Free collaboration is the only path between false individualism and false collectivism

Evidence

The situation in which the individual was vanishing was at the same time one of unbridled individualism, where ‘all was possible’: ‘Above all, individuals are now worshipped instead of gods.’ 1 That the setting-free of the individual by the undermining of the polis did not strengthen his resistance, but eliminated him and individuality itself, in the consummation of dictatorial states, provides a model of one of the central contradictions which drove society from the nineteenth century to Fascism. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 169 (#expands, via linked claim)

Without the human race, mankind, there is no truth; that is certain. There would remain only an irrational and contingent swarming of individual choices to which no law could be assigned. If some sort of truth exists capable of unifying the individual choices, it is the human race which can furnish this truth for us. But if the race is the truth of the individual, it can not be a given in the individual without profound contradiction. As the laws of speech are sustained by and incarnated in the concrete free project of the sentence, so the human race (as an ensemble of peculiar techniques to define the activity of men) far from pre-existing an individual who would manifest it in the way that this particular fall exemplifies the law of falling bodies, is the ensemble of abstract relations sustained by the free individual choice. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1222 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Only free choice can resolve an indeterminate chain of mutual objectification; Unchecked individualism destroys individuality rather than protecting it — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 169; The human race is constituted by free individual choices, not vice versa — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1222 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Unchecked individualism destroys individuality rather than protecting it #expands (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 169
• Only free choice can resolve an indeterminate chain of mutual objectification #expands (0.75)
• The human race is constituted by free individual choices, not vice versa #expands (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1222
• Individualism becomes a moral defense of the status quo once group-based paternalism is challenged #contradicts (0.70)
• Individualism becomes a defense of the status quo by delegitimizing group-based demands #contradicts (0.70)