By Diogo Costa, President
Foundation for Economic Education.
. . . New York mayor Zohran Mamdani used his inaugural address to promise he would replace the “frigidity of rugged individualism” with the “warmth of collectivism.” It is a clever bit of rhetoric. Mamdani himself seems like a nice and warm person. And the imagery works. To be “cold” is to be isolated, shivering and alone. To be “warm” is to be embraced, held, and safe. Collectivism here appears as this kind of coming in from the cold, a fire around which we gather, a blanket that covers us all.
Anyone watching the AppleTV show Pluribus might recognize something in Mamdani’s promise. The series imagines an alien hive mind which has absorbed almost all of humanity. What makes it terrifying is that the hive is warm and nice. Those who join it seem content. Blissful, even. The collective embraces you. You are never alone.
But something in us recoils when we watch that. There’s a difference between voluntarily joining a community and being absorbed by one. We want to belong somewhere, but we also want to remain someone. At what point does “warmth” become a fever? We want the freedom to control our own thermal state. Sometimes we don’t want to be warm. Sometimes we want to step outside, feel the cold, and return when we choose..
What individualism actually names is not self-isolationism, but self-possession, and the capacity to be somewhere and still be yourself.
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis described a society that had traded objective moral reasoning for something softer, what we might call niceness, or agreeableness, or simply going along with the group. Such a society, Lewis warned, would produce “men without chests”: people with appetites below and intellects above, but no trained moral instinct to connect them. Just calculations about what the group wants and how to stay in its good graces.
The warm collective doesn’t ask you to be brave and it doesn’t reward those who stand for something. It requires you to be agreeable. And eventually, Lewis predicted, a society that educates this kind of person will be ruled by “Conditioners”: warm tyrants, benevolent managers. When everything becomes negotiable, including human dignity itself, someone will do the negotiating.
The young are especially susceptible to this. They’re caught between two powerful forces: a genuine desire to be their own person and a desperate hunger to belong. No matter the generation, young people often think of themselves as individualists. They reject their parents’ values, question authority, cultivate an aesthetic of independence. But scratch the surface and you find a tribal engine running at full speed.
This is a kind of false individualism, not in the strict Hayekian sense, but in the young one. Think of the vibe of independence, the posture of not caring, the costume of rebellion. It directs its skepticism only at the people who have always offered support (family or traditional values) while remaining defenseless against peer conditioning. It says “I don’t need your approval” to parents while desperately seeking approval from strangers online.
False individualism has no immune system against the warm collective. It’s more concerned with managing reputation than building character. When the social weather shifts, it shifts with it.
True Individualism, in this sense, is the capacity to stand somewhere even when there is a massive social cost. It requires that “trained chest” Lewis wrote about: courage, honesty, and a commitment to standards that exist outside of vibes.
When we hear Mamdani’s socialist discourse, the initial temptation is to answer him with better arguments. And we should make better arguments. The case for economic freedom, voluntary cooperation, and limited government is stronger than the case for collectivism, which, as in Mamdani’s version, must always hide its costs and exaggerate its benefits.
But better arguments aren’t enough. If the only problem were ignorance, we’d win debates and then win people. But we can win the argument and lose the person. We can be right and still be dismissed.
Because the person we’re talking to isn’t just reasoning through the argument. They’re managing their social position. They’re calculating what it will cost them to agree with us. In 2026, many young people get that free markets work or that individual liberty is what made America the most successful nation in human history. But they also know that saying so might result in “social death.”
This means that defending freedom requires more than white papers and op-eds. It requires forming people who can carry freedom forward. People whose instinct isn’t to check what’s popular before deciding what’s true. People who have practiced the discipline of saying what they think even when it’s unpopular. And who know from experience, that you can survive social disapproval and come out the other side.
This is the cultivation of a trained chest. The development of what Leonard Read called high moral character: the habits that let you do the right thing when doing the right thing is hard.
FEE has never been embarrassed about this. Consider Leonard Read or Henry Hazlitt or any of the great figures in our tradition and you’ll find the moral language of character and the dignity of peaceful cooperation. That there is something dignified about a person who takes responsibility for their own life, and something degrading about a system that treats people as instruments of collective ends.
The collectivist version isn’t actually warm. It’s a simulation of warmth. It provides the feeling of belonging without the substance. As in Pluribus, you’re embraced, but you’re also trapped. The group accepts you only so long as you accept its terms, and those terms include not being too much yourself.
Real warmth comes from genuine relationships with people who know you as an individual. People who love you as you are, not as a member of a category or an identity. Real warmth requires boundaries, because without boundaries there are no individuals, and without individuals there’s nothing to connect.
