Peak Individualism
The internet age has been a time of massive contradictions, to use one of Marxism’s favourite memes.
It has been an era in which the new left has abandoned the working class. And has embraced wealth accumulation. Especially by its own emergent ruling class.
It has been a time when China, the remaining communist behemoth, has used economic imperialism – the highest form of capitalism, according to Lenin – as its strategy to colonise the planet. Who needs military invasions?
An age that is said to be “the most educated” that is, patently, the least educated. A period flooded with information and yet devoid of wisdom. A time where physical ugliness, observed across cities now defined by brutalist urban forms and in the gifting of art prizes like the Archbalds, is taken for beauty.
Where we witness people sacked and/or ostracised for speaking truth to power.
Where we are all urged to “follow the science” at a time when real science, in its classical understanding, yields very different results from the megaphoned narratives. Covid and climate change are but two obvious examples.
It is an age when “environmentalists” are destroying the very environment they once convinced us they were out to safeguard.
It is an era where men are said to have a “right” to get pregnant. And to invade women’s spaces, like bathrooms.
Despite John Cleese’s good sense on the subject, depicted in The Life of Brian.
There are new hybrid ideological combos that defy traditional understandings of left and right. Just look at globalism and its prime exemplars, like Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Blair. These two, between them, changed the faces of the parties they led, in two countries. They would agree on almost all the big questions, Blair’s recent globalist apostasy on net zero notwithstanding. This is, after all, the age of the UniParty.
We willing hand over tax dollars to governments that spend those taxes on things of which we violently disapprove. We do this year after year.
And, of course, we try our military heroes for “war crimes”. We watch police employed to keep us safe handcuffing men (like Henry Nowak, in Southampton) who are bleeding to death, having been stabbed in the street.
Our own coppers shot protesters in Melbourne with rubber bullets during the Andrews Covid dictatorship. They locked us up. They tasered old ladies. They smashed heads into concrete floors. The ACT police used LRADS (long range acoustic devices) during the Convoy to Canberra to harm the innocent.
Melanie Phillips once penned a book called The World Turned Upside Down. It sums up part of the problem – the abandonment of rationality – neatly. Shelley Gare’s book, The Triumph of the Airheads, does similar things. But the willingness of many to believe anything is not quite where the argument here is going.
It is clearly the most contradictory age in human history, for mine.
Perhaps the greatest cognitive dissonance of our age is the simultaneous embrace of hyper-individualism, baked into the culture through postmodernism and evident from the student radical days of the 1960s, and the mass conformity, often to rank idiocy and barminess, revealed by Solomon Asch in his experiments and reaching its apotheosis during Covidmania.
For an explanation of Asch, see:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
Asch set out to see many people are willing to go along with the pack, in the face of reason and the evidence of their own eyes. He found his answer. A large number of us are willing to go along with the crowd, in defiance of our own beliefs. This could be an expression of what many take to be our greatest desire in life – to be part of the majority. On the right side of history. History written by the winners. In the age of social media, we don’t even have to personally know those with whom we wish to identify.
Two things above all else tell us that we are a society that conforms, and conforms religiously. The first is the triumph and the absolute power of DEI. Of woke. In the workplace. Whether corporate, universities, mainstream churches or government. It is the sheer breadth of the ideology that confirms its victory. Every institution takes the knee.
The second is the utter insouciance of the vast majority in the face of the elimination of free speech. Remember 18c? There were no marches in the streets. Mass immigration gives people the shits. The elimination of free speech never did.
We are a cognitively dissonant bunch.
We are, simultaneously, both Ayn Randians and supine robots. We are gaslit by the state, and yet we demand the freedom to do and to be anything we want. Including killing the babies in our women’s wombs, right up to birth. Including changing the sex of our children. Or allowing it.
How to explain conformity?
There is probably little mystery. Who would ever be (say) a whistleblower? You know there is corruption at work. What to do? Face the sack. You are the main breadwinner. You believe that your main role in life is to “provide” for your dependents. You are decades off retirement. You stay silent. Get the Covid state injectable? If you don’t, there will be hell to pay. Douglas Murray once said that it is only the retired than can buck conformity.
Principles may not be cheap, but they are also not fungible, when the chips are down. They then just seem cheap. When principles are parked a million times over, you get a society that looks a bit gaslit.
In this regime, the genuine dissidents can be heroes. Like Allan Myers, of the Samuel Griffith Society. When you are on $20k a day as Australia’s premier commercial lawyer, you have a certain freedom to push back against the legal establishment.
Those who don’t give a shit can become heroes of the silently dissident. It explains the rise of One Nation.
There are other explanations of serial conformity. The power of propaganda is exquisite. You can fool the people … pretty much all the time. When the argument for repugnant action becomes seductive, it is game over.
Then there is the power of ideology. You simply take one for the team when your team says “believe this”. And you know it is bullshit. Black can be white in the age of turbo-ideologies.
Another reason to conform is fear. There is punishment for standing out from the crowd. This is now de rigeur, alas, in so-called liberal democracies. The punishments can be many and non-traditional.
Then there is “above my pay grade” conformity. White coat respect is part of this. 97 per cent of climate “scientists” cannot be wrong.
You could describe the characteristics of a society defined by its aggressive individualism. Then you could describe a society that conforms, is bullied by government, accepts a total absence of popular influence on the state as par for the course, bends to idiot rules, parks any desire to protest against the direction of travel. Then you suddenly realise … you are describing the same society. Where both things are true. They co-exist.
Now, you might say, the reason there is both radical individualism and hyper-conformism in our age is that it is different people who are conformists and individualists. A fair point. Reference the quadrant of conformity. There are always hyper-conformists, passive conformists, passive resisters and activist dissidents. True enough.
Yet the overlap between the conformists and the individualists is considerable, and quantifiable. Those who actively support radical personal autonomy – sexual licence, abortion, multiple genders, anything goes in the bathrooms, anti-official religion, radical rights – have also been some of the most conformist. As seen in crystal clear clarity during Covid. It was the “radicals” who were the keenest on the tyranny. The postmodernists only like dissidence when it is directed at THEIR enemies. The traditional family. Religion with rules. And the rest. They object when the dissidents are the deplorables. We can’t have that.
It seems that conformity is winning. Despite outliers like the guy (a neo-Nazi, according to the ABC, already ready with the vapid label) who booed the welcome to country at the Anzac dawn service. And went to court. And was fined.
But he went down fighting, at least. The Judge clearly didn’t get the irony of his call on the protester for not recognising the sacredness of Anzac. No, Your Honour, that is precisely what the “neo-Nazi” was doing.
Most of us, when confronted with this activist bullshit, just grumble silently. Yes, DEI trumps individualism and dissidence.
Peak individualism, with its urge to rebel, came and went, probably in the 1960s and 1970s. Come the post Berlin Wall accommodation, we have all settled into a comfortable, distracted, ultimately supine state of shoulder-shrugging whatevers.
Paul Collits
4 June 2026
Thunderous applause.