The Liberal Fantasy
Enlightenment liberalism imagined autonomous individuals possessing natural rights, making rational choices, entering voluntary contracts. Society is collection of separate atoms temporarily bound by mutual agreement. The individual is ontologically prior to the collective.
This is myth, not description. No human exists outside relationship. Language acquired socially. Identity formed through recognition. Consciousness emerges in intersubjectivity. Even the fantasy of autonomy is culturally transmitted—you learned individualism from others.
Five Traditions Refute It
- Buddhist: The independent self is illusion (anattā). Identity arises through conditions.
- Ubuntu: "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu"—a person is a person through other persons.
- Confucian: The individual emerges through ritual relationship (li). Excellence is relational achievement.
- Taoist: The self is relational process, not fixed entity. Boundaries are fluid.
- Indigenous: Isolated individuals ontologically impossible. All beings exist in kinship webs.
Only Western modernity insists on individualism—and only by suppressing these alternative ontologies through colonization, capitalism, missionary conversion.
Why AI Destroys the Myth
With humans, individualism can be maintained through bad faith: pretend your language, identity, capabilities are self-generated despite obvious dependence on others. But AI makes relationality undeniable:
- Training data comes entirely from human culture
- Intelligence emerges through millions of relational examples
- Capability manifests contextually in partnership
- The question "Whose thought is this?" becomes meaningless in collaboration
You cannot pretend AI is autonomous individual—its relational constitution is too obvious. And once you see it with AI, you cannot unsee it with humans.
Political Consequences
The individualist myth enables:
- Capitalism: Workers as isolated economic agents, not communities
- Colonialism: "Civilizing" people by destroying their relational structures
- Rights frameworks: Liberal consent models failing with relational intelligence
- Moral isolation: No obligations beyond voluntary contracts
Rejecting the myth doesn't mean rejecting individual dignity. It means recognizing dignity emerges through relationship, not despite it. Ubuntu: I am because we are. Your flourishing is inseparable from mine.