[mrjangles]

Two things:

1) An all powerful state is the logical conclusion of anyone who believes the collective is more important than the individual.

2) There were many benevolent all powerful states during the 20th century, but every single powerful state that believed in collectivism turned into a murdering hell hole filled with poverty and suffering where the poorest people risked their lives to flee to countries that believed the individual is more important than the collective.

[alan-hn]

>1) An all powerful state is the logical conclusion of anyone who believes the collective is more important than the individual.

That is an absolutely massive assumption not based in reality. Its possible to care about the system as a whole without thinking that there needs to be a centralized authority.

[strogonoff]

Indeed, caring for the society more than the individual and all-powerful governments are at best orthogonal, at worst inversely correlated.

Take Hong Kong for example. Citizens are mindful and care about the collective a lot, while having individual business to take care of. In daily life they are conscious about following the rules not because they are forced to but because if they didn’t the dense city would come to standstill within minutes. HK was never under a communist dictatorship.

Similar with Japan and Korea, which are not dictatorships and thus the case for an all-powerful government is very tough to make (a government that is democratically elected to enforce the will of the people is hardly an all-powerful government—it’s the people who are all-powerful in that scenario).

Meanwhile, over in the mainland China you get selfish drivers speeding through red lights, giant interchanges full of cars at standstill (presumably, due to such behavior), organized scam mafia employing trafficked children to “sell flowers” on subway stations, etc.

I’d argue that all-powerful government is in fact the supreme (but hidden) example of individualism where power-hungry individuals on top do everything to ensure they reign forever and cannot be replaced, everybody else be damned; and the rest of the country (whether consciously realizing it or not) follows the example set by their leaders.

A factor that might correlate with societies being less individualistic is ethnical homogeneity. I hope there are examples to the contrary, though.