Ethical Individualism and Communism

Ethical Individualism: The Path to True Human Equality

The Center for Human Equality in Oregon, founded by Russell McAlmond, exists to champion a simple yet revolutionary idea: every individual American possesses inherent dignity and worth that no group label can define or diminish.

Through its promotion of Ethical Individualism—a human relational philosophy rooted in the founding principles of the United States—the Center seeks to restore equality as the Founders understood it and to build a society of mutual respect, trust, and genuine human connection.

Ethical Individualism holds that we are all created equal as unique individuals, each a distinct “mosaic of experiences” deserving equal respect. It rejects “group judgmentalism” or “groupism”—the practice of judging people by their race, gender, ethnicity, class, or any other collective identity rather than by their character, actions, and individual humanity.

As McAlmond articulates in his book Ethical Individualism: A Human Relational Philosophy, this approach recognizes the “primacy and reality of individuality over groupism.” It establishes a “horizontal line of equality” where no human being stands above or below another by virtue of group membership.

This philosophy draws directly from the Declaration of Independence, which declares: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Ethical Individualism takes these words at face value. Equality is not an outcome engineered by the state or granted by group membership; it is the starting point of our shared humanity. Individual rights are unalienable—meaning they belong to each person by nature and cannot be legitimately taken away by majority vote, government decree, or collective ideology.

The sole legitimate purpose of government is to protect these rights, not to redistribute them, redefine them along group lines, or subordinate them to any collective goal.

In human relations, Ethical Individualism functions as a practical ethic. It calls us to approach every person as a unique individual worthy of respect, fostering win-win interactions built on trust rather than suspicion or stereotype. It encourages curiosity about the person before us instead of assumptions based on appearance or affiliation. This creates the conditions for genuine compassion, cooperation, and social harmony without requiring anyone to erase their individuality or apologize for their group background.

Ethical Individualism vs. Totalitarian Communism

To understand the power of Ethical Individualism, consider its sharp contrast with totalitarian communism, the 20th-century ideology that produced the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and other regimes responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people through famine, execution, forced labor, and engineered poverty.

Totalitarian communism begins with a fundamentally different premise about humanity and equality. It views society through the lens of inevitable group conflict—primarily class struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Individuals have no inherent, unalienable rights; rights exist only as granted (and revocable) by the collective or, in practice, by the Communist Party claiming to represent it.

Private property, the foundation of individual independence, is abolished. The state claims total control over economic life, speech, thought, and association in pursuit of a utopian “classless society.”In this framework, equality means enforced sameness of outcome, achieved through coercion. Dissenters, “class enemies,” or members of disfavored groups are not treated as individuals with rights but as obstacles to be eliminated for the greater collective good. The result was not equality but a new hierarchy: party officials lived in privilege while ordinary citizens faced surveillance, shortages, and terror.

The Gulag, the Holodomor, the Cultural Revolution, and the Killing Fields stand as monuments to what happens when individual rights are sacrificed on the altar of group-based ideology.Ethical Individualism stands in direct opposition. Where communism subordinates the individual to the collective and the state, Ethical Individualism places the unique person at the center.

Where communism justifies violence and repression in the name of historical inevitability and class warfare, Ethical Individualism demands that every interaction begin with the presumption of equal human value and respect. Where communism produces tyranny by concentrating power to enforce its vision of equality, Ethical Individualism limits government to protecting the rights that already belong to each citizen—precisely as the Declaration prescribes.

Communism’s claim to equality was always illusory. It delivered poverty and oppression equally while concentrating power unequally in the hands of a ruling elite. Ethical Individualism offers real equality: equality before the law, equality of respect, and equality of opportunity for each individual to pursue happiness according to their own talents, choices, and character. It does not promise identical outcomes—because human beings are not identical—but it refuses to judge or penalize anyone for the groups they belong to.

Why Ethical Individualism Matters Today

In our time, new forms of group judgmentalism—often marketed under the banner of equity or identity—threaten the same erosion of individual dignity that communism achieved through state power. Whether through racial essentialism, gender ideology, or class-based resentment, these approaches repeat the communist error of treating people as avatars of their groups rather than as sovereign individuals.

Ethical Individualism provides the antidote: a return to the American principle that character, not category, defines a person.

By teaching and practicing this philosophy, the Center for Human Equality works to heal divisions, rebuild trust across differences, and strengthen the foundations of a free society. It offers workshops, education, and advocacy that help individuals and institutions treat every person as the unique, irreplaceable human being they are.

The choice before us is clear.

Totalitarian communism demonstrated what happens when equality is redefined as the destruction of individual rights and the triumph of the collective. Ethical Individualism returns us to the revolutionary American insight that true equality begins with the recognition that each person is created equal and endowed with unalienable rights that government exists to protect—not to override.

The Center for Human Equality invites all who value human dignity to join in advancing Ethical Individualism. In doing so, we do not merely oppose the errors of the past; we actively build the relational foundation for a society where every individual can flourish as an equal among equals.Center for Human Equality

centerforhumanequality.org

This essay is offered in the spirit of the Center’s mission: to conserve and promote the timeless truth that we are all created equal—not as interchangeable members of groups, but as irreplaceable individuals.