The Morality of Individualism

I was listening to a show of Dr. Savage where he said that the individual has lost all moral justification in society and I couldn't help but think how true that is. The individual has no moral standing in our society as it has been eaten way by collectivism. This is a problem to our freedom since the exercise of our free-will is an exercise of the individual's free-will. The will to do anything emerges from the individual person themselves and not the collective mind of the whole since all thoughts begin and end with the individual's mind themselves. Assuming that our independent will is somehow synchronized with the collective will simply nullifies any internal will that we may have. Without the natural instinct to preserve that we can't have freedom nor can we have human happiness.

Self-interest is the instinct that drives us to defend our life, property, and liberty. It is our self-interest to protect those things that motivates us to repel any other person's attempt to remove them from us. A person who does not act out of their own self-interest will not defend those things and will have those things taken from them by those who are genuinely selfish.

Selfish is when we take something that we are not entitled to and that feeling only happens when we don't recognize the self-interest of others. When we don't recognize the validity of other people's self-interest then we simply cease to recognize their right to their life, liberty, and property. We then begin to assume that we have a positive right over someone else because we believe they have no right to those things themselves.

The self-interest instinct acts as a preservation against the selfish instinct of others since it motivates us to protect ourselves from other people's attempt to take our life, property, or liberty. The difference between selfish and self-interest is the difference between positive and negative action. It is a very self-interested thing to want to live and defend ourselves from those who want to deny that right to us but it is a very selfish thing to demand other people give up their life for our own purpose. We can see that a basic morality begins to appear when we recognize the self-interest of others.

We also can see that we have rights since self-interest allows us to preserve our liberty (our right to live) and since this right was born from a natural instinct we can say that this is a natural right. It is natural to want to preserve our life, our property, and our liberty so self-interest (not selfishness) is crucial for the understanding of natural rights. These rights were born of our natural desire and are a part of our natural creation. They were given to us as a part of our creation. This can either be done by mother nature or God but whatever you believe is responsible for our natural instinct those natural rights were not given to us by man. That is an assumption by the selfish since they believe they have the right to impose their will onto us by determining what we are allowed to do. Thank goodness that my natural sense of self-interest forbids them from doing that.