Even if all one cares about is social cooperation and group harmony – and to hell with individual greatness and happiness – then it needs to be known that the best way to get social cooperation and group harmony is thru non-coercion. Don’t make people interact. Don’t coerce them in that direction. Let them remain free.
If cooperation and harmony between people is society’s primary goal – which is fundamentally absurd – then it needs to be realized that the best approach to this is, as it were, roundabout. Don’t seek this ideal directly. Let it happen. Allow the social cooperation and group harmony to develop naturally, organically, peaceably, and freely. Don’t attempt to force it via government tyranny.
Grant each individual in society his full liberty. Respect the rights of man and allow everyone to interact with each other as they will and choose. Because the fact is: People have more than enough sweetness, goodness, common sense, and rationality within them to cooperate harmoniously with their fellows naturally and easily. This practically happens automatically.
Or at least it does if the social cooperation and harmony is allowed to happen and develop freely. But if some ingenious and saintly social engineer chooses to coerce the social interplay – if he wisely and virtuously elects to force friendship and brotherhood down people’s throats – then that pretty much kills all high-quality cooperation and harmony in society.
Just as people quickly and easily become friends and brothers under individual liberty – as the history of Britain and America in the 1800s proved – so too they naturally become enemies and destroyers under government compulsion. When the rights of the Holy Individual are protected – when all members feel safe and secure from societal attack – then social interactivity flourishes.
Tyranny, in contrast, makes everyone hostile to everyone. People rightly see their fellow man as their slave-master which they must now serve. They accurately view their fellows as their hated lords and masters which they now must cooperate and live in harmony with – or else. People inevitably regard these folks with revulsion, and as their evil enemies.
They even tend to see such hostile forces as bizarre, fascist space aliens – and not human beings at all. People they once would have welcomed, and gladly called friends, they now naturally view as noxious insects which need to be squashed. Freedom-loving individuals properly regard these moral slave-masters as vermin fit only for extermination.
Thus if one is personally and philosophically stupid and slimy enough to favor social cooperation and group harmony above the proper and noble goals of individual greatness and happiness, then one should at least try to realize that far the best way to achieve the ideal of cooperation and harmony is via pure individual liberty with zero coercion of the society and collective.
