@Lee humans are indeed dependent on each other for a certain standard of living, but this does not justify enforced collectivisation. Trade and consenting mutually supporting customs are enough. Remember you can earn protection from your friends by demonstrating virtue and investing in that relationship without trading goods or cash, but you cannot earn protection from strangers in the same way. An individualist society would therefore be warmer and friendlier than the mechanical bureaucracy we have in so many areas of our lives today.

That is demonstrably false! What’s more it’s a poorly worded, pseudo-intellectual falsehood. There IS a direct correlation between socio-economic inequality and crime, an in particular violent crime. If states do nothing to tackle the pay inequality (nominally through taxation) it is inevitable that crime will rise!

Now if you have any ideas how to rectify the extra-ordinary levels of pay inequality in this country (UK) without progressive taxation I’d be more than willing to listen. Note that relying on the free-market is NOT an option, as capitalism does NOT reward intellect and genuine talent as efficiently as it does greed and indifference.

“Examples in support: welfare dependency, gang violence, a majority of inventions coming from other countries, self imposed tax exile, the royal mail.”

Welfare dependency is a result of a flawed system and NOT a flawed ideology. There are a multitude of possible responses to it that fall far short of dismantling the welfare state entirely (for example job guarantee programmes). Also, gang violence is (to some extent) innate to humans and other primates, it’s observed in tribal communities the world over as well as in chimpanzees and gorillas (in the form of gangs of highly aggressive rouge males). In any case, violent crime is demonstrably reduced in communities with reduced inequality, some of the most violent cultures on Earth suffer immense pay inequality and institutionalised polygyny (example: Saudi Arabia). As for your allusion that British innovation is on the floor, I really would like to see your sourced for this; the British research base is widely regarded as one of the best in the world (in-spite of the year-on-year attacks on it’s taxpayer funded budget). Self-imposed tax exile is not mearly a consequence of individuality (there are no doubt plenty of high-rate tax payers who do not avoid their tax obligations), it is also the result of a weak and feeble government unwilling to close tax loopholes and tax havens. And finally, the Royal Mail is failing for the simple reason that its rates are extra-ordinarily low and much of its profitable business has been sold off, leaving an extensive loss leader in letter delivery. Even the lucrative junk mail arm of Royal Mail has been privatised (private companies pocket the profit, yet Royal Mail still delivery the junk mail!).

“I fail to see how collectivists and altruists can fail to recognise this, even at the level of the subconscious, or as some form of cognitive dissonance. They must be evil, or very stupid, I think mostly the latter.”

The issue lies with fundamentalism, and not collectivism. The collective is nothing without the individual, since the individual is the basic unit of the collective. The individual is, likewise, nothing without the collective, as we as human beings are social creatures who rely on collectivization to maintain the apparatus of civilisation. In fact broadly speaking the very basis of civilisation is collectivism; you try living a worthwhile life in a cave 20 miles from civilisation and you’ll quickly discover just how dependent you are on other human beings.

The only intelligent position is a more nuanced combination of the two, it is both libertarian and social, it is libertarian-socialism. You’re more than welcome to denigrate and even abandon the collectivism if that’s what you want, but along with the theorised benefits you’ll have to be burdened with the downsides, and I think you’ll find that the latter greatly outweigh the prior.

I can’t understand how fundamentalist individualists (i.e. advocates of feudalism) and fundamentalist collectivists (totalitarians) don’t understand this. They must, at least at some innate level recognise that they are dependent on a lot of anonymous individuals (farmers, scientists, engineers, doctors, dentists, candle-stick makers, etc…), and that by extension they owe those anonymous individuals a lot in return. They must also understand at an intellectual level that people don’t like being micro-managed, and that the best way to organise society is to enfranchise everybody (and not just the rich and powerful).