A Brief Primer on Individualism in Western Intellectual History - Areo

I was weened on the Western value of the individual. The cowboy was the icon of the rugged individualist and I embraced that as my role model in life. Other than a couple years spent as a civil servant and my time in the Army, I was an entrepreneur and independent consultant. I made my living helping people do the things that they were unwilling or unable to do for themselves, collected my reward, and rode off into the sunset. The same was true of the time I volunteered helping others. When asked why, I had no better answer that the one attributed to Persius in Plutarch's Selected Lives: If not men of good will, then who? Now, for the past 100 years progressive Leftism has been threatening to replace the ideal of the individual with placing the collective first. In other words, as Spock said in Star Trek III, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few". Well, before we surrender individualism, maybe we should pause and take a look at it and where it came from...