There was a time when belonging was not a concept but a condition. You were born into a rhythm that already existed. The village knew your name before you could speak it. The craft you would learn, the land you would tend, the grief you would share and the joy you would multiply were already waiting for you. No one asked whether this was freedom or limitation. It simply was life.
Today, collectivism often feels like a word spoken in a low voice. Not illegal, not forbidden, but uncomfortable. Something that needs justification. In boardrooms, classrooms and even living rooms, the language has shifted. We speak of personal brands, individual purpose, solo journeys and self made paths. The collective has not disappeared, but it has been pushed into the background, treated with suspicion, sometimes even dismissed as outdated or dangerous.
So the question is not whether collectivism exists. It clearly does. The real question is why it feels like a taboo.
At the heart of modern society sits a powerful idea. The individual is the primary unit of value. This idea has produced remarkable outcomes. Innovation, personal freedom, civil rights, entrepreneurship and creative expression all flourished because individuals were allowed to think differently and act independently. The problem began when individualism stopped being a tool and started becoming an identity.
When the self becomes the center of every story, the collective begins to look like a threat. Cooperation feels like compromise. Shared responsibility feels like dilution. Even empathy starts to feel transactional. What do I get out of this. How does this serve my growth. What is my return.
Collectivism challenges this mindset because it asks an uncomfortable question. What if the outcome matters more than the credit. What if progress is not always visible on a personal timeline. What if success is shared and therefore quieter.
In corporate culture, collectivism is praised in language but discouraged in practice. Teams are celebrated, yet promotions are individual. Collaboration is encouraged, yet performance metrics reward visibility over contribution. The person who speaks loudest often advances faster than the one who listens deeply. Over time, people learn the rules even when no one states them.
This is where collectivism starts feeling risky. If I slow down for the group, will I fall behind. If I share my knowledge, will I lose my edge. If I choose harmony over dominance, will I be forgotten.
Technology has amplified this tension. Automation and artificial intelligence have changed how work is done, measured and valued. Algorithms reward output, speed and consistency. They struggle with nuance, care and context. In such an environment, individual performance is easier to quantify than collective intelligence. A dashboard can track your productivity, but it cannot easily measure how you held a team together during uncertainty.
Social media adds another layer. Identity becomes performative. The self is curated, filtered and broadcast. Even activism often becomes individualized. My cause, my voice, my platform. The collective message fragments into millions of personal narratives competing for attention.
Yet something interesting is happening beneath the noise.
The very systems that elevated individualism are now revealing its limits. Burnout is no longer a personal weakness. It is a structural outcome. Loneliness is not confined to the elderly. It is widespread among the hyper connected. Innovation stalls when ideas are hoarded instead of exchanged. Organizations collapse not because of lack of talent, but because of lack of trust.
This is where collectivism quietly returns, not as ideology but as necessity.
Look at open source communities. Thousands of contributors across borders build tools no single company could sustain alone. Credit is distributed. Ego is secondary to function. Look at crisis response, whether during pandemics, climate disasters or economic shocks. Individual excellence matters, but survival depends on coordination. Systems thinking replaces hero narratives.
Even artificial intelligence, often framed as a solitary replacement of human effort, is built on collective input. Data generated by millions. Research refined through shared knowledge. Models trained not by lone geniuses but by networks of minds, labor and lived experience. AI is not an individual achievement. It is a collective mirror.
So why does collectivism still feel taboo?
Because it forces us to confront power. True collectivism is not about sameness. It is about negotiated difference. It requires systems that distribute authority, not just tasks. That is uncomfortable for those who benefit from concentration of control. It is easier to celebrate individual success stories than to redesign structures that allow many to thrive quietly.
Collectivism is also misunderstood. It is often confused with the erasure of identity, with forced conformity or with ideological rigidity. History has examples where the collective was used as a weapon against the individual. These scars remain. They deserve acknowledgment, not denial.
But rejecting collectivism entirely because of its abuses is like rejecting language because it has been used to lie.
The more relevant question is what kind of collectivism we are willing to build.
A modern collectivism does not silence the individual. It contextualizes them. It recognizes that autonomy and belonging are not opposites. They are interdependent. You think freely because others protect that freedom. You create boldly because someone else maintains the system that allows creation to matter.
Starting this conversation requires honesty. We need to admit that hyper individualism has costs. Not moral costs, but practical ones. Fragmented organizations. Shallow collaboration. Constant competition disguised as motivation. We also need to stop romanticizing collectivism as a nostalgic return to some imagined past. The future collective will not look like the village. It will look like networks, platforms, cooperatives and fluid alliances.
Education plays a role. We teach children to compete before we teach them to cooperate meaningfully. Group work often becomes divided labor rather than shared thinking. We grade outcomes, not processes. A shift here would not weaken excellence. It would deepen it.
Leadership must change too. The strongest leaders in the coming years will not be the most visible. They will be the ones who design environments where others can think clearly, disagree safely and contribute fully. Their legacy will not be a personal brand but a resilient system.
And at a personal level, collectivism begins with small choices. Listening without preparing a response. Sharing credit without fear. Staying in the room when leaving would be easier. Accepting that not every contribution needs applause to be meaningful.
Is collectivism a taboo. Perhaps only because it exposes something we are not ready to admit. That we are not as self sufficient as we pretend to be. That our greatest achievements are rarely solo acts. That the future we are entering, shaped by automation, uncertainty and complexity, will not be navigated by individuals shouting louder, but by collectives thinking deeper.
In the end, collectivism does not ask us to disappear into the crowd. It asks us to show up fully, knowing that our presence gains meaning when it connects to others. Not as a sacrifice, not as an ideology, but as a recognition of reality.
And reality, no matter how advanced our tools become, still works better when we move together.
