I posted a couple posts ago about the long extinct town of Durrestad, which was in effect driven into bankruptcy and dissolution due to the fact that everything they had kept getting stolen by the Vikings. One year they came, and nobody was home.
The extension of this is that they also took people. The Vikings were one of the most energetic slaving peoples ever. The word Slave itself derives from Slav, since they took so many of them, and literally sold them down-river, to the Arabs and Byzantine Empire.
Communists, likewise, take people, and force them to do work they do not choose; nor do they retain any rights to the fruits of their labor.
There is a continuum in this, though. If we work half the year for a State which does not represent our interests, then we are half-enslaved. Progressive taxation, when not used according to the will of the people paying it, is progressive enslavement.
With respect to individualism, and I have combined in this post two divergent but related ideas, it’s easy to say the invididual does not matter, to just accept the world as it is. Most people for most of history had to accept conditions which were not optimal for them. There is a value in this in rejecting self pity.
Yet to the extent that you say to people that they do matter, when you give people the right to see things in their own way, they do. Both economic and cultural creativity follow. Look at the Gothic Cathedral movement. It was creative because free.
Individualism is nothing more or less than the creed which recognizes that there are as many potential realities and creative accomplishments as there are sets of eyes–figurative or literal–surveying a situation. It empowers countless solutions to problems. It increases the perceptual capacities of a social order by an amount equal to the number of people involved, multiplied by their motivational involvement.
Socialists empower only a select elite. This lessens the intelligence of the whole system. Socialism only rewards a select elite, which demotivates people. Individualism is necessary for both moral and economic progress. Far from being immoral, it is the only doctrine capable of generating human progress.
And as I have said before, nothing in it presupposes selfishness. Mother Teresa was an individualist, as was Gandhi. Selfishness is selfishness. Individualism is simply a recognition of moral autonomy. What people do with that freedom is dependent upon their personal development.
You serve no long term good forcing people to do what is right, without their cooperative involvement.