So, I've been thinking about individual and group rights — Not in a deep sense, but simply in the way they're taught in American schools. It's a central dichotomy everyone learns in late elementary school or early middle school: individual rights are freedoms to do as you wish, particularly economically and in speech, while group rights protect the group or the community from excessive incursions by individuals. We learn the framework early on, and it's so common and accepted (being a philosophical underpinning of our legal system and whatnot) that it's hard to question. But just a little digging shows this helpful little framework for the destructive force it is. The idea of individual rights takes our most libertarian impulses and uses them to justify almost any tyranny, so long as it's not state tyranny.
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The Servile Individualist
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