Baxter and I have an issue with what's loosely referred to as Individualism. What's happened over the past 250 years is that Market Logic has replaced Social Ethics, then the political class determined that stupidity did indeed trickle down and more recently Neo-Christians rearranged the Beatitudes to allow jumbo jets, corporations, the billionaire and aircraft carriers to pass through the eye of the needle because of King Cyrus the Great of Persia, formerly Iran.
A basic genesis of modern Individualism would start with the Protestant Reformation. An assertion by the Godly that no longer were we people joined by a collective church, that whole collective stuff which allowed the greedy to thrive and pay priests to grant them amnesty, that soup of vice and avarice had warped the understanding of why Jesus died on a cross. The truth was, when you died you stood alone before God, who'd bring out the big book, you'd be asked to explain your actions and your attitudes, and sometimes, depending on your legal team, especially if you were a suspicious looking character, God himself, apparently, would ask to see your papers rather than just assuming you'd been baptized.
You can wonder, if you like, why people got excited by the prospect of this face to face with the ultimate headmaster. There are a number of theories the simplest is that a worthy percentage, it's usually 20%, relish the prospect of purification by large numbers of the poorly adjusted going to an eternity in hell without prospect of forgiveness, this was certainly Dante's position.
More recently the poorly adjusted are seen as an opportunity for gathering redemption points within a community, they have been lumped in with the heathen, the Jews and the Catholics and are regularly subjected to degrees of evangelical fervor from our 20%.
When the Enlightenment gathered steam, one of the areas it chose to apply reason to was this rather icky personal relationship with God, his enthusiastic Son and a somewhat sinister, poorly understood Ghost. Not everyone was convinced that Calvin and Luther had logically solved the problem. One of the founders of Individualism as a modern practical philosophy David Hume, and you can blame the English for a lot but Hume was a Scotsman. His Book was Treatise of Human Nature, it was published in 1740. Hume, along with a bunch of others, argued that people were a bundle of sensations subject to the give and take of cause and effect, we had free will, he didn't think miracles were real and we probably hadn't been perfectly designed.
Some might say "What about what's his name, the chap from Somerset England, who died in 1704, he pretty much wrote the bill of rights."
The thing about John Locke, he was all very Enlightenment, and gung-ho on property rights, personal rights, slave ownership, supply and demand, money as a means of exchange and it's a very long list of often sensible, old fashioned capitalistic claims about stoic behaviors being profitable and so on, but he was a Puritan who was 10 years old during the English Civil War. This made Locke a Calvinist, Lutheran true blue Protestant with an aggressively healthy attitude toward Judgement Day, he wasn't a liberal in the same "for god's sake don't take yourself so bloody seriously" sense that Hume was a liberal. Nor was Hume anything much more that an agnostic, and by the 1740's you could begin to use the 'A' word without being automatically branded a dangerous blasphemer who should be shipped off somewhere.
So how did a tool meant to establish moral agency turn into a "dying fish on the beach"?
In the late 20th century, championed by figures like Margaret Thatcher. "There is no such thing as society, only individual men and women." Ayn Rand's individualism was stripped of its relational context. Reagan became a Right Wing Saint. And on it went into deeper and deeper pits of tripe.
Hyper-individualists now continue to guiltlessly reduce human freedom to frictionless consumer choice and white faced autonomy from obligation. Public health measures are "tyranny." Taxes are "theft." Collective sacrifice is viewed as "sucker behavior." Just visit the White House if you want to listen to the new sermons
The issue for Baxter and I is this : Homo sapiens is an obligate social species, which means we cannot survive, grow or reproduce alone. We survived the two million plus years of the Pleistocene precisely because our ancestors did not act as hyper-individualists. Our neurobiology, our oxytocin pathways, and our default somatic states are hardwired for cooperation, shared responsibility, and belonging.
This current iteration of hyper-individualism, dominated by an unlettered, small class of psychotically un-woke, newly hyper-wealthy, demand that because an increasingly tinier few want to fly around in rocket ships and government is an evil, the rest of us human organisms must learn to live in direct contradiction to our evolutionary biology and to do that we've got between eighteen months and three years to learn to share our existence with cake.
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