Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays !

My point there was that I disagree with the first part.

IMO, environment, upbringing, genes and society are influences, sure. But what “got him to that point in his life” were his choices.

If a man becomes a criminal it is, indeed, his own responsibility but, the collectivist is not wrong by suggesting that what got him to that point in his life is environment, upbringing, genes or even a corrupt society. There is no contradiction there! The “crime” is still his responsibility.

The same for your “success” example . . . a man can be proud of his achievements and take credit for them and still recognize that it’s the other “crap” you point out that helped him along the way.

. . . or, perhaps, your reasoning is just beyond me.

Your farmer example could be seen in a different POV: by ruining the earth, you are harming yourself too. So it’s a stupid thing to do.

As for “a responsibility to contribute collectively”… I don’t think I’d go that far. I think that, by trying to improve our own lives while respecting the rights of others (which collectivists always believe individuals never do, for some reason, even though it’s one of the main points of individualism), you end up improving the lives of everyone else around you, even if that wasn’t your actual goal. But to say that you have some kind of duty to improve others’ lives… I don’t think so. We’ll agree to disagree, or disagree to agree, or something like that.

Anyway, my point in the part you quoted wasn’t that we didn’t need anyone else, but was, instead, that most people never take responsibility for anything they do - good or bad. And they prefer a “nanny government” (or group, or state, or organization, or whatever) to take away any shred of responsibillty left - and, although the room heat example was mostly for the humor, in a way it’s also a true example of how people don’t want the responsibility of taking care of their own body warmth… or anything else.

Is there is a difference between actual help and environmental help or upbringing? Why is one crap and not the other? I’m not sure what you mean by actual help, since it seems perfectly obvious to me that we are helped by many people throughout our lives. Our environment certainly contributes something, as does our upbringing. My personal belief is that when we benefit individually, we have a responsibility to contribute collectively and to ensure that future generations have the same or better access to what we took advantage of. Its like being a farmer. You are allowed to take what you can from the land, but if you take too much, the farm will become exhausted and be unable to grow anything any more. You must feed the system just as you must feed yourself.

What individualists do is claim that they don’t need collectivism to be successful, they can do it on their own, but all of civilization is simultaneously a collectivist and individualist project. Individualists take the easy way out by pretending that the benefits that they take advantage of are purely individualistic. Like your “actual help” vs “fictional help” that you want to pretend doesn’t exist. Of course, people have good reasons for pretending certain facts don’t exist. They might help you take a more extreme position against people who you think are evil, or to advance a particular political goal. Those might very well be worthwhile goals, but just because a goal is good doesn’t mean that the strongest argument that supports it is true.

(1) in the winter, you must wear summer clothes under your winter clothes to abide the heat
(2) in the summer, you must carry or tie around your waste big, heavy sweatshirts to abide the cold
(3) you’re sick the whole damned year.

gotta love it.