It’s all for the common good.

Such sentiments have been thrown down from many political pulpits over the years, and we are no stranger to that form of demagoguery these days. The ongoing pandemic has been replete with collective-minded addresses that exhort us to do the right thing for society. Society, ghostly in its essence and representation of human interaction, seems to manifest into a corporeal state when those at the helm need to make an appeal to our good nature.

Ostensibly, the common good is supposed to be just that—common; that is, an unquestionably positive adjustment of the common good should be an improvement for everyone. As a result, the notion of the common good has at certain points in history been regarded with greater import than the individual good.

But one need not go far to find examples of when the well-being of society at large has been championed over the individual rights of its citizens to calamitous moral effect. The greater good is often used to justify in a society what is best for the people in power, not for the countless named individuals who want to live their lives in the way they think is best for them. According to Albert Camus, in his essay Homage to an Exile:

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”

How can one thing be equally good and useful for all people? For what is any society other than myriad individuals, each of them unique? Karl Marx, in the words of British psychiatrist and author Anthony Daniels (writing under the pen name of Theodore Dalrymple), saw humans as being “utterly conditioned by their circumstances” and “instances of general forces”. He viewed men and women only in categories, instead of seeing them as:

“…individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche…”

Where others perceived individual people, Marx only observed the People. Why would one bother to study a man, when we know Men? Despite Marx’s predilections towards lumping humans into faceless groups like proletariat and bourgeoisie, it remains obvious that the mass cannot exist without the specific parts that comprise it. Society purports to represent us all, but each of us in no way represents society as a whole.

In light of this, Carl Jung maintained in his essay The Undiscovered Self that the “real facts” of our world are populated with discrete objects, not broad generalities. For our purposes here, this discrete object is the individual, and the broad generality is society.  Herbert Spencer similarly suggested in The Man Versus the State that concepts like society cannot be touched or seen, and can only be known “by an effort of constructive imagination”. This was the argument of Benedict Anderson’s famous work Imagined Communities, where similar points are put forth: that large communities like society and nation are inherently imaginative and are lacking in true community, something only possible with perhaps “primordial villages of face-to-face contact”. Anything else is an invention and not an accurate reflection of a community of unique individuals like you and me. We are an exception, an irregularity, an utterly unique occurrence; that is, each of us is the “authentic carrier of reality, a concrete existence that is crudely obscured by the practically fictional umbrella of “society”. Individuals are not invented: they simply are.

An accurate picture of reality, then, is one that consists of an incomprehensible list of exceptions. To place value upon the specific instead of the general is to apprehend the difference between the knowledge of a particular category of thing—its broader characteristics for purposes of taxonomy—and the understanding of each distinct element, unique in its form and ultimately irregular when held up to the average. To do otherwise is to only see the forest but miss the trees.

Ultimately Jung—who was deeply concerned with meaning—suggested that an indelicate category like society or nation “has no life of its own”. The true social life exists within the real individual, and it is in the individual alone that meaning exists to be found—and an individual apprehends their meaning by understanding their uniqueness versus comprehending the broad categorical knowledge of humanity.

Society should exist for the benefit of the individual. If this relationship is flipped, we begin to shift into a tyrannical dynamic; that is, the individual exists for the good of society—the oft-cited greater good. To bulldoze the uniqueness of the individual—their values, conscience, health, and so on—under overbroad policy is inherently unjust. Society, nation, all abstractions that represent our stratospheric human interaction, must be subordinate to the sovereignty of the real individual. An inversion of this hierarchy will necessarily result in injustice and tyranny, as pointed out by John Stuart Mill in his essay On Liberty:

“Instead of moral and mental differentiation of the individual, you have public welfare and the raising of the living standard. The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside… The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision of how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed, and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses.”

As unique individuals we must first come to understand ourselves—using our own reason and reflection—and pursue personal meaning. The broad push for the greater good should not impress upon the individual to the point where their own path is paved over entirely. Jung, ever the individualist, suggests that:

“The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness.”

The only way to truly pursue something like a greater good—although such a thing can hardly be said to exist in vivo—is to pursue that “moral decision” of how best to live one’s phenomenal life: to be the change we wish to see. The pursuit of individual meaning, separate from the pressures of the barbarous mob and those that incite it to action, is the best way to raise oneself, and potentially those in one’s immediate influence, higher. The encroaching tyranny should be contended with by all who desire to live as free individuals, present and future.

Otherwise, we may each of us end up as snowflakes, tossed and obscured by the tyranny of the avalanche.