The immorality of Collectivism.
Why Your Life Belongs to You, And Why They’ll Never Admit It
You already know the script. Someone—politician, pastor, professor—will tell you that your life, your time, your mind exist to serve a higher abstraction. Change the abstraction, and the sermon never skips a beat. God needs your soul. Society needs your wallet. The planet needs your thermostat. Same moral engine, different hood ornament. This essay is the wrench that strips the paint and shows the rust underneath.
Whenever I engage with collectivists, the conversation inevitably turns to morality. At its core, the debate is one of ethics: the clash between egoism and altruism.
In this analysis, I aim to dispel the persistent myth that any form of collectivism can be genuinely moral. At best, collectivist ethical codes are incomplete—half-codes that demand obedience, extol sacrifice, and valorise dependence, while offering no guidance on thought, rational action, or the principles required for human flourishing. They provide no framework for sustaining life, creating value, or achieving happiness.
What is Collectivism?
Collectivism’s core moral premise: your life belongs to someone else—state, tribe, planet, or deity. The label shifts; the invoice stays fixed. It views the individual as a mere tool for collective ends. These systems span all politics and eras, including but not limited to:
Communism – Window dressing: Proletariat. Invoice: Your labour.
Socialism – Window dressing: Equality. Invoice: Your earnings.
Fascism – Window dressing: Nation. Invoice: Your loyalty.
Nationalism – Window dressing: Patriotism. Invoice: Your autonomy.
Nazism – Window dressing: Race. Invoice: Your blood.
Islamism – Window dressing: Ummah. Invoice: Your submission.
Christianity – Window dressing: God. Invoice: Your soul.
Tribalism – Window dressing: Clan. Invoice: Your independence.
Postmodernism – Window dressing: Narrative. Invoice: Your truth.
Environmentalism – Window dressing: Planet. Invoice: Your comfort.
Welfare states – Window dressing: Society. Invoice: Your productivity.
Mixed economies – Window dressing: Fairness. Invoice: Your initiative.
Window dressing: The superficial, noble-sounding slogan that lures you in—like a shop’s flashy display. Invoice: The hidden, mandatory bill extracted from you personally (labour, soul, etc.), without consent or reciprocity; promoters seldom pay it themselves.
No matter the packaging, the deal is identical: the collective owns your life, demanding surrender of its essentials. The bill is yours alone.
Despite variations, all share a common blueprint: a group, deity, or abstraction takes precedence over the individual. They enforce conformity, obedience, and sacrifice. Your life and judgment serve collective “interests.” Creativity and initiative? Allowed only if aligned—or else punished, suppressed, co-opted. Ambition and independence bow to group goals. You are never an end in yourself.
Policies prioritise “need” over achievement: taxes and rules hobble producers’ innovation; dependents get rewards. Success punished, failure exalted.
Collectivism morphs morality into a sedative—group over self, judgment as vice, obedience as virtue. Control poses as ethics; dependence as ideal; the capable shackled to buoy the incapable. Result: eroded thought, stifled innovation, vanished flourishing—replaced by compliance and stagnation.
The Moral Sedative
Why would anyone willingly surrender themselves to this code? The answer lies in the morality of altruism as the justification. Comte’s Catéchisme positiviste (1852) defines it as:
“To live for others… is the only way to freely develop the whole of human existence; extending it simultaneously to the widest present, the most ancient past, and even the most distant future. Only sympathetic instincts allow an unalterable expansion, because each individual is supported in them by all the others, who, on the contrary, constrain his personal tendencies.”
Translate: “Live for others” = “Die a little every day so the collective can breathe.”
This is not cooperation. This is moral cannibalism—the strong slowly devoured so the weak may posture as virtuous. The individual is not supported; he is subsidised into extinction.
Comte’s vision of altruism is universal, temporal, and grounded in instinctive cooperation. But in practice, it transforms morality into a sedative. Life becomes service to others, obedience becomes virtue, and self-sacrifice is mandatory. Your purpose is no longer to achieve, create, or think independently; it is to become a disposable tool, a dishcloth for society.
Defining Collectivism Morally
Strip every collectivist creed to its moral chassis and you find the identical engine: altruism. Call the beneficiary God and demand tithes of blood or gold; call it Society and demand tithes of taxes or time; call it Gaia and demand tithes of comfort or children. The invoice is always addressed to you, never to the priest who writes it. That is why every collectivist ethic is window-dressing on the same demand: sacrifice now, justification later, maybe.
The consequences of collectivist vice and enforced obedience are stark and persistent throughout history. Khmer Rouge, Stalin, Inquisition, HMRC/IRS audit—different centuries, same moral logic: the able must bleed so the unable may feed.
From the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to Stalinist purges in the USSR to Nazi Germany’s industrialised slaughter, the consistent output was mass death, oppression, and the suppression of innovation and independent thought. Even when not militarily destroyed, such regimes eventually collapsed, sought foreign aid, or attempted superficial reforms; the logic of collectivism—sacrificing the individual for the group—inevitably led to societal self-immolation.
Religious collectivism demonstrates similar patterns. Medieval Christianity punished independent thought as heresy, while the Spanish Inquisition and Puritan colonies enforced rigid conformity. In the East, Confucian-inspired systems emphasised hierarchical duty over individual initiative, and strict interpretations of Buddhist or Hindu orthodoxy sometimes constrained social mobility and intellectual innovation to preserve communal or spiritual authority.
Modern examples, such as welfare states and heavily regulated economies, follow the same logic. Arbitrary regulations, punitive taxes, and anti-competition policies constrain productivity. Those who innovate or excel are often penalised, while those who fail, claim dependency, or invoke victimhood are rewarded. Contemporary redistributive policies across Europe, North America, and some regulated Asian economies illustrate this clearly: entrepreneurs and creators are heavily taxed, wealth is redistributed to those who contribute little, and dependence is sanctified as virtue. The capable are drained to sustain the incapable, and success itself becomes morally suspect, corroding not only wealth and productivity but the ethical foundation of society.
If sacrifice is noble, why do collectivists never volunteer their own children first?
Mechanisms of Moral Corruption
Altruism links directly to collectivism through obedience. Self-sacrifice—giving up one’s values, time, and energy for no personal gain—is elevated to virtue. Labour, service, or giving without benefit to oneself is considered morally righteous; acting in one’s own interest is condemned as sinful or “selfish.” Personal flourishing thus becomes a transgression against the collective.
The anti-concept of duty intensifies this inversion. Duty is
The moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire, or interest.1
It is moral surrender: the individual no longer evaluates right and wrong through reason, but defers entirely to an external authority. Duty erases responsibility, making atrocities possible under the guise of compliance. It drives guards at Auschwitz, inquisitors in the Spanish Inquisition, jihadists, bureaucrats, and functionaries in authoritarian states to commit acts otherwise unthinkable.
The collectivist calls envy “justice.” Translate: “I covet, therefore you owe.” Obedience and enforced sacrifice replace reason, independent thought, and rational action.
Even in moderate contexts, such as modern welfare states, the same dynamics appear on a smaller scale. Goods and services are granted based on “need,” often disconnected from responsibility, effort, or contribution. Producers—entrepreneurs, innovators, creators—are burdened with taxes and bureaucratic hurdles, while those relying on state support are rewarded for dependence. Dependence is sanctified, achievement penalised; moral corruption is systemic, not incidental. Every collectivist society transforms moral evaluation from rational judgment into the enforcement of conformity and the virtue of victimhood.
Imagine a stranger walked into your home and announced your savings now belong to “society.” You’d call the police. When the stranger wears a ballot badge, you call it virtue. The same man who would fight a mugger in an alley applauds the state for doing it by law. The only difference is the mask—and the applause.
Egoism vs Collectivism
Egoism and collectivism are not merely political alternatives—they are fundamentally opposed moral codes, based on contrasting views of human life.
Egoism treats the individual as an end in themselves. Life belongs to the person; reason guides action; achievement and happiness are proper goals. Thought, work, and creation are morally significant because they sustain life and enable progress.
Collectivism denies the moral sovereignty of the individual. Life belongs to the group, state, or “society.” Obedience is virtue, sacrifice is duty, self-interest is sin, and ability becomes a claim by others. Productive individuals are coerced to support the unproductive, while dependence and victimhood are rewarded.
History illustrates this inversion. In Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR, innovation outside state control was punished. Religious collectivist doctrines—from the Crusades to modern moralistic movements—demanded self-denial for the “greater good.” Contemporary welfare states replicate the pattern: producers are taxed and constrained, while dependency is rewarded. Collectivism exalts conformity and sacrifice over reason, competence, and life-affirming action.
Every collectivist framework—political, religious, or redistributive—subjugates the individual, glorifies unearned claims, and suppresses merit.
Collectivism offers two roads: obey and be drained, or resist and be shamed (or worse). Egoism offers a third: produce and keep.
The Moral Half-Code of Collectivism
Collectivist ethics are incomplete as a guide to human life. They instruct only on serving others, sacrificing, and subordinating oneself to a collective ideal—offering no framework for self-directed living, prosperity, or flourishing. Virtue is measured by the magnitude of renunciation; life, achievement, and independent action are irrelevant or condemned. Survival is secondary to conformity, and independent thought is discouraged.
Consider a hypothetical: Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos could be elevated to sainthood under collectivist morality simply by surrendering wealth, abandoning comfort, donating everything, and serving the needy—and if they bled a bit, that would guarantee sainthood. Their moral worth would be judged not by innovation or intellectual contribution, but solely by the scale of their renunciation. Success, skill, and creation—all hallmarks of life-affirming achievement—are invisible under this lens.
This reveals a fundamental weakness: collectivism is an emotional, reactive creed for redistribution, not a rational moral system. It cannot teach self-reliance or how to thrive. Even moderate collectivist structures rely on egoism to survive. Welfare states, regulated economies, and redistributive systems function only because some individuals produce beyond imposed demands. Collectivism parasitises the capable while offering no guidance on living, creating, or prospering. Its dependence on egoism underscores its parasitic and self-contradictory nature.
In short, collectivist ethics are a half-code: prescribing what to give, whom to serve, and how to obey, but nothing on living meaningfully, rationally, or independently. They elevate sacrifice over life, dependence over ability, and envy over achievement—a moral code of death, not life.
Advocates of Collectivism
Three primary groups actively promote collectivism, each serving a distinct function in maintaining the system:
The Faithful: The loyal foot soldiers, conditioned so thoroughly by altruistic moral codes that they cannot conceive of any alternative. Their lives are devoted to defending the collective—blindly enforcing rules, championing slogans, attacking dissenters. They form the majority of supporters and provide the manpower without which the system collapses. Examples: Mao’s Red Guard torching heritage in the name of duty; low-level bureaucrats who believe coerced sacrifice is noble.
The Grifters: Opportunists who exploit the system for personal gain. They understand the game and play it ruthlessly. Examples: Stalinist commissars hoarding privileges during collectivisation; modern politicians preaching higher taxes while exploiting loopholes.
The Priesthood: The true architects of collectivist power. They don’t exploit for cash—they exploit for conscience. By defining virtue as sacrifice and sin as independence, they make oppression seem righteous. From medieval clerics condemning reason, to Marxist professors denouncing property, to post-modern theorists branding success as “privilege,” they sanctify suffering and vilify achievement. Their method is moral corruption: guilt becomes virtue, envy becomes justice, submission redeems. They convince the productive that talent is debt, the independent thinker that thought is dangerous, and the happy that joy is sinful. No force is needed—people willingly chain themselves. Every dictatorship, inquisition, or purge begins not with a sword, but with a sermon.
Together, these three groups form a self-reinforcing system. The Faithful provide obedience and manpower; the Grifters exploit their sacrifices to enrich themselves while keeping the Faithful in line; and the Priesthood justifies control, granting the Grifters legitimacy. Each depends on the others: the Faithful enforce what the Priesthood legitimises, the Grifters profit from the Faithful’s labour, and the Priesthood secures its influence. Collectively, they make collectivism self-sustaining—corrosive to independent thought, parasitic on productivity, and destructive to individual moral and practical autonomy. And out of the three, the priests are the most evil, as they know better.
The Cycle of Collapse
Collectivism encourages dependency—under the guise of interdependence—undermining independent producers. Obedience, passivity, and conformity are moralised, discouraging initiative, creativity, and self-reliance. Those who produce or innovate are constrained by arbitrary rules, regulations, and redistributive policies, while those claiming need, failure, or victimhood are often rewarded. Personal weakness becomes entitlement and moral authority, creating a culture where mediocrity is sanctified and excellence punished.
History illustrates this pattern. In the Soviet Union, entrepreneurs and skilled workers were constrained by quotas and oversight; innovation outside collective goals was suppressed, and nonconformity punished. Nazi Germany enforced obedience and conformity while criminalising resistance. Even modern welfare states replicate this dynamic: high achievers fund non-producers, while dependence is treated as a moral virtue. Less collectivist societies sometimes bail out the more collectivist ones, as the USA did with the USSR.
During a collapse or a crisis, a fourth group emerges: the Bottom Feeders. Unlike the Faithful, Grifters, or Priesthood, they do not sustain collectivism; they exploit its wreckage. Historical examples include opportunists after the Soviet bloc’s fall, post-war profiteers, or those exploiting crises caused by overextended welfare states. The Bottom Feeders accelerate disintegration while profiting from it, stripping what remains and selling it to the highest bidder—they are the system’s only “winners.”
At its core, all collectivism—ideological, religious, or philosophical—serves one function: control. It compels voluntary sacrifice, obedience, and internalised guilt for independent success. By moralising dependence, submission, and renunciation, collectivism co-opts the mind, turning reason into guilt and initiative into a threat. The Bottom Feeders highlight the ultimate consequence: a collapse that creates opportunity for those willing to exploit it.
The Threat: Egoists and Independent Thinkers
Collectivism cannot tolerate the independent thinker—the true egoist. They reject the inversion that equates obedience and sacrifice with virtue and treats self-interest as sin. Where collectivists seek conformity and dependency, the egoist pursues reason, achievement, and self-directed purpose. They innovate and create because life demands it, not to satisfy collective approval.
Even in regulated societies, civilisation depends on egoists. Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web through independent discovery. Historical examples further illustrate this:
Sergei Korolev: The Soviet space program relied entirely on his autonomous genius.
Richard Feynman: Centralised projects like the Manhattan Project required independent minds.
Alan Turing: British wartime efforts depended on his creative reasoning.
Leonardo da Vinci: autonomous inquiry drove Renaissance innovation.
Marie Curie and James Dyson: achievements flourished through self-directed insight, not compliance.
A society of egoists thrives: individuals acting for their own life and values produce a dynamic, self-sustaining civilisation. By contrast, collectivist societies collapse under moral and practical contradictions. Collectivists cannot survive without capturing or coercing productive minds; they depend on a few independent thinkers to sustain what would otherwise self-destruct.
Egoists stabilise society through independence and productive initiative. They do not exploit others; their value lies in sustaining life, innovation, and progress. Their very existence exposes collectivism’s fragility, revealing its reliance on control, guilt, and coerced labour. Societies that cultivate egoists progress; those that suppress them stagnate. The egoist embodies a sustainable moral code grounded in reason, choice, and life-affirming action, while collectivism survives only by leeching from the productive.
Conclusion
Collectivism is both a moral and practical failure. It strips individuals of choice, reason, and the ability to act in their own rational self-interest. By placing the group, state, God, or abstract “society” above the individual, it transforms moral agency into a tool of compliance. Decisions are no longer guided by logic, values, or consequence, but by what is demanded, expected, or prescribed.
True morality requires autonomy: rational principles, the ability to weigh cause and effect, and the freedom to pursue life-affirming goals. Only when individuals act by reason, make choices, and assume responsibility for outcomes does morality serve its proper function—guiding human life rather than suppressing it. Collectivist systems, in contrast, substitute obedience for ethics, need for justice, and guilt for virtue.
Those who enforce collectivist codes—the priests, politicians, ideologues, and self-appointed guardians of morality—are not educators or guides. They are predators of independence, exploiting human obedience and dependency for power. They cloak control in moral language, presenting coercion and sacrifice as noble acts.
Civilisation can survive only when individuals are empowered to think, act, and live for themselves. Societies that celebrate autonomy, innovation, and responsibility flourish. Those that elevate the collective over the individual inevitably stagnate, decay, and collapse under the weight of their own moral inversion. The health of a civilisation is measured not by the number of people it claims to serve, but by the freedom and capability of each individual within it.
Every collectivist sermon ends the same way: your life, your future, your child—offered up so someone else can feel righteous. The altar is always ready. The question is: whose blood will be on it?
Next time a collectivist demands your sacrifice, ask one question: “Will you put your own child on the altar first, or is the nobility reserved for mine?” Watch the sermon stutter. That silence is the sound of altruism meeting reality—and losing.
You rely on a hidden and highly contestable picture of what humans are like (a moral anthropology). Once we surface those assumptions, the “collectivism = immoral” claim stops looking like an objective truth and starts looking like one ethical preference among others.
Here’s what’s being smuggled in under “reason” and “morality,” Rand-style:
Humans are essentially rational, self-interested maximisers; altruism is rebranded as vice; the only real rights are negative liberty and property; and “collectives” have no standing beyond individuals. Rand explicitly grounds ethics in “man’s life… required for the survival of a rational being,” with “reason as [the] only absolute.” From that moral anthropology, any duty grounded in shared purposes (public goods, commons, care) is framed as coercive “sacrifice,” i.e., immoral. But that’s a conclusion baked into the starting picture.
Why that anthropology is contestable:
Human morality is deeply cooperative. Evolutionary and developmental evidence (Tomasello) shows our species builds normativity out of joint and collective intentionality—shared goals, fairness, and mutual responsiveness—well before market-style individual calculation. That’s a very different baseline than “atomised utility-maximiser.”
Moral intuitions are plural and culturally patterned (Haidt). People don’t reason from one master value; they balance care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Declaring only one axis “rational” simply privileges one tribe’s moral palate.
In practice, collective action is often the rational, moral way to avoid harm and create value. Ostrom’s work shows communities can govern commons successfully without collapsing into tyranny or free-riding. That’s cooperative agency, not “immorality.”
Methodologically, social outcomes aren’t just the sum of isolated choices; there are real collective agents and responsibilities (think teams, juries, co-ops, unions, municipalities). Philosophy recognises this category.
So, in light of “moral anthropology” your piece is trading on a particular anthropology (Randian individualism), calling it “Reason,” and then condemning everything that doesn’t fit it as “immoral.” That’s circular. If you allow for cooperative moral psychology, plural foundations, and empirically successful collective governance, the blanket “collectivism is immoral” claim doesn’t hold.
Alex, your frame smuggles a whole moral anthropology in under the word “collectivism.” You treat every ‘we’ as slavery and every ‘I’ as freedom. But humans are both individual and cooperative animals; shared intentionality is a basic feature of our species, not a Bolshevik glitch. You also redefine “duty” as blind obedience. In the tradition you cite (Kant), duty is self-legislation by a free, rational agent—obedience to a law you give yourself, not to a priest or party. That’s autonomy, not servility.
History: the “independent geniuses” you list mostly thrived inside public institutions and mixed economies. Turing at Bletchley (state lab), Feynman on the Manhattan Project (federal program), Berners-Lee at CERN (public lab), the Internet via DARPA, and GPS via the US DoD. The breakthroughs you use every day were co-produced by public and private effort.
Your claim that welfare states reward dependence and “stifle innovation” runs into data: countries with strong social insurance regularly sit at the top of global innovation tables and sustain very high employment/productivity. See the 2025 Global Innovation Index and OECD employment/productivity snapshots.
Finally, the “my thermostat, my choice” line ignores externalities. Climate change is a textbook market failure (Stern), and the IPCC’s synthesis is clear on the risks without collective action. Freedom includes the freedom from others imposing unpriced harms.
In short: not altruism-versus-egoism, but a richer anthropology—reasoning individuals embedded in networks of care, cooperation, and institutions that make innovation (and liberty) possible