Collectivists think they’re doing us favors as they force herd to follow

By David McElroy · November 15, 2011

The arrogance of collectivists seems to know no bounds. What’s even worse, their attitudes are so ingrained that they don’t even realize they’re being arrogant. Instead, they see themselves as magnanimous folks helping the collective.

Two completely unrelated stories Monday focused my attention on this. First, I read comments from retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens defending the decision he wrote in the infamous Kelo case — the one that made it legal for local governments to take property from pretty much anybody and give it to private entities to do what they want with it.

Even now, he seems to think that case wasn’t a big deal, even knowing the outcome — that the homes of Kelo and others were taken from them against their will and torn down, all to end up with useless vacant lots. (You might recall that a Connecticut Supreme Court justice who ruled against Kelo sees things differently now.)

The second story that made me focus on the arrogance of collectivists was close to me. Here in the Birmingham area, the city of Birmingham is mostly just the core older parts of town. It’s been losing residents for 50 years. Even though the metro area has a million people now, the core city is down to about 200,000. Although there are wealthy pockets remaining, most people who have the ability have moved to suburbs where the government isn’t so dysfunctional and the schools are still good (at least by modern standards).

The cesspool known as City Hall has announced that it’s holding a series of meetings to “allow public input on Birmingham’s future.” That’s right. The overlords from City Hall are going to graciously allow individuals to come to neighborhood meetings and give input about the rules that should then be imposed on everyone as part of the city’s first “comprehensive plan” in 50 years. I have a plan. How about you just let people decide what to do with their own lives and property — instead of meddling in the ways that have run so many people out into the suburbs?

In both of these stories, the people with power believe they’re doing great things for “the people.” Stevens believes the wants and needs of a city government — the collective — outweigh the wants and needs of individuals to control their own property. The people at Birmingham City Hall probably think they’re being gracious to allow individuals to have input into their great coming collective plan for everyone. (If I know politicians, though, the listening is going to be more about making people feel they’re being listened to than it will have to do with shaping the plan.)

In neither of these stories is there any hint of concern for the rights of individuals to live their own lives and control their own property. The unquestioned (but unspoken) hub around which it all turns is the collective. This is dangerous.

In Ayn Rand’s foreword to “Anthem,” she talks about the moral guilt of people who support collectivism when it seems like the easy and obvious thing to do:

The greatest guilt today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one’s eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: “But I didn’t mean this!“

People who support the collectivism inherent in the coercive state mostly do so out of the best intentions. They’ve been brainwashed to support the state from the moment they stepped into government-run schools and they’ve accepted the collective “frame” of society that teaches that individuals must have their rights trampled for the “leadership” of the collective to get its way.

But what they’re supporting is evil, whether they realize it or not. Every past nation that started down that path has ended up with “bloody ruins and concentration camps,” and I don’t think people in the social democracies are ultimately going to fare any better — if the economy survives long enough to get that bad. When the day comes that things degenerate into real totalitarianism, the people who have been good little patriots — supporting their coercive collectivist government — are going to look at what’s developed out of what they supported, and they’re going to say, “But I didn’t mean this!”

It will be too late by then to object.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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