The Lone Ranger Vs. Seal Team Six

Hypothetical battle:  The Lone Ranger (throw in Tonto if you like) against Seal Team Six:  Who wins?  Easy.  Seal Team Six.  Not fair?  OK, take away all of the Seal team's night-vision goggles, automatic weapons, and other fancy toys.  Now who wins?  Still the Seals.  Still not fair because the Lone Ranger is outnumbered?  OK, add any John Wayne character, any Clint Eastwood character, and make it equal numbers of  loner heroes and Seals.  Who wins?  Again, the Seals.  No contest.  Not even close.

Why?  Because Seal Team Six members work, train, live, and risk their lives as a team.  Each man on the team knows his mission, and each man's mission is part of an overall strategy designed to win.  Each man is incredibly strong and capable in his own right and can think for himself and react to new threats, but he always has the mission in mind and weighs whether what he's doing will affect the mission. He's brave, partly because he knows his buddies will never leave him behind. That's the best of individual strength and working together.  By the way, the four-dollar word for working together is collectivism.  It is this combination of individualism and collectivism that makes Seal Team Six an awesome fighting force and also what makes America truly great.

In America, we take pride in being individuals.  After all, the wild, wild west is part of our history where rough and courageous characters were out there on their own making up the rules as they went along. We lavish praise on the entrepreneur who on his own came up with a new product or a new way to do things.  John McCain and Sarah Palin were appealing to this spirit when they called themselves Mavericks in the 2008 election.  Our definition of freedom usually includes being able to do exactly as we please whether it's for the collective good or not.

When we think of collectivism, we usually point to countries like Japan where conformity is taught from an early age and where drawing attention to oneself (as American Tourists frequently do) is frowned upon.  A place that, in the point of view of many Americans, built it's economy on mass producing products built on the ideas and innovations that originated in the US and elsewhere.

What we often overlook are the remarkable examples of collectivism in our own culture and history.  In the Midwest  when somebody's barn burns down, the whole community joins in a barn raising.  We ended the depression and won World War II by an amazing collectivist effort where everybody pitched in for the common cause, even the 12 year-old collecting tin cans.  In recent history,  most of us remember where we were on 9/11.  The single bright spot amid all that grief and anger was the fact that we all shed whatever political labels defined us and all became Americans, resolved and determined that we would work together and would not be beaten by this.

Every good thing we've done as a country was a group effort.  Putting a man on the moon was an incredible and massive group effort.   Building our economy has always been a group effort involving everyone from the trader on wall street to the shop keeper on main street to the man or woman working on the factory floor.  Take away collectivism, and the whole thing comes to a grinding halt.

Progressives are sometimes accused of emphasizing collectivism too much.  One of the biggest "Much Ado about Nothing" moments in the 2012 presidential campaign has to be President Obama's "You didn't build that" comment.  That was the moment conservatives seized upon to prove that progressives were anti-business, anti-individual, and downright anti-American.  Now that the election is over, can we all just calm down and admit it takes both individualism and collectivism?

We sorely need the guy in the laboratory who is not afraid to buck common wisdom and common theories and thinks of something no one ever thought of before. We very much need the innovative entrepreneur who finds a better way, takes a big risk, and is rewarded for that risk.  We very much need the woman who works day and night to create a small business that then takes off and employs thousands of people.

But we also need to work together.   No one individual or even one company can build the infrastructure we as a country need.  When a storm like Hurricane Sandy comes along, we need to work together to help its victims.  Corporations will not always do the right thing by their workers and customers, and someone (the government) has to step in and remind them of their obligations.

If you emphasize individualism against collectivism too much, you get the Lone Ranger, when what you really need is Seal Team Six.