Resist the collective

With his essay "Identifying With the State," Butler Shaffer articulates where I was trying to go the other day with "ism, shmism." Thanks to Sunni for the link!

By identifying ourselves with any abstraction (such as the state) we give up the integrated life, the sense of wholeness that can be found only within each of us. While the state has manipulated, cajoled, and threatened us to identify ourselves with it, the responsibility for our acceding to its pressures lies within each of us. The statists have – as was their vicious purpose – simply taken over the territory we have abandoned.