De Individuationis

You know, I should've pointed out how counter-intuitive it is, the fallacies relating to the One and the Many. I mean, you'd think collectivism resulted from denying the One, and individualism from denying the Many, but actually, individualists deny the One, and it's collectivists who deny the Many. The ethics that they then deduce are rather ironic; do you, to quote Snatch, know what Nemesis is?

Notice how many philosophical materialists are of Libertarian bent—every shallow reductivist skeptic debunker from here to Mythbusters makes Robert Heinlein look like a Borg drone. Meanwhile all the collectivists see is categories, like a bad bootleg of Plato. Actually because of one, namely Marx.

Incidentally, aside from her hatred of materialism being inconsistent with her fundamentally atomist anthropology, Ayn Rand was a philosophy fail in another way. Namely, Aristotelianism cannot be strongly individualist, it cannot believe that each human has a unique nature: because the only individuation a material thing has is its trait (possessed by all material things) of quantity. It is only because matter only imperfectly partakes of form, and never to the same degree twice, that there is more than one of any material substance—on the level of nature, "soul", substance, all matter is unified; there are no humans, there is no human, only Humanity. Averroes (being smarter than Rand by orders of magnitude) asserted, rather famously, that humans all share one intellect; Maimonides didn't go that far, but did essentially assert that humans revert to drops in the bucket of Humanity at death. No, only Aquinas—compelled by Christian dogma—asserted the actuality of individual existence, and he had to claim it was a miracle.

Now it's funny how, to us, "it's a miracle" looks like a copout. But Aquinas was actually demonstrating why the Scholastic system he founded would eventually found science: because he would not deny an observed phenomenon, human individuality, merely for the sake of fitting a system, hylomorphism. It's the same as when Jean Buridan dismissed Aristotelian cosmic geocentrism (Aristotle taught that the earth was the only "world", all the other bodies being made of a different, celestial substance) by simply saying, "God can make as many worlds as he likes."