Freedom? Or Security? Or both?

Security is a basic human need.

It is the assurance of survival, literally, but also figuratively, in the forms of financial security, emotional security, and the like. Many, perhaps most,  people will give up much, including degrees of freedom, in exchange for a sense of security. After all, survival is fundamental: if one must submit in order to survive, one can still hope to achieve freedom later; but if one dies one's freedom dies too. In some domains, giving things up to gain security may well be wise, even necessary - exercising prudence and discipline in one's financial affairs, for example, reduces one's freedom of action in spending in the short term in search of substantially greater freedom of action and security in future.

When this very natural instinct to seek security is applied to making political decisions as a citizen, it can result in choices that result in the loss of both freedom and security. The danger is that people come to regard the state, or a demagogue, as the source and guarantor of their security or means of living, and therefor may be willing to trade personal freedom for whatever the state provides or the demagogue promises. Then there is no longer an effective electorate watchdog controlling the political leadership and bureaucracy that actually constitute the state. Yet the leaders and bureaucrats comprising the state, as we have seen, are all too often tempted too much by power hunger and corruption, and constantly tempted to expand the power and resources available to the state and therefor to themselves at the expense of the rest of society. The more powerful the state becomes, the more obsessively and ruthlessly those who seek power over others will strive to control it. Even the well-meaning are tempted to increase control over others' behavior and coerce desired behavior they deem, rightly or wrongly, to be necessary for the greater good. For them, the need for security can becme an extremely effective lever for gathering more power. Obviously, those in power need effective pushback and boundaries. This is a problem in a society that places a high value, or any value at all, on individual freedom.

Preserving individual freedoms is complicated by the fact that the fundamental purpose and justification for the state is security. That is what makes the state necessary, whether it is defending the society against foreign enemies; or protecting citizens against criminals; or coming to citizens' aid in the event of catastrophes either natural or manmade. Abolishing the state, or so weakening it that it cannot perform these essential functions, is obviously out of the question. There is evil in the world, and it can organize. That makes it fundamentally necessary for people to organize as needed to protect themselves. The result is, after a certain size of organization is reached, a state, as the term is being used here. Then the question arises, how do the citizens protect themselves aginst the state when it becomes coercive, oppressive, and/or corrupt?

A further complication: Government has proved to be useful for providing some services, especially those that contribute to general welfare but which the recipients cannot, or find their personal benefit so small they will not, pay the cost or otherwise marshal the resources needed to provide them. Urban mass transit and roadbuilding are familiar examples. It can be all too easy to start believing the state is entirely benign. Finally, as the state grows in power and resources, increasing numbers of people and even private institutions find their livelihoods depend, if not completely at least in great part, on the power and money of the government.

It is complicated yet further by the fact that human beings are by nature social creatures, who instinctively look to groups for help and security. For most of human existence on this earth, we lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers who depended on each other for mutual survival - men hunting game and defending the women and children in war parties of men who depended on each other un battle, women producing and mothering children and providing the social glue binding the group's families together, the elderly imparting experience and wisdom to the young, and a leader personally related to or at least familiar with the rest of the group giving needed direction. In times of trouble or crisis, it is inherent in us to look to groups we belong to or can organize for support, and natural to favor the groups that provide the strongest support. The trouble begins when a group becomes too large for those holding power at the top of its hierarchy to know or be known personally by those at its base.

If one considers decentralization of power where feasible to be a desirable goal, what is to be done about mitigating this tendency and striking a balance?

The most important thing of all is to instill in the population at large the concept that they inherently are, or ought to be, free, and that governments must serve their citizens and be limited by rule of law. The institution of freely elected representative government limited by rule of law in light of that fact was an essential contribution that needs to be nurtured and protected from assault. It is also important that people be made aware that governments are not only benign dispensers of goods and services, but also, because of their inherent coercive powers, potentially and all too often actually threats to both the freedom and the security of individual citizens such as themselves. The citizens need to be wary, and therefor they need to know that they must be wary.

One must also look for ways to add to citizens' sense of security that lie outside government and, when possible, are under the control of the individuals themselves. That lessens (though of course does not eliminate) the citizens' need for government and thus their willingness to surrender freedom to it.

The traditional mainstays of society, family, religious institutions, and the like, are obvious choices. Encouragement should also be given to voluntary groups conceived, organized and maintained by interested individuals themselves, including novel sorts of groups not previously in use or even thought of that supply members' wants or needs.

Coupled with that, making sure that individuals have capabilities and resources under their control on which they can rely is important. The rise over time of general prosperity has helped greatly in doing just that. It would be useful to create or enhance more institutions that add to or protect individuals' material means. The invention in the US of IRAs and 401(k)s, for example, was a significant contribution, giving individuals able to put money aside a vehicle designed to preserve from taxation and invest savings under the individual's control and therefor provide themselves enhanced financial security. More ideas of that sort are needed.

The more secure people feel in themselves, and the more means of security are available to them outside government, the less vulnerable they will be to political calls for lessened freedom, and the less willing to tolerate attempts at such lessening.

But most of all, the people must want to be, r remain, free.

The True Enemies in Government

If you think governments should serve the people they govern, there are three major enemies within governments to be dealt with: Power freaks, bureaucracy, and corruption.

The worst of these is power freaks. 

Most social creatures at least as advanced as chickens have hierarchies - “pecking orders” - in which one individual has the highest status, and others have lesser ones. Human beings are not only no exception, they have refined and elaborated “pecking order” exponentially more than any other creature. 

     

Within human communities there is brisk competition for status, and for power, meaning the ability to control others, and some people have an obsession with getting and wielding power and position. Their apparent motives vary: some seem driven by religious or ideological conviction. Others by fear of enemies, rational or otherwise. Often, simple self-interest and venality are explanations. For some, the reasons need to be sought in the realm of psychiatric inquiry. Any or all of these may operate in the same person. Unlike many other social creatures, humans are capable of inflicting injury or murder on each other to achieve their ends. 

Power freaks seem to arise spontaneously within human society. It is unclear how much culture affects this phenomenon, but the existence of powerseekers is evident everywhere in the world and throughout history. For such persons, the more power adheres to a position, the more desirable that position becomes, and the more avidly, and all too often ruthlessly, they will pursue it. In any society, there is unlikely to be any more powerful a position than the head of its government. And the next most powerful positions are likely to be those near the top of the governmental hierarchy. It is not only the most capable of powerseekers, but also the  most obsessed and ruthless, who are likely to prevail in the contest for these positions, and who are likely to seek to extend or enlarge their power at almost any cost. It is exactly this sort of person who is the most dangerous person to hold such power from the point of view of others and of society as a whole. One need only note the most notable committers of mass murders of the 20th Century - Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, and Pol Pot are prime examples - to appreciate the havoc such a person can wreak. 

This phenomenon has been at the root of much of the mayhem that has filled human history from the earliest known times to the present day, and threatens to continue where not firmly checked. So far, the best defenses against the evils powerseekers can wreak have been general, strongly held consensus within a society for constitutionally limited powers of government; and for recurring, free, and fair elections by secret ballot. Another is what is lately called transparency and accountability: the more the governed know and respond to about what powerholders are doing, the less  easy for them to inflict harm to the governed. A strong case can be made for adding what in the US is referred to as term limits - a limit on how many years one person can hold an office. In general, the weaker and less permanent a government position is, the less dangerous it and any power freak who should happen to secure it is.

The second is bureaucracy.  

Like power freaks, it is an inevitable consequence of large, hierarchical organizations. Governments necessarily consist of a leadership at the top at the apex of an organizational pyramid, the people governed at its base, and in between layers of functionaries who transmit orders and information back and forth and exercise powers delegated to them by the leadership. Such a structure makes it possible to acquire and concentrate resources and apply them in a controlled and purposeful way. It is an essential part of any military organization: The commander needs reliable intelligence from the battlefield, and reliable transmission of and obedience to his orders. It is a life-or-death matter. For other sorts of hierarchical organizations, it may be less existential, but bureaucracy is still unavoidable. It is even desirable in many ways: It make possible organized human activities that would not be possible otherwise. 

Unfortunately, bureaucracy also has unavoidable, and sometimes fatal, weaknesses and drawbacks.

Most importantly, bureaucratic hierarchies are potent force multipliers for those at the top. Neither is necessarily evil, but neither is necessarily good, either. The combination of powerholders and such hierarchies, however, can be extremely dangerous if those holding power are malicious, misguided or misinformed, or even merely clumsy.

For starters, it inherently separates makers of policies and of some or all decisions, who are by design at or near the top of the bureaucratic pyramid, from the people most affected by those policies and decisions, at the bottom. The more layers between them, the less the decisionmakers at the top can know about the situations, needs and wants of the people at the bottom. If the purpose of the bureaucratic pyramid is merely to extend the reach, control, and power of those at its apex, that is not the most important consideration. In a military hierarchy, for example, the primary need is to coordinate and carry out the force’s strategy and actions in the theater of war. Knowing the condition and morale of the troops is certainly important, of course, yet those matters are secondary to the purposes of transmitting orders from above and controlling actions. But if the purpose is the welfare of those at the bottom, such matters are by definition primary.

This hierarchy is made up of individual human beings, who are subject to all the imperfections that human beings have. Often they will have agendas of their own that may not mesh well with the interests of those supposedly being served. They may be corrupt. They may oppose the policies and actions they are supposed to implement and support. They may practice favoritism among individuals or groups affected by them. They may be incompetent, mentally ill, or simply irresponsible. They may simply misunderstand the communications that pass through them from above or below. They may make honest mistakes. And beyond all that, the longer such a hierarchy is in place, the more its members will come to behave like a separate interest group from both those at the top and those at the bottom of the pyramid, one increasingly or even primarily concerned with the needs, wants, and internal politics of the people in the hierarchy.

In the U.S., corporations have been working hard at “flattening” their internal bureaucracies - reducing the number of layers between the decisionmaker and those he or she affects - for at least a generation, abetted by the power of computer networking. The principle is simple: Drive decisions and the responsibility for them down the pyramid as close as possible, given the resources and reach of responsibility required, to the level that is affected most by the decisions - and hold the decisionmaker accountable at potentially the cost of his job if he behaves badly. It requires careful monitoring, great transparency, ability to measure and judge results, and clear defining of who the decisionmaker is and what his or her responsibility is. It is not perfect by any means, but it has worked fairly well. Transparency, accountability, feedback from those affected by decisions, and a personal stake in a favorable outcome on the part of the decisionmaker are essential.

And the corrupt.

Finally, there is corruption - abuse of office for personal gain, whether tangible or intangible, or to serve ends antithetical to the interests of the organization and the people it is intended to serve. It appears to be a virtually universal disease in government at every level. The remedies that seem to do the most good: Transparency; avenues for those at the bottom of the pyramid to communicate to those at the top; careful auditing, monitoring and policing; encouragement of whistle-blowers; ability and interest on the part of the citizenry to affect government; and perhaps most of all a universal ethical revulsion against corruption and the corrupt. What is tolerated or at least unopposed will surely proliferate.

In Many Ways, People Are Freer Than Ever

Discussion of individual freedom usually revolves around what laws and governments do or do not forbid or compel. But there are other dimensions of freedom that lie largely outside laws and government, and which have a great practical effect on what people can or cannot do, and therefore their perception of what degree of freedom they have or lack. Let us call it practical freedom.

For example, money. The late Malcolm Forbes once opined that one of the best aspects of having money is the freedom it gives its owner. He meant it gives its owner options he or she otherwise would not have. Someone without money cannot buy a car, and so his mobility is severely limited compared to someone who can. With some income and a little bit of savings, he can lease a car, giving him a lot more freedom of action. With more money, he gains more options. He becomes able to buy a Chevy or a Honda Civic outright, and not have to worry about its condition when he has to turn it in after the lease expires. If he has as much money as Forbes had in his day, he can write a check for a Maserati without turning a hair. Or not. He is free to choose because he has the money to pay for his choices. Greatly more options are available to him in many other aspects of his life as well. Vacationing in Tahiti, if he chooses, instead of being restricted to taking a bus to the nearest beach, or hanging out in the local park. Living in a gated community instead of a crime-ridden slum. Getting medical treatment not covered by insurance. More options means more practical freedom of action. People sometimes call it empowerment, and that is a valid description too, but in fact it is increased freedom of choice. As general wealth increases, so does people’s practical freedom.

Technological advances have afforded more people more practical freedom than almost any other factor, perhaps excepting the spread of democratic principles of government. That vacation in Tahiti is feasible only because jet airliners have put Tahiti only a couple of days away from almost any developed country with an international airport. A century ago it was not a vacation; it was an expedition taking months. Today, even a person of modest means can carry a personal cell phone in his pocket with which he can call anyone in the world for whom he has a phone number, and send them a photo he’s just taken with it that does not entail a delay of several days to be processed in a photo lab.  A mere generation ago, neither was possible, so he was not free to do that.

Another important dimension is the effect of prevailing social mores, as opposed to laws and governmental diktats. The gradual loosening of many such mores in the US and elsewhere has removed many constraints, and visibly enlarged the degree of freedom with which people can conduct their daily lives without prohibitive social opprobrium. Once, an unmarried couple living together was subjected to shaming and general disgrace in the US; some landlords would not rent to them. They were “living in sin.” Today, no-one turns a hair. Whether that is a good or bad thing may be debated, but it is an accepted fact, and people have the freedom to accept it for themselves or, if they consider it wrong, to reject it for themselves. Even such a mundane thing as freeing up standards of dress and appearance is liberating. Where once many American women felt they needed to replace wardrobes  according to the dictates of Paris fashion houses and follow the current fashion in hairdos on pain of embarrassment about being unfashionable, today they can wear what they feel comfortable in or looks good on them, and wear their hair any way they darn please. There used to be lesser, but still restrictive, standards for men’s appearance, also now greatly diminished or gone. This is liberating. It may seem minor, but it is something that affects people’s freedom of choice literally every day of their lives on matters that have an immediate personal effect on them. 

Far less minor may be loosening of mores in places like China, where it is hard tor westerners to imagine the liberating effect of the early communist regime’s banning of the formerly widespread custom of binding women’s feet, which physically hobbled them for life. Such changes make people more free. 

Yet another, closely related dimension, with worldwide repercussions, is the general increase in material abundance, whether people are living in the money economy or not. When people are living at subsistence level or struggling to escape from it, they are likely to be more concerned with securing basic biological necessities like food, potable water, and shelter from the elements than with enjoying their rights to speech or voting. People at risk from threats and violence will sacrifice much, even freedom, to assure safety. These brutal facts may do much to explain the persistence in many parts of the world of tyrannical regimes. Such a regime’s excesses may be overlooked when you and your children are finally able to count on having enough to eat, and to eat in peace, because of it. This may be particularly true in societies that have little or no experience of political freedom, and are therefore inured to authoritarianism.

It remains to be seen what will happen in such societies when large numbers of people finally rise through Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs beyond physiological necessity and security and find their further progress hindered by such a regime. Will the result be similar to the experience of South Korea, whose people eventually threw off a harsh military dictatorship and established a full-fledged democracy? Will they regress instead, by embracing ideology or old values that favor authoritarianism, as seems to be happening in Russia and Turkey, and perhaps in China at this time? Only time will tell.

The Economy: An Ecosystem

Much of economic thought seems based on an almost unconscious fundamental analogy: The economic system is thought of as if it were a huge, complicated machine; at its center is a sort of reciprocating engine in which enterprises on one side and households on the other exchange money, goods, services and labor back and forth. Since economics as a science developed largely during the industrial era, it was perhaps natural to adopt this analogy. Machines, from bicycles to locomotives to blast furnaces, and by extension machine-like institutions like assembly lines, in which humans served as essential working parts, were awesome both in potential and in reality, utterly transforming society and the quality of life and daily existence. That would get anyone's attention.

That analogy has proved serviceable to some degree, but it is far from perfect. It  encourages an expectation of predictability that is frequently disappointed. It implies a degree of precision in the system's operation that does not exist. It predisposes toward assuming there is some grand design. It also predisposes subordinating the parts of this "machine" to the whole, when the "parts" are in fact the human beings the economy exists to serve. Worst of all, it leads one to think that there is some set of controls that one can seize to operate the machine, and even to "fine-tune" it, and that it therefore is in need of an Operator. Naturally, government is often looked to as that potential or actual Operator.

Basically, this analogy is fundamentally incorrect.

A better analogy would be to look at the economy as like an ecology. In a natural ecosystem, all the plants and animals in it act independently, albeit sometimes in symbiosis and sometimes as antagonists, seeking to survive and flourish, and they evolve together in light of each others' behaviors and nature and the resources available to the ecosystem, and the conditions under which it exists. The result rising out of apparent chaos is an ad hoc order that increasingly serves its components and that is simply the result of Darwinian natural selection - that which works tends to persist and increase and that which does not tends to decrease and die out. It is constantly evolving. The interrelationships among its components are sometimes extremely complex, and alterations of the ecology can therefore produce unexpected, even counterintuitive, results.

Similarly, the economy is the evolved product of the independent actions and decisions of everyone who comprises it and has comprised it, together with the resources they have available to act with. Everything said above about natural ecosystems is true of human economies.

In the United States, for instance, that means there are 320 million "operators," the vast majority of them making decisions for themselves under continually varying circumstances that affect the system in which they are acting to greater or lesser degrees. It is true there is often some degree of predictability to people's actions, which enables economists to make predictions about future results that prove close enough to actual outcomes to be of some use. Most often, these predictions are made by observing past trends and projecting them forward, as if anticipating machine-like predictable behavior, with some tweaks to adjust for known current circumstances. It is famously also true that most economic predictions and models fail at the times when they are most needed - at "points of inflection," moments when the performance of an economy departs significantly from trend or even reverses. That is because the economy is not actually a machine. Human behavior changes, sometimes on a large scale, and the overall economy inevitbly changes with it.

An example is the financial crisis of 2008-09. While a few warned of a possible recession (mostly people with reputations as "perma-bears"), no serious economist saw anything like this crisis coming, nor did virtually anyone who relied heavily on economists' analyses - including commercial bankers, stockbrokers, central banks, all of whom had an obvious institutional need to anticipate such an event if it were in the offing.

There were a small handful of speculators who did anticipate a collapse of some sort, and who profited almost beyond imagining by acting on that anticipation. The motion picture The Big Short entertainingly sets out how one such speculator foresaw and acted, to his vast profit. And how was this remarkable feat accomplished? By setting aside the equations and "econometrics" of economists and by adopting the methodology of those who seriously study the ecology - going out into the field and finding out what people were actually doing and what was going on. They discovered a deranged housing sector, full of "liar loans" to manifestly unqualified mortgagees being made by utterly irresponsible banks and other lenders banks and sold immediately to Wall Street "aggregators," who made no effort to verify the soundness of the loans before packaging them in mortgage-backed securities being held as assets amounting to many,  many billions of dollars on the assumption that their income streams would continue when in fact they would not. In short, the rise of packaged mortgages had short-circuited the traditional moral and practical constraints on mortgage lenders that had forced due diligence and accountability. As a resut, much of the mortgage and investment industry went haywire. Key motivations to ethical behavior were gone, and economists did not pick that up from their statistics and equations because they made no such investigation.

Perhaps it would be wiser for economists to augment the methodologies of mathematicians and engineers to the methodologies of those who study natural ecologies, with their enormously complex interrelationships and their sometimes surprising reactions to changed circumstances. Perhaps they should recognize that they are dealing with an economic ecology of independently acting organisms that can change in unanticipated ways and not with a basically predictable machine.

The Trust Fund Illusion

One assertion of collective-oriented commenters is that individuals "should" share equally, or nearly so, in the fruits of the society's economy. Underlying this assertion is the presumption that the economy and its srock of goods and services are a product of the collective that exist independently of the people and therefore belong to all. Those that would permit unequal distributions insist that government decide who is more deserving and who is not. It is analogous to maintaining a legacy trust fund, of which everyone is supposed to be a beneficiary, with the government acting as trustee.

This way of thinking is false, but gets some support from the apparent permanence of much that surrounds us. Landmark buildings, street maps of cities, bridges, and tunnels, and much else persist decade after decade. Some cathedrals date back many hundreds of years. Even something so evanescent as a daily newspaper is often published by a business enterprise that is generations old - The New York Times, to cite just one highly visible example, has been published by the same family in substantially similar form for the whole of the 20th Century and on into the 21st. Such things certainly seem permanent and created virtually independently of current population.

But such permanence amounts to, at best, to borrow a Shakespearean expression, only a hemi-demi-semi truth. In fact, such material goods are the product of human endeavor, and their continued existence is also the product of continuing human endeavor ensuring that they be preserved.

Consider a house, that cultural symbol of permanence, one built long ago by people no longer living. Imagine it abandoned and left untended and unrepaired. If it is well made, at first little will change. But over time, weather will affect it. Insects and rodents will find their way in.  Perhaps ground water will seep into the foundation. Wood rot is a risk. The roof will erode, as all things exposed to weathering do, and eventually leak. If lightning strikes and sparks a fire, the end can come very quickly. Even without that, eventually the house will become uninhabitable, and finally reduced to ruin of interest only to future archeologists, or disappear altogether.

Those things that are valuable and most nearly permanent legacies are intangibles, things like a common language, transmitted values, knowledge and technology most noticeably. These can be seen as like a trust fund, and they can and should be distributed or at least made available equally to all. To a great extent they are, at least in developed countries: That process is called education. But even they owe their continued existence to the efforts of living people to maintain and disseminate them.

Obviously, such efforts need to be compensated if they are going to be continued for long, and since some efforts are more highly valued than others, and are done by some people and not other people, clearly that compensation will and should be variable from person to person. Equally obviously, such compensation must coexist in a world with other, non-permanent goods and services that require compensation, like preparing meals and prescribing medications. All of these are the results of individual human endeavor, usually voluntary, usually acting in concert with others, but individual nevertheless. It is not that abstraction Society that made the car you drive, or supplies the gasoline it uses, or keeps it in good repair; it is individuals. The existence, or the continued existence, of these goods, legacy or nonlegacy, cannot be reasonably counted as independent of the people who provide them.

So the question really is, how shall such compensation be determined, which therefore largely determines how goods will be produced, preserved and distributed, and by whom? The best answer, in nearly every case, is that they be worked out freely among the people directly involved, because it is they who are best informed about the value they place on what good or service is sold or bought and on the labor and resources required, and what prices they are willing to pay or accept, and whether they can come freely to an agreement. Anything else consists of using power to determine distribution. That places a priority on getting and holding power, meaning the ability to coerce people to act differently from what they would do if left to act freely, or on influencing those who have it, rather than on producing value. It should be self-evident that is a poor priority to have as the main driver of who gets what portion of the wealth created. It drives people to expend time, effort and resources on getting and holding power, or on getting the favor of or nfluencing powerholders, instead of on producing goods and services of value.

The trust-fund illusion is not only wrong, it is harmful.

How Free Should People Be?

Human beings are unique individuals with separate, unique intellects and minds, and separate, individual perceptions of reality, interests, aims, desires, goals and purposes. 

It seems obvious then, that the greater the proportion of people in the human population who have freedom of thought and action, and the greater the scope of those freedoms, the larger the likelihood that some, perhaps many, individuals will discover or create new and better ways of thinking and acting, and develop wider knowledge, from which all individuals stand to benefit. That is called progress.

It should also then be obvious that the less freedom individuals have, the less scope of freedom to think and act, and the fewer the individuals who are able to act freely, the less opportunity there can be for creating improvement.

 It should therefore follow that if one wishes the human condition to get better, then normal, mentally competent, adult individuals should have maximum scope and freedom to act as they wish, each in their own way, and to communicate freely.

The obvious limitation: that their actions should not  injure or prey upon other individuals or encroach on their similar freedoms, for otherwise everyone’s actions and freedom would be seriously limited or contravened by the need to protect themselves or even to survive attacks or encroachment by others.

The historical record and current experience support this idea of maximizing freedom: We find that in general, the freer the society, the more successful it tends to be.The less free, the less successful. In the West, we look back on the great burst of progress created by ancient Athens, for example, or the flowering of intellect and culture of the Renaissance. They pale in comparison to the greatest flowering of human development of all time: It started with the Reformation, which introduced the concept of freedom of religious thought, combined with the development of systematic scientific inquiry, the development of the printing press and the drive to spread literacy, throughout the population, and continued with the consequent development of first religious and then political and economic freedom, all providing the foundation for an enormous leap in human progress and quality of human life that continues to this day. 

In general, the correlation today between relative freedom and the economic success and general happiness of the world’s nations is unmistakeable: The freer the nation, the better off it tends to be. The correlation is not perfect - there are other factors at work - but it is very strong.

So, considering both theory and practice, this conclusion seems inescapable: Individuals should be as free as is feasible, and societies should be designed to incorporate and reflect that conclusion.

No Man Is an Island…

While people are autonomous intelligences, they do not exist in isolation. People normally live together in groups of various sizes and kinds - families, local communities, affinity groups, and so forth, up to nations comprising millions of people. There are very few hermits.

In fact, people very likely lived together in groups long before they were people: Other primates largely live in groups, as do many other mammals, and even birds. So did other humanoid species, like the Neanderthals. And so, in all probability, did our biological ancestors. People therefore have a widespread inclination to ally themselves with one or more groups, and to establish quite powerful emotional ties to them, occasionally even to the extreme of sacrificing their own lives; we seem to be programed that way.

Many of these groups exist before, during and after the memberships of individuals in them, and often their entire lifespans. Groups have identities, and often purposes, beyond those of the individuals composing them. 

So it is reasonable to raise the question of which takes precedence, the groups, or the individuals that compose them? There are many assertions, even entire philosophies and systems of law,  based on the premise that the groups come first. Wars, some of which have killed millions of individual people, have been fought over group primacy. In fact, one could argue that all wars have been fought over which group will rule, and over whom and what they would have dominion.

So, which has pride of place? The individual, or the group, granting that both occur together and are intertwined? Which is figure and which is ground?

Here is a simple thought experiment: If all groups in existence magically disappeared, what would happen to the individuals; and if instead all individuals disappeared, what would happen to the groups? 

Quite obviously, if the groups disappeared, individuals would immediately set about creating new ones, which might or might not be reconstitutions of those that disappeared. Equally obviously, if it were the individuals who disappeared, there would be no groups, for there would be no one to replace them. Groups cannot exist independently of the individuals comprising them. In reality, only the individuals physically exist; their groups are mental constructs in people’s minds. A mathematician would say that the individual is the independent variable, and the group is the dependent variable.

Put as plainly as possible: groups exist for the benefit of the people comprising them, not the other way around.