The Threat of Excessive Individualism

The cult of excessive individualism threatens the survival of our species

Vahid Houston Ranjbar
6 min readNov 25, 2020
Photo by Jayant Kulkarni from Pexels

“The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.” — (Gleanings from the writings of Baha’u’llah CXXXI)

A few years ago I wrote an article on the The fetish of exaggerated individualism and the danger it poses to the survival of our species.

Yet since then the issues I discussed only have seemed to become even more pronounced with the recent turn against global cooperation, the rise of rabid nationalism and the growth of fear and outright terror of any sort of international cooperation. These are tightly coupled to the explosion of conspiracy theories which have infected the minds of a sizable and growing population. The advent of COVID and our collective response has only highlighted this problem in a stark manner. The fact that wearing a mask to help slow the spread of this disease is in some sections of our culture, considered a gross infringement of individual liberty and…

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Vahid Houston Ranjbar

I am a research physicist working on beam and spin dynamics. I like to write about connections between science and religion.