Purely self-interested individuals collapse when organization and terror arrive

Evidence

As something abstractly realized, in Hegel’s sense, the individual cancels himself out: the countless people who know nothing but their naked, prowling interest are those who capitulate the moment organization and terror overtake them. If today the trace of humanity seems to persist only in the individual in his decline, it admonishes us to make an end of the fatality which individualizes men, only to break them completely in their isolation. The saving principle is now preserved in its antithesis alone. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 169

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The self-cancelling of the abstractly realized individual, ‘the saving principle preserved in its antithesis,’ is the aphorism’s culminating reversal.
• SEED: Essay angle: how hyper-individualism creates the psychological precondition for totalitarian conformity — the isolated self as the fascist’s raw material.
• XREF: connects to: Saturated social systems collapse into absorbing black holes — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 249; People fear collapse and carry their own powerless enemy within themselves — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 747; Individual rational self-interest can systematically produce collective disaster. (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Individual rational self-interest can systematically produce collective disaster. #expands (0.85)
• Rational individual self-interest can cumulatively destroy shared collective resources. #expands (0.85)
• Total-institution socialization via isolation and occupancy transforms civilians into terrorists. #qualifies (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2127
• Civilizations collapse when they lose the will to defend themselves #contradicts (0.75)
• People fear collapse and carry their own powerless enemy within themselves #exemplifies (0.72) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 747