What is all the hostility on the right—the anti-communists, the right-libertarians, the paleo-conservatives, the reactionaries, the ur-individualists, the anti-collectivists, the anti-woke-ists—directed against? It seems to be directed against the idea that there is anyone or anything outside the individual himself (or herself¹) that needs to be considered as more than an opponent, an enemy, a danger. That everything other than the individual himself (or herself) exists solely to benefit … me. It/they only exist in me. It/they are merely a projection from me. It/they are a part of me; I am not a part of them; I exist only apart from them. And should I come to see that I am a part of them, it is the end of me: I cease to exist. This is solipsism. It is the ethical and political theory of idiots (in the Greek sense of ἰδιώτης). Synecdoche standing on its head and running amok.

My problem with this view is that my end is to be—merely?—a part of the whole. “A piece of the continent” Donne said. And neither the piece nor the continent can exist apart from the other.

¹ there have been and are plenty of women in this camp—Maggie Thatcher not least among them.