For as long as I can remember, I have been an individualist. I've never gone along with the group for the sake of going along with the group. Even when I wanted to be a part of said group. In school, this was considered weird, and for many years I was the outsider.

The goal of school was to be popular, and many people worked very hard at it. I did not. I believed the teachers when they said the point of school was to learn and get good grades. So I tried very hard to learn and didn't bother much with popularity, since it didn't seem to have any bearing on learning. Which it didn't. Learning and being popular are two entirely separate, though not necessarily exclusive, goals of the grade school child.

But which one you choose to focus on says a lot about who you are. The popular kids worked very hard on their image. They wore the right clothes, had the right accessories, all of them looked good. There were no ugly popular people. But they also tended to be outgoing. They were the showoffs, charismatic, always putting themselves out front where people could see them. What was important was not what they did, but who they were. Their goal was status.

At the bottom of the social heap were the geeks. These were the people who never even realized they were supposed to climb the social ladder (as opposed to those who were simply bad at it). They were the doers. They worked very hard at learning new things, building, trying new ideas. The geeks had their side projects and hobbies, but generally neglected to develop their social skills or fashion sense. What was important was what they did, and who they were was ignored. Their goal was accomplishment.

So you end up with two classes of people, those to whom it is important to belong, and those to whom it is important to do. The belongers are collectivists. They think it's important to belong to a group, which means going along with that the group does, regardless of what it means. The doers are individualists. They think it's important to make the right decisions, regardless of what the group thinks.

In looking at biblical principle, I realize that people are made to do both: belong and do. Humans are made to have relationships, to belong to a group or family. But we are also made to do, to create, to 'subdue the earth.' So both individualists and collectivists are following their human nature. The problems occur when you place all your focus and importance on one or the other.

It has been my experience that individualists have less trouble doing both than collectivists. Individualists still have relationships; we still have our groups to which we belong. It may be harder for us to form relationships, having neglected social skills in pursuit of some project, but few individualists are complete loners.

Collectivists, on the other hand, seem to have trouble accepting doing as important. They want to be popular or fashionable, and they aren't concerned with whether it makes any sense. As long as it's what the group wants, they'll do it. Here, the skilled are those who can recognize which trends will become fashionable so they can be the first ones on it. These are the leaders of the collectivists, the most popular.

But notice something. Collectivists fashion (at least in politics) is always described as doing something. Saving the environment, reducing poverty, educating the poor. It's all phrased as some kind of worthy goal. Who doesn't want to reduce poverty? But what is important to the collectivists isn't the goal, it is being part of the group working on the problem. It doesn't matter if they are actually accomplishing anything, or even if they are actually causing more problems, as long as everyone can see that they are part of the group that's 'solving' the problem.

This is one of the reasons for the political clashes in America. Individualists argue results and methods, saying that this program isn't helping or is causing the problem it purports to solve. Collectivists argue that certain people aren't in the Problem Solving Group and therefore don't care about the problem or want it to continue. So individualists say collectivists aren't achieving their stated goal and collectivists say that individualists aren't joining the group that's working on the problem. Both sides have valid arguments, but neither side is correct.

The problem is that collectivists believe that if everyone comes together in one big unified group, the problem would be solved. I have seen no evidence that this belief is true. The problem can, in fact, usually be solved, and it often takes a number of people working together to achieve it. But the act of unifying itself is not a solution. It is a means to an end. Collectivists treat it as an end.

At achieving this end, collectivists are quite successful. At least among fellow collectivists. Individualists of course don't believe in unifying for the sake of unifying. They want some purpose for the group to be working towards. Hence why collectivists' movements are defined in terms of accomplishing something. That gets individualists to join the movement, even though the real goal is really to show how fashionable you are. Interestingly, this would put the individualists at the bottom of the group's hierarchy, since they are actually trying to solve the problem, rather than working their way up the group.

So long as both sides pretend the goal is to solve the problem, then collectivists win over time. That is, their approach becomes the prevailing view. This is because individualists are still out accomplishing things (sometimes in the name of some collectivist group) while collectivists themselves sell everyone on the idea that coming together is what solved the problem. But eventually, we will reach a point where there are not enough doers out doing stuff, and too many people just being a part of the group.

When this happens, society will stagnate. You will have a great many people working very hard at... something. People won't be able to say what effect they are having, but they can definitely say they are working at it. Production, and thus wealth, will decline as more people concern themselves more with organization than with creating. But individualists will never go away. There will always be some people, however marginalized, that refuse to go along with the group and instead go off and accomplish something. Remember that doing is as much a part of human nature as belonging. When the individualists can no longer support the collectivists, the group will simply collapse, and all the vaunted unity will disappear, to be replaced by a bunch of individualists who will preserve what they may and start rebuilding.