The idea is now widespread that communities or groups exercise a form of collective thought, which can be duly expressed by the leader of the group as the thoughts of the group mind. Community leaders often purport to speak on behalf of all members of their group when expressing the wishes or needs of the group. For example, when demanding reparations for historical injustices, they identify themselves and every member of their group as a collective unit deserving redress. The same applies when a community is said to need special assistance—for example, the “black community” is said to be collectively vulnerable even though there are many famous black millionaires. The justification for this, the identitarians claim, is that group identity is important and members of the group have a common experience that unifies them and makes it appropriate to see them as a group. This also has important implications for how history is understood, with historical events often being explained by reference to group opinions or group motivations.
However, double standards apply. Different considerations arise when the tables are turned and the group is accused of exhibiting negative traits. Then group leaders are at pains to explain the importance of individualism and why entire groups should not be held responsible for the actions of individual members. For example, Tim Walz, the Governor of Minnesota, has accused President Trump of deciding to “broadly target an entire community” because Mr. Trump said, “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of Minnesota.” Mr. Walz does not want all Somali people to be viewed as gangsters or fraudsters. He wants to emphasize that fraudsters are individual Somalis responsible for their own criminal conduct. His message is, “Do not paint an entire group of people with that same brush, demonizing them.” NYT reports that:
Debate over the fraud has opened new rifts between the state’s Somali community and other Minnesotans, and has left some Somali Americans saying they are unfairly facing a new layer of suspicion against all of them, rather than the small group accused of fraud. Critics of the Walz administration say that the fraud persisted partly because state officials were fearful of alienating the Somali community in Minnesota.
The Walz administration treats Somali people as a group for purposes of helping them with welfare and food assistance, the very schemes through which the fraud was perpetrated, but objects to them being treated as a group for purposes of assigning responsibility and blame for that fraud. These double standards should be rejected. Mr. Walz’s fear of alienating an entire community, choosing instead to turn a blind eye to criminality in their midst, is precisely the same type of collectivist thinking that he complains about when Mr. Trump tars that entire community with the same brush. The same analysis applies to a Somali congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, who objected to “her group” being demonized and spoke out on behalf of the group, saying, “What keeps me up at night is that people whose identities I hold—black, Somali, hijabi, immigrant—will suffer the consequences of [Trump’s] words, which so often go unchecked by members of the Republican Party and other elected officials.” She used collectivist identitarian language, speaking as a representative of “people whose identities she holds” to complain about collectivist tarnishing of people based on the identity they hold. She purported to speak on behalf of the “black, Somali, hijabi, immigrant,” despite the fact that many who hold that identity are known to disagree with her due to clan warfare raging among Somalis in Africa. She is, in that sense, guilty of the same time of collectivist thinking of which she accuses Mr. Trump. The same people who complain about “white privilege,” demonizing white people while ignoring the fact that many white people are poor or vulnerable, turn around and insist that their entire community should not be demonized.
These double standards are unprincipled and dishonest, insofar as they uphold individualism only when it serves their political purposes. None of these politicians should treat any group of people as a collective unit merely because it suits their politics to do so. But it is necessary to go further in understanding why this type of collectivist thinking is wrong—highlighting double standards may show the dishonesty of politicians, but it does not by itself explain why their collectivist thinking is wrong.
To understand this, we can turn to the defense of individualism advanced by Ludwig von Mises. In Theory and History, Mises explained how the notion of the group mind was invented by collectivist authors whose goal was to explain historical events by reference to the groups to whom those events related. They made the initial error of assuming that historical events were inevitable, from which it followed that the individuals involved in those events were merely incidental to the occurrence of the event. Mises gave the example of the assumption that, “If Shakespeare had died in infancy, another man would have written Hamlet and the Sonnets”—indeed, some have suggested that perhaps another man or woman did write those sonnets. To collectivists, the point is that these are English sonnets; therefore, as they see it, any English person could have written them and it matters little which precise English individual did in fact write them. Mises identifies that as the root of the group mind:
In their eagerness to eliminate from history any reference to individuals and individual events, collectivist authors resorted to a chimerical construction, the group mind or social mind.
The group mind or social mind was then treated “as if it were a real phenomenon, a distinct agency, thinking and acting. As they see it, not individuals but the group is the subject of history.” Thus arose the habit of referring to groups, rather than individuals, as the unit of action. One reason why they collectivize human action in this way is to deny authorship or agency to individuals. They diminish the genius of inventors by attributing their inventions to a group—the invention of “the American mind.” They justify the demolition of historic statues by arguing that there were no “great men.” Instead, all Americans, including those who arrived five minutes ago, are to be credited with having built America. Mises sees such doctrines as a “fable invented by impotent people for slighting the achievements of better men and appealing to the resentment of the dull.”
As those upholding such doctrines see it, man is an animal that has the instinct to produce poems, cathedrals, and airplanes. Civilization is the result of an unconscious and unpremeditated reaction of man to external stimuli.
Mises reminds us that this is always incorrect, because “the group is not an ontological entity.” This is important in approaching not only the debates about historical or political events, but also in resolving wider debates about collective guilt and collective responsibility. It is a reminder of the axiom that “only individuals think and act.”
