Are Humans Hardwired to be Collectivists?

“I don’t want to pay for your damn private school,” fumed the retired public school teacher, whose three kids attended public schools.

The angry comment was in response to a question I’ve asked in scores of newspaper columns over the years. His answer was typical of the hundreds of answers I’ve received, for it put words in my mouth and had nothing to do with what I had asked.

There’s something about THE QUESTION that brings out a primordial response in people, similar to how a chimpanzee is genetically programmed to respond to a perceived threat with barred teeth, screams, somersaults, and hair standing straight on its back. I’m coming to the conclusion that humans are hardwired to be collectivists and thus attack expressions of individualism, especially if the tribe’s children are involved.

I had not asked the retired teacher if he would pay for my kid’s Catholic education. Rather, the question was this: “What is the justification for my wife and me being forced to subsidize the pubic education of the three children of a well-off physician in our neighborhood?”

The question came with these background facts: The physician will pay approximately the same $190,000 in public education taxes over his lifetime as my wife and I will pay. But he will get about $360,000 in education services in return (the school district’s cost of educating each of his children for 12 years) and we will get no direct benefit in return. In a real sense, the difference of $170,000 between what he pays and receives will be picked up by my wife and me.

I don’t know about you, but $170,000 isn’t chump change to Kim and me.

A typical answer to the question in bold above is that “Public education taxes are for the common good.”

Beware of abstractions like the 'common good'. It’s an historical fact that such abstractions have been used to justify putting people in railroad cars for delivery to the gulag or showers. Invariably, some people are excluded from the common good, such as peasants under Stalin, Jews under Hitler, and, by no means even close in evil to these two examples, people who have their money taken in a liberal democracy for other people under the pretense of the common good.

But even if someone buys into the rationale about the common good, how does it help the common good for the physician to be subsidized by Kim and me? After all, because he would educate his kids without the subsidy, the subsidy does not result in a net gain to the common good. It’s a net gain to the physician, but not to the common good. It might be a different matter if the subsidy only went to the poor, but that’s not the case with public education taxes or most other collectivist programs.

For the record, my family subsidizes the education and living expenses of an orphan at a Catholic orphanage in southern Mexico. But we do so voluntarily and not through coercion. I’ll use that fact as a segue to the next point.

Another typical answer to the question in bold is that because I have chosen to send my kid to private school, I shouldn’t complain about being coerced to pay public education taxes. That’s like saying that Russian peasants shouldn’t have complained about having their land expropriated by the Bolsheviks, because they chose to own private land instead of joining the collective. Using that logic, if the US government were to nationalize the food industry and collect taxes for government commissaries, people shouldn’t complain about paying extra to shop in private supermarkets, because that would be their choice. The same with nationalized healthcare: If American healthcare were to be nationalized, people shouldn’t complain about paying extra to see a physician outside of the nationalized system.

Still another typical answer is that if it were not for public education, children would not be educated and taught to be good Americans. Sigh. First, that is not an answer to the question in bold. Second, it’s hogwash.

What kind of thinking is behind such answers? A cynic might say that the answers are driven by self-interest--that people like the retired public school teacher at the beginning of this article are on the receiving end of the subsidy but don’t want to admit their self-interest, choosing instead to hide it behind lofty rhetoric about the common good or personal attacks against me.

A cynic might also say that most people don’t question the status quo or think philosophically. They accept what exists because it has always existed in their lifetime. And since 90 percent of Americans have been taught in government schools, they have not been encouraged to think differently about government schools or other forms of collectivism.

But after years of being attacked for my belief in individualism and opposition to collectivism, and after seeing the leading presidential candidates be cheered by the masses for proposing more collectivism, I believe that the reason for the prevailing thinking is more basic: that people are hardwired for collectivism. As such, when the idea of individualism is inserted into their mental cage, they respond with the civilized equivalent of barred teeth, screams, somersaults and hair standing on their backs. “Destroy the threat” is their programmed response.

The blessings of industrialization, the division of labor and the Enlightenment are too recent to have changed the hardwiring that developed from a million years of living in hunter-gatherer tribes, or collectives. Clearly, my different hardwiring is due to a genetic mutation.

As such, it would be wise for me to stay away from chimpanzee cages.

By Craig J. Cantoni
Jan. 24, 2008
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An author and columnist, Mr. Cantoni can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

Posted January 25, 2008 09:46 AM
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