>I hate to break up this little "no I'm the underdog" love-fest, but
>utilitarian individualism is certainly NOT predominate in the US. "By
>their fruits ye shall know them". Judge the actions, not the words.
>Where are all these utilitarian individualists on election day? Voting
>for Gore and Bush????? Yeah right.
>
>The US is predominately made up of thoughtless robots, programmed for mass
>consumption and rote work. The robot is only superior if you judge
>superiority using amount of debt and number of useless toys. The robot
>knows nothing of utility and lives his life trying to stamp out the little
>individuality he has. The robots dress alike, talk alike, and think
>alike. The robot is programmed for fear, and has been conditioned to
>associate fear and unpleasantness with responsibility, so the robot does
>anything to abandon responsibility whenever possible.
Utilitarian individualism doesn't worry about such things, Matt (not that 'thoughtless robot' is the right term in your damning spray - big-picture thinking takes time and energy and discussing takes time and entrenched conscious social linages - many people have neither these days - but they're not without thought or the capacity for it). 'Utilty' is simply what works for you and 'individualism' is the view of the 'you' for whom it works. No room there to wonder at how you came to want what 'you' wanted, why it 'works' for you, what 'works' means here, and why the 'you' you're trying to satisfy is so unlike the you you can't help but regularly suspect you are. Our wants are naturally, internally, hierarchically and individually the wants of each of us and each of us is a product only of those natural internalities - and what we want is as internally directed as it is internally sourced. How one comes by the things one wants for one is the only question for the utilitarian individualist.
Else they'd ask why it is so important to 'em, autonomous wanters that they are, to fit in with all the autonomous wanters ... and a lot of 'em must, because even the marketers, who have long recognised and exploited the social aspirations of the essentially social would-be autonomous individualist, are learning to brand stuff as anti-brand-brands (at least they are here).
>The equivocation of social darwinism with libertarian political philosophy
>is absurd.
Well, then Christopher must not be a libertarian, because he's sure-as-hell a social darwinist! Trying to fit the species-oriented Darwin to the individual in an implicit 'war of all against all'.
And the social is either a way to optimal human freedom or it is a nagging and ever-threatening inhibition to human freedom. American libertarians tend, it seems to me, to the latter view. If so, that falls bodily into the social darwinist category.
Cheers, Rob.