviors and enforce punishments from public humiliation to actual violence against those who express their human rights in violation of their man-made dictates. They are fundamentalists and zealots preaching a gospel of hatred and divisions disguised in the language of unity and inclusion. They are the collectivist version of the "Moral Majority" seeking to enforce their ideals of behavior on every individual regardless of the human rights of the individual.

You want to criticize someone? It can only be criticism of members of approved groups. Don't you dare criticize a member of one of their protected groups! How dare you violate their commandments! Repent of your sins! Beg forgiveness of the priests of post-modern culture. Prostrate yourself before the throne of the almighty collective elites.

Think of it like this. If I hire a guard to protect my business, the guard does not have the authority to tell me when to open my store, which customers to serve, what products or services to provide, where my kids can go to school, etc. I exercise my rights as the business owner freely. If, however, my freedom to business is being "protected" by the Mafia as part of a protection racket, while they are nominally still protecting my store, they also can tell me when to open my store, which customers I should serve, what products or services I should provide, where my kids should go to school, etc., or risk the loss of their “protection”. See the difference? Both are sources of protection for my business, but if the protection is derived from my right as the owner it is a completely different scenario than if the protection is granted to me by the Mafia as a “protected business owner”.

Did I just compare a collectivist-based government to the Mafia? Yes. Yes, I did.

So there you have it. Only individualism protects the human rights of the individual and seeks to limit the role of government to protecting the free expression of those rights as long as they do not violate the rights of other individuals. Collectivists do not and cannot believe in human rights. They only believe in limited freedoms as defined according to their political ideology.

If you believe "human rights" derive from or are granted by the government or some other authority, you are a collectivist and do not actually believe in human rights.

If you do believe that human rights actually exist and derive from the existence of the individual, welcome to Individualism! We have all the best ideas!