On balance, Collectivism is preferable to Individualism

Contention 1: Collectivism My opponents bring up the thoery of utilitarianism where the needs of the many outweight the needs of the few. There are many times in history that we have seen that the needs of the majority have led to terrible things. My opponent's justification of the majority over the minority can be used to justify slavery as it could better the economy and that the masters in the nation outnumber the slaves. While in the Triangle Trade days, slavery was justified by saving them from the terrible living conditions, converting them to Christianity, and bettering the economy and benefitting even the slaves to not doing it and harming multiple people. (http://tylerquillin.wordpress.com...) It has also been used to argue genocide from NAZI Germany to Extreme Radical Islam. Anotherf thing here is that under a collectivist society there is no motivation for an individual to be strong, to be healthy, to actually work hard, to provide for one's self, and/or be beneificial to society. Why is this you may ask? You have no motivation, because the system will provide for you no matter what and we would be creating a free rider problem. A free rider problem is where no one contributes to society and only flies by and lives off of the effect of others. This is one of the things that has a greater chance of occuring in a collectivist society than an individualistic society. Contention 2: Individualism Now for your attack on individualism, why in the world do we need a community? Yes, the chaos may cause the death of several people, but the fact is that why isn't that a bad thing? Everyman for himself isn't such a bad society and in a default situation we would laspes back into an individualistic society. My opponent's attack on me is based on the assumption that we need a community. The theory we need a community is based on nothing. We do not need a community in the first place, Unless the individual is more prepared to help and work harder than the person next to him he would need You obviously cannot expect a babby, a senior citizen, or (excuse my terminology here) a "Special" person cannot be expected to be fully functional and be able to further society for the resources. What would happen here if we had overpopulation on Earth under collectivism. As I said you need to get the most amount of resources from, but without motivation you won't be able to get anything. You can expect people to be equally individualistic you cannot expect people to be equally collectivist. People fall back on the individualism as the default due to the motivation under every situation. When is out for themselves then they can help, but under collectivism you are only out there to help for others and not yourself as you expect others to help you out, but under a collectivist society we have the free rider problem and that's more people doing nothing than most things, because you have no motivation. Today there is 45 million people bellow the poverty line in the world. (http://www.census.gov...) I also showed how Tocqueville's definition, but when we apply both we can see that both Individualiams and Collectivism are quite similiar. In Individualism those are thinking for themselves and better society by their success. In a Collective society people try to better society as a whole by bettering others. We can see that the definitions are quite similiar, but the fact is that in an individualistic society people are motivated and that we are not affected by the Free Rider Problem, because we do not have to rely on others. My opponent also states that the US is a democracy and thus a collective society, but it is the Capialist individualistic view point of many Americans that has prevented this nation from turning into Socialist in the mid-1900s or even fascist in the 1930's. He also states that Tocqueville's quotes only apply to wealthy, but they apply to the risk takers in America who are motivated to take the risk in order to make a profit. Contention 3: Humans are selfish. There have been many examples in history where a Collectivist society has sprung up, but only to fall due to Power corrupting it's leaders such as the USSR. IF there was a true collectivist society then it would be a grassroots deomocracy and there is none currently. THis is where the actions of the government, every single law, is voted upon by the average citizen and that represents a collective society while the US can be an individualistic society due to the Corporations giving massive amounts of money to give to cannidates and then they make the decissions, while a majority of the national laws are created by these people and not the country. WHose to say that a Senator from New York has the same interests and knowledge as per say a Senator from Alaska. It doesn't and a bill that perhaps highers the US gas prices may be introduced by the New Yorker since they don't drive a ton of cars so they don't understand the repercusions, but it will raise food prices as a result. My opponent argues that the Marine’s acts were selfless, but he failed to counter may Freud argument showing that he did this to save the genes of more people so the human race could continue and that those genes can still exist.