Warmth of the collective can suffocate

In his inaugural speech, Mayor Mamdani prophesied, "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism." I criticized earlier his straw man (false) version of individualism, which came from socialists, not capitalists. Today I want to ask if collectivism is always warm? 

F.A. Hayek, a Nobel Prize winner and the second greatest economist of the 20th century behind Ludwig von Mises, wrote in his last book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, that we live in two worlds. One is the family, church, or tribe in which everyone knows everyone else, their needs, weaknesses and strengths. The other is the larger world of the nation in which few people know each other.

Hayek wrote that socialism works well in families. We get our first ideas about socialism from growing up in a good family. The parents care for the children and provide for their needs without asking for a contribution from the children. A church is similar. Churches average 250 members, small enough for most people to know each other well, so members can know who needs help while encouraging others to work and contribute financially. Tribes are similar. 

Hayek wrote that parents running a family by the principles of capitalism would destroy families. How would children flourish if they had to survive on only what they could produce? The Bible encourages a from of collectivism in churches. In Acts, wealthy church members sold land and gave the money to church leaders to distribute to the poor. That wasn't really socialism for the reasons I give here. And later the church only cared for widows over 60 years of age and orphans. But Jesus expects the church to be a collective and it can because everyone knows everyone and their true needs. But what happens when we try to run a nation like a family or church? 

Because people know few of the other members of a nation, the dynamics change. Assuming a city or nation is like a family is an example of the composition fallacy. The fallacy of composition assumes that what's true for the individual parts must be true for the whole. For example, a house may be made up bricks, so the whole house is a brick. Or in sports, every player on this team is a star, so the team will be unbeatable.

Marvin Olasky illustrates the fallacy of treating the nation as a family in his classic book, The Tragedy of American Compassion. Until the 20th century, he wrote,

Christians practiced charity by getting to know the poor in their neighborhoods. They feared giving to much and enabling drunkenness, gambling and laziness, so they gave food and clothing to poor people instead of money, and they only supported women, children and old people. For any man of working age, they found jobs and encouraged him to work. Often, that first job was splitting wood. 

Socialists in the U.S. by the middle of the 19th century demanded indiscriminate giving to the poor on the grounds that they were poor because the rich had stolen their wealth, which is the medieval economics that claims one can grow wealthier only at the expense of others. They denied that the poor held any responsibility for their condition, having fabricated the anti-Christian dogma that people are born good and turn bad, or poor, only because of oppression. 

Christians opposed the indiscriminate giving demanded by socialists because they knew from the Bible that people aren't born good but are born with a strong tendency to evil, part of the explanation for poverty. The conflict between socialism and capitalism has always been about their views of human nature. 

One hundred and fifty years of socialism have proven 19th century Christians right, but socialism was much worse than they had imagined. It was a nightmare instead of the dream socialists promised. Countries like Russia and China that tried to fully implement socialism impoverished everyone and starved to death around 100 million of their own people. Democratic socialism, the third way between socialism and capitalism, or half-hearted socialism, has merely made Europeans poorer. 

Collectivism can be warm and fuzzy, if kept to families, churches and tribes. It is a disaster when imposed on larger societies and suffocate nations. The "cold" of individualism makes nations warm and fuzzy.