Jeez, will I ever get used to this exercise in mind-reading?

I will not make you read my mind: No.

I had thought to go back through the pageant of history and develop a thumbnail history of collectivist vs. independent social structures, but I have to go to work. So let me just take us back through the last hundred and fifty years or so.

Our current socialist movement goes back to the near-slavery conditions that developed for labor after the Industrial Revolution got ramped up. It's also, ironically, a result of the increasing democratization of our republic, in which you only needed to be an adult to vote, and in which our Senate ceased to be composed of ambassadors from the states but became directly elected.

Labor discovered that, in the face of rapacious capital, it could only save itself by organizing. So it did. In this, it took a page or two from the church, which socialized the hell out of Europe in the Middle Ages. This organizing gradually found philosophers and all, and became what you call socialism. When it became political, if became Communism, i.e., the medieval Church without the moderating influence of God.

"Do-gooders", who we also call "social acitvists" (and we could also call "intelligent, educated women who were not allowed any meaningful adult activities and their male admirers"), saw the results of organization and tried it too. The results were sometimes good -- prison reform, humane treatment of the mentally ill -- and sometimes not so good -- Prohibition.

Then we had the Great Depression and World War II, two great crises that required group action. Out of that, we developed a society in which group action became the norm, or, as you like to call it, "socialist". It isn't, though, or you wouldn't be able to work as an independent contractor.

If you want to leave the worst of group action behind, you're going to have to allow that "every man for himself" and "I've got mine and to hell with you" are not alternatives society can live with, or you will see collective action rise again in reaction against it, as it did before.

Regards--
Mary Anne