Who Defines the Common Good?
How collectivists prioritize the few over the many
Extremists often think in collectives.
To get into power, they make promises of collective harmony, equality, or purity. And to succeed, they have to sell their visions well. But their efforts frequently end in catastrophe.
How come?
Both the far left and the far right tend towards collectivism.
They elevate the importance of the group over the individual. And they prioritize the common good over individual interests. The former is supposedly the highest thing to aim for, while the latter is selfish.
Collectivists see society as a single thing that can be engineered toward a single purpose: the common good.
Their thinking has a deep flaw.
The minds of individuals are distinct. Therefore, any individual typically knows what is good for them much more than anyone else. This is called the knowledge problem.
No central planner can understand all citizens as well as they can themselves. Hence, a million separate human beings are more effective at managing themselves than a single government could ever be.
To do the opposite would mean prioritizing the knowledge of the few (the government) over the many (the people).
This reveals a contradiction. Collectivists brand themselves as the great equalizers of power. True equality, however, would mean allocating decision-making rights equally. That means allowing for individual choice, which implies free markets.
Because collectivists are naturally against such freedom of decision-making, they centralize power in the hands of a new elite that claims to represent the common good.
The government then lacks the knowledge to rule effectively.
Still, it hoards power anyway.
If they disregard the dignity of individual lives, central planners go off the rails. They misallocate resources, waste talent, and quell productivity. Coercion becomes the new operating system.
As a result, the people and the powers grow alienated from one another.
Mutual trust then evaporates. Collectivist leaders enforce hierarchy because, without it, they cannot picture themselves undoing it. If that does not make sense, it is because it cannot make sense.
In the long term, the brave new societies of collectivists typically prove more unequal than the ones they overthrew.
Collectivism must be enforced if it is not to dissolve itself.
To justify enforcing collectivism, someone must have superior knowledge of the common good.
Ironically, that person stands out. He or she is special and supposedly entitled to special privileges. That is unequal by definition.
Collectivists cannot truly share power without dividing it among individuals. And they cannot enforce collectivist ideals without creating the hierarchies they claim to abolish.
This is the core problem of collectivism.
It explains why failure is not an exception, but a recurring outcome for collectivists. They refuse to accept the reality of dispersed knowledge. And they refuse to acknowledge their own inability to change this reality.
Humans, unfortunately for them, are unique creatures with diverging ambitions.
This is why ideologies that promise to abolish hierarchy so often create steeper versions of them.
Governments cannot decentralize power without forfeiting most of it. And they cannot effectively govern individuals without respecting their self-understanding as superior. Any authority that does not acknowledge these truths will trip over them at some point.
A good leader knows when to let others lead.