A note to Sargon - a Caution against Collectivism (Social Contract Theory; Individual vs. Group RIghts)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGw3_iC4FB0

Original comment:
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I think you're being unnecessarily dismissive of Social Contracts. Granted you have a degree in philosophy that I don't, but the way that I see it is this: we are individuals first. Every single interaction that we have with other individuals creates a social contract. We constantly negotiate and re-negotiate these contracts so that we know what is acceptable between us, and what is not. So within my family, we have a certain contract. My family is nested within a local community, and a religious community. We share common values, codified or not within a more abstract social contract. Then that community is nested within our State (I'm in America) and that State has what is SUPPOSED to be an even more abstract common value. Then it goes up another level to the national, which again, is SUPPOSED to be even more abstract. Ideally, the closer to the individual you get, the MORE complicated the social contract, and the less codified, and the higher the hierarchy, the LESS complicated the contract, and the MORE codified. Obviously this has been eroded in America, where we have a federal beauraucracy that tyrannizes us with sweeping policy from on high, which is why our elections are so frought. But in totality, the social contract doesn't have to prioritize individual rights over the shared value of the group. My individual identity is nested within a group identity. There's a balance, because I will lose favor with my people (and likely, most people) if I prioritize myself above all. The collective doesn't get to decide without the individual, either, unlike our current governmental system. We are individuals, so we're already atomized in a sense. What the "liberal order," as you put it, seeks to do, is to break the bonds of each atom to separate each compound from its solid, perhaps crystalline structure, so that it dissolves into a solution, even unto all the mass becoming diluted by the liquid of all the other groups. What has happened is not the intended result of social contract theory; liberal social contracts work when there is a solid conservative hierarchal structure for them to fit into. What has happened is that the natural order has been reversed, due to all the bonds, or contracts, having been broken. So there are millions of individuals, now, who don't know where to go because they were cut off from their heritage, tradition, community, values, all of it. We naturally seek to form bonds (contracts), because we are a social species, so we're in the midst of the Great Scramble; each individual has nothing higher to subject themselves to. Some turn to religion and new bonds are formed there. Some turn to collectivist movements that seem to provide them some other sense of meaning that is, by all intents and purposes, a new and more primitive religion. The rest unite under the existing Order and push it to become a totalitarian regime, equally religious. And that's the structure releasing the enzyme, that seeks to destroy all other structures.

TL;DR yes, atomization has occurred. But it's not because of the belief in social contracts; it's because of the subversion of said contracts due to the upending of the proper Order.

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2025-04-19
 @kwazooplayingguardsman5615  While it's true that each individual is born into a family, he emerges from the womb completely alone. Each consciousness is inseperable from its own perception. If we exist primarily as groups, each individual would not be required to reverse-engineer creation alone. That is to say- we would not have to teach our children a single thing, they would download information like a hive mind. If we weren't individuals first, there would never be disagreements among individuals, such as the one we're having right now.
