A soulless piece that equates individualism with self-centeredness or a disregard for others - which is only true of the narcissist. Always the answer to the question of what to do about the individual is some form of holding hands and singing kumbaya, and individual portrayed as a threat to group cohesion or progress.
The best communities are made up of strong, responsible individuals who choose to collaborate, not people forced or guilted into denying their own needs.
Individualism doesn’t mean "only me" - it means I take responsibility for myself, so that I may help others, in the same way a flight attendant advices to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.
The problems highlighted are not a result of Individualism, but of its decades long erosion of the sovereign, spiritual man - the gross expansion of a government its constitutional limits while failing to protect what matters most: the commons, tradition, civic trust, and moral order
This whole argument is just silly. Your definition of individualism is wrong—look it up. Even if it were correct, the essay makes no such claim. You’re reading into it what simply isn’t there.
And what is this nonsense about a “sovereign, spiritual man”? I’d love to see a genuinely sovereign individual existing entirely on their own. Please, show me just one.
As for your naïve view of the state, it seems you haven’t read much history—or even followed the news. The lawns at golf courses are always watered, even during droughts. Traditions are always maintained, but only for those with power ... that is to say the poor have no real say, and the world is run by a handful of strong individuals who cooperate—though only with each other. Their interests and morality are always protected, with guns if necessary.
And as for civic trust? heck … here is a bit of a tumble … But don’t worry—Uncle Don is working on it full-time.
That's an interesting exemple of an AI writen text that has a little bit of depth and interest. We can still feel it is AI, but we clearly feel that the human that directed the AI has something precise in mind.
The essay’s account of market failures, neoliberalism, and the erosion of civic life, along with challenges such as environmental degradation, financial instability, technological unemployment, and social fragmentation, rests on the same fundamental error: treating society, institutions, and the common good—epistemological derivatives—as ontological fundamentals. This reification obscures that all such phenomena arise from the choices and actions of volitional individuals. Once this philosophical error is corrected, the so-called paradoxes dissolve, not because the challenges vanish, but because they are properly understood as problems of coordination and interaction among rational individuals, not conflicts between individuals and an independent collective entity.
Emergent properties are not independent entities—they are attributes of the interacting individuals and vanish without them, just as “wetness” disappears without water. Persistence over time does not confer ontological status; institutions “outlasting” individuals simply means other individuals continue similar actions. Calling ideology a “mind” or institution a “causal agent” reifies a pattern into a thing, mistaking—as I wrote earlier— the map for the territory. Shared language and norms are tools individuals use, not beings in themselves; they exist only in the minds of those who hold them. Strip away the individuals, and no “institution” remains—because there never was one apart from them.
Impermanence does not imply nonexistence—but neither does temporary existence grant independent ontological status. A mirage is “real” as a perceptual event, yet not real as a mind-independent body of water. Institutions exist as coordinated actions and shared concepts in individual minds; they have no existence apart from those minds. Recognizing a single ontological category—entities with attributes—does not erase distinctions; it prevents smuggling in reified agents where only patterns of action exist. Without this discipline, explanation collapses into treating abstractions as things, mistaking transient coordination for a separate mode of being. The article conflates the mind-independent (the ontological) with the mind-dependent (the epistemological).
It does no such thing. Your misunderstanding rests on a faulty notion of the relationship between individuals and social structures. If there is a philosophical error here, it lies in your conflation of distinct ontological categories. Society and institutions are products of human social practices, but that does not make them mere “epistemological derivatives”—whatever that term is meant to denote. It is not widely used as a philosophical concept, as far as I can tell. These structures are metaphysically real in the sense that they possess causal powers—albeit of a different kind than natural phenomena. Nature is intransitive and indifferent to human practices (and occupies a distinct ontological category), but social structures, once created, exert real constraints and affordances on individuals.
To deny the causal reality of institutions leads to absurd consequences. If the economy is not real, why trust an ATM to dispense cash? On your account, the entire financial system would be just a figment of individual volition, with no objective causal force. Similarly, why invest in education at all if a “school system” has no power to shape people? You seem to assume that individuals are born fully rational and volitional, yet this is precisely what education and institutions help to cultivate. If everything reduces to the choices of isolated rational agents, then please explain: what is “will,” and how does it arise without the formative influence of social systems?
Society and institutions are not independent of individuals, but neither are they reducible to them. They occupy a distinct ontological status: emergent realities with genuine causal power, not mere abstractions to be dismissed as philosophical errors.
Calling “society” or “institutions” “emergent realities with causal power” simply reifies patterns of coordinated human action. An ATM dispenses cash because individuals built, programmed, and maintain it; a student learns because specific people teach and influence them—not because of some independent entity called “the economy” or “the school system.” Such terms are epistemological derivatives—abstractions from individual choices—not ontological fundamentals. The moment those choices cease, the so-called “structure” disappears, proving it has no existence apart from the agents who enact it.
A classic example of this error is the exhortation to “think with the mind of the Church,” which treats an abstraction as though it possessed a mind, rather than recognizing it as the culled, redacted, and edited thoughts of many individuals. There is no mind of the Church and no “societal problem,” just as there is no “societal stomach.”
Your argument feels stiff and philosophically flat, as if you’re scraping off all the texture of reality. You have just decided that “individual” exists a priori as only metaphysically real entity. That oversimplifies both emergence and the causal reality of institutions. Saying “society” or “institutions” are “just patterns of coordinated human action” is trivially true but misses the point: emergent structures can have properties and causal powers not reducible to individual actions.
Yes, an ATM dispenses cash because people built and maintain i … but the economic system that makes that cash valuable is not exhausted by those specific individuals. Governments persist when leaders die … legal systems enforce contracts even when no one personally wills them. If institutions “aren’t real” because they depnd on people … then neither are individuals, who also cease when their conditions vanish. Contingency does not imply non-existence.
The claim that these are mere “epistemological derivatives” confuses description with ontology. What you call the “mind of the church” is better understood as ideology—a structured set of norms and beliefs guiding behavior and constraining individuals. There are many such ideologies, and they operate with real force. Dismissing them as abstractions leads to absurdities: how do individuals even communicate without shared language, concepts, and institutions? If everything begins and ends with isolated volitional agents, then every belief, every rule, every market price would need to be reconstructed from scratch—an infinite regress that makes collective life unintelligible.
Institutions are social facts with emergent causal power—neither independent of human action nor reducible to it. They codify and enforce ideas beyond any single person’s control, which is precisely why they can surprise, constrain, and even coerce the very individuals who constitute them.
My position actually rejects the idea of fixed or eternal “ontological fundamentals.” It holds that everything—people, institutions, even the universe itself—changes and eventually disappears. But impermanence does not imply nonexistence: to say something will vanish is not to say it isn’t real now. Reality is dynamic and contingent, yet still real while it lasts. But, conflating everything into one ontological category will just not allow for coherent explanation … such as yours surely is not.
>>My position actually rejects the idea of fixed or eternal ‘ontological fundamentals.<<
If existence is not fundamental, what is? The axiom of identity—A is A—is the precondition of any statement about anything, including “change.” To exist is to have determinate attributes, to differ from other existents, and to stand in relations to them. Denying these fundamentals presupposes them: one cannot so much as assert “there are no fundamentals” without relying on identity, difference, and relationship to make the claim intelligible.
>>t holds that everything—people, institutions, even the universe itself—changes and eventually disappears.<<
Change can be identified only against a constant. “X changed” means: the same X now has different attributes or states. If nothing endures, there is no subject of predication and thus no “change” to identify. The very concept of change presupposes identity through time.
>>But impermanence does not imply nonexistence: to say something will vanish is not to say it isn’t real now.<<
Granted—and irrelevant to the point at issue. The issue is ontological priority: a human being is a concrete existent; “society” and “institutions” are abstractions we form to track patterned interactions among persons. They are real as relational facts about individuals, not as agents over and above them.
>>Reality is dynamic and contingent, yet still real while it lasts. But conflating everything into one ontological category will not allow for coherent explanation….<<
No conflation is needed; only a clear hierarchy. Start from first principles: which is logically prior—an individual or “society”? One can have an individual without a society (a castaway on an island); one cannot have a society without individuals. That asymmetry fixes the dependence relation. “Society” supervenes on choices and actions of volitional agents; it does not reverse-engineer them. Treating the derivative (social patterns) as fundamental and the fundamental (persons) as derivative is the category error that generates your “paradoxes.”
This is fantastic. Political theorist Wendy Brown would approve :). The historical nararatie about the emergence of individualism is great accurate means of looking at the emergence of liberal culture. And the messy today is apropos. Thank you for writing this. I look forward to reading more.
Quite a piece! As the comments suggest, it does feel AI generated and yet it is a good question to have been asked and tweaked beyond the collating, though lots of nuances that would need to be pruned. I'm especially interested in this notion of the liberal paradox, for example, and how holding it might be actually be a pathway to renewal
A soulless piece that equates individualism with self-centeredness or a disregard for others - which is only true of the narcissist. Always the answer to the question of what to do about the individual is some form of holding hands and singing kumbaya, and individual portrayed as a threat to group cohesion or progress.
The best communities are made up of strong, responsible individuals who choose to collaborate, not people forced or guilted into denying their own needs.
Individualism doesn’t mean "only me" - it means I take responsibility for myself, so that I may help others, in the same way a flight attendant advices to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.
The problems highlighted are not a result of Individualism, but of its decades long erosion of the sovereign, spiritual man - the gross expansion of a government its constitutional limits while failing to protect what matters most: the commons, tradition, civic trust, and moral order
It's AI, ofc it's soulless. The whole profile is AI-generated.
This whole argument is just silly. Your definition of individualism is wrong—look it up. Even if it were correct, the essay makes no such claim. You’re reading into it what simply isn’t there.
And what is this nonsense about a “sovereign, spiritual man”? I’d love to see a genuinely sovereign individual existing entirely on their own. Please, show me just one.
As for your naïve view of the state, it seems you haven’t read much history—or even followed the news. The lawns at golf courses are always watered, even during droughts. Traditions are always maintained, but only for those with power ... that is to say the poor have no real say, and the world is run by a handful of strong individuals who cooperate—though only with each other. Their interests and morality are always protected, with guns if necessary.
And as for civic trust? heck … here is a bit of a tumble … But don’t worry—Uncle Don is working on it full-time.
AI indeed. If this were summarized by 2/3 it would be much more accessible. Someone please do that!
That's an interesting exemple of an AI writen text that has a little bit of depth and interest. We can still feel it is AI, but we clearly feel that the human that directed the AI has something precise in mind.
soulless AI slop
The essay’s account of market failures, neoliberalism, and the erosion of civic life, along with challenges such as environmental degradation, financial instability, technological unemployment, and social fragmentation, rests on the same fundamental error: treating society, institutions, and the common good—epistemological derivatives—as ontological fundamentals. This reification obscures that all such phenomena arise from the choices and actions of volitional individuals. Once this philosophical error is corrected, the so-called paradoxes dissolve, not because the challenges vanish, but because they are properly understood as problems of coordination and interaction among rational individuals, not conflicts between individuals and an independent collective entity.
Emergent properties are not independent entities—they are attributes of the interacting individuals and vanish without them, just as “wetness” disappears without water. Persistence over time does not confer ontological status; institutions “outlasting” individuals simply means other individuals continue similar actions. Calling ideology a “mind” or institution a “causal agent” reifies a pattern into a thing, mistaking—as I wrote earlier— the map for the territory. Shared language and norms are tools individuals use, not beings in themselves; they exist only in the minds of those who hold them. Strip away the individuals, and no “institution” remains—because there never was one apart from them.
Impermanence does not imply nonexistence—but neither does temporary existence grant independent ontological status. A mirage is “real” as a perceptual event, yet not real as a mind-independent body of water. Institutions exist as coordinated actions and shared concepts in individual minds; they have no existence apart from those minds. Recognizing a single ontological category—entities with attributes—does not erase distinctions; it prevents smuggling in reified agents where only patterns of action exist. Without this discipline, explanation collapses into treating abstractions as things, mistaking transient coordination for a separate mode of being. The article conflates the mind-independent (the ontological) with the mind-dependent (the epistemological).
It does no such thing. Your misunderstanding rests on a faulty notion of the relationship between individuals and social structures. If there is a philosophical error here, it lies in your conflation of distinct ontological categories. Society and institutions are products of human social practices, but that does not make them mere “epistemological derivatives”—whatever that term is meant to denote. It is not widely used as a philosophical concept, as far as I can tell. These structures are metaphysically real in the sense that they possess causal powers—albeit of a different kind than natural phenomena. Nature is intransitive and indifferent to human practices (and occupies a distinct ontological category), but social structures, once created, exert real constraints and affordances on individuals.
To deny the causal reality of institutions leads to absurd consequences. If the economy is not real, why trust an ATM to dispense cash? On your account, the entire financial system would be just a figment of individual volition, with no objective causal force. Similarly, why invest in education at all if a “school system” has no power to shape people? You seem to assume that individuals are born fully rational and volitional, yet this is precisely what education and institutions help to cultivate. If everything reduces to the choices of isolated rational agents, then please explain: what is “will,” and how does it arise without the formative influence of social systems?
Society and institutions are not independent of individuals, but neither are they reducible to them. They occupy a distinct ontological status: emergent realities with genuine causal power, not mere abstractions to be dismissed as philosophical errors.
Calling “society” or “institutions” “emergent realities with causal power” simply reifies patterns of coordinated human action. An ATM dispenses cash because individuals built, programmed, and maintain it; a student learns because specific people teach and influence them—not because of some independent entity called “the economy” or “the school system.” Such terms are epistemological derivatives—abstractions from individual choices—not ontological fundamentals. The moment those choices cease, the so-called “structure” disappears, proving it has no existence apart from the agents who enact it.
A classic example of this error is the exhortation to “think with the mind of the Church,” which treats an abstraction as though it possessed a mind, rather than recognizing it as the culled, redacted, and edited thoughts of many individuals. There is no mind of the Church and no “societal problem,” just as there is no “societal stomach.”
Your argument feels stiff and philosophically flat, as if you’re scraping off all the texture of reality. You have just decided that “individual” exists a priori as only metaphysically real entity. That oversimplifies both emergence and the causal reality of institutions. Saying “society” or “institutions” are “just patterns of coordinated human action” is trivially true but misses the point: emergent structures can have properties and causal powers not reducible to individual actions.
Yes, an ATM dispenses cash because people built and maintain i … but the economic system that makes that cash valuable is not exhausted by those specific individuals. Governments persist when leaders die … legal systems enforce contracts even when no one personally wills them. If institutions “aren’t real” because they depnd on people … then neither are individuals, who also cease when their conditions vanish. Contingency does not imply non-existence.
The claim that these are mere “epistemological derivatives” confuses description with ontology. What you call the “mind of the church” is better understood as ideology—a structured set of norms and beliefs guiding behavior and constraining individuals. There are many such ideologies, and they operate with real force. Dismissing them as abstractions leads to absurdities: how do individuals even communicate without shared language, concepts, and institutions? If everything begins and ends with isolated volitional agents, then every belief, every rule, every market price would need to be reconstructed from scratch—an infinite regress that makes collective life unintelligible.
Institutions are social facts with emergent causal power—neither independent of human action nor reducible to it. They codify and enforce ideas beyond any single person’s control, which is precisely why they can surprise, constrain, and even coerce the very individuals who constitute them.
My position actually rejects the idea of fixed or eternal “ontological fundamentals.” It holds that everything—people, institutions, even the universe itself—changes and eventually disappears. But impermanence does not imply nonexistence: to say something will vanish is not to say it isn’t real now. Reality is dynamic and contingent, yet still real while it lasts. But, conflating everything into one ontological category will just not allow for coherent explanation … such as yours surely is not.
>>My position actually rejects the idea of fixed or eternal ‘ontological fundamentals.<<
If existence is not fundamental, what is? The axiom of identity—A is A—is the precondition of any statement about anything, including “change.” To exist is to have determinate attributes, to differ from other existents, and to stand in relations to them. Denying these fundamentals presupposes them: one cannot so much as assert “there are no fundamentals” without relying on identity, difference, and relationship to make the claim intelligible.
>>t holds that everything—people, institutions, even the universe itself—changes and eventually disappears.<<
Change can be identified only against a constant. “X changed” means: the same X now has different attributes or states. If nothing endures, there is no subject of predication and thus no “change” to identify. The very concept of change presupposes identity through time.
>>But impermanence does not imply nonexistence: to say something will vanish is not to say it isn’t real now.<<
Granted—and irrelevant to the point at issue. The issue is ontological priority: a human being is a concrete existent; “society” and “institutions” are abstractions we form to track patterned interactions among persons. They are real as relational facts about individuals, not as agents over and above them.
>>Reality is dynamic and contingent, yet still real while it lasts. But conflating everything into one ontological category will not allow for coherent explanation….<<
No conflation is needed; only a clear hierarchy. Start from first principles: which is logically prior—an individual or “society”? One can have an individual without a society (a castaway on an island); one cannot have a society without individuals. That asymmetry fixes the dependence relation. “Society” supervenes on choices and actions of volitional agents; it does not reverse-engineer them. Treating the derivative (social patterns) as fundamental and the fundamental (persons) as derivative is the category error that generates your “paradoxes.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/masroorshah/p/modernity-and-prison?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=643hzq
Another reason for decline of public space is growth of modern forms of power
This is fantastic. Political theorist Wendy Brown would approve :). The historical nararatie about the emergence of individualism is great accurate means of looking at the emergence of liberal culture. And the messy today is apropos. Thank you for writing this. I look forward to reading more.
Not sure to what extent Brown would approve AI-generated content influenced by her ideas and positions, though.
Agree!
https://christophermeestoerato.substack.com/p/collective-vs-individual-world-view?r=12utpl
This essay is a long-winded vindication of Marx’s view on alienation.
Quite a piece! As the comments suggest, it does feel AI generated and yet it is a good question to have been asked and tweaked beyond the collating, though lots of nuances that would need to be pruned. I'm especially interested in this notion of the liberal paradox, for example, and how holding it might be actually be a pathway to renewal
Wow, that's a long essay. Looks pretty good though from what I read.