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Ok, let's try this if you're interested in discussing at an annoyingly meta level: I don't see this belief
as an axiom, but rather a necessary conclusion from deeper principles justifying morality. Specifically, I 100% agree with the very end of this article
Scott Alexander of course always says things way more eloquently than I can. The (admittedly extreme) individualism you're calling out isn't an axiom, rather, at our current level of technological development, it's the best way to achieve all the good things---to exalt and glorify civilization, etc. See here and ymeskhout's broader point in the original post.
Actually that helps me understand you a lot better, thank you.
I agree with all of this. The thing is, my shining example of all that we could be is Victorian Britain circa 1850, which clearly involved individualism but also religion and a profound sense of who we were as a people. I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was pretty damn good, and could have been a lot better if we'd had modern technology and levels of economic development.
Now, in your linked comment you basically say that times change and the latter things resulted from the 20th century pivot towards extreme individualism. I used to think so too, but it no longer seems self-evident to me. The rise of countries like China (which did badly under full communism but OTOH pretty clearly hasn't embraced liberal individualism now) on the one hand and the decay of Britain / Europe / US despite those countries not becoming measurably less individualistic has muddied the individualism <-> prosperity relationship considerably in my eyes.
You might also say that you're primarily in favour of full individualistic meritocracy rather than individualism per-se. Tautologically, getting the most effective possible person for the job is most effective, at least on an individual-level, short-term scale. Whether that's true on a longer time scale, I don't know. My sensibilities are affronted by blatant nepotism and discrimination(*) but at the same time I think a big part of the dysfunction that Western societies have gone through in the last few decades has been essentially a sublimated cry of despair on behalf of middle-class people who are exhausted by the perpetual struggle not to fall from their current position and resentful of the constant pressure to strive for positions they can't realistically achieve. I suspect the majority of people were mostly happier with more structured expectations and a somewhat more rigid social structure. (I would be interested to know how you think things will end up: do you envision a natural slackening of the rat race one day, or a continued and perpetual struggle? If the latter, the resultant technological progress and prosperity may not be worth the candle.)
So I think I see where you're coming from, but I broadly disagree on how we get there and how adaptive modern liberal globalism is. I think we need a mostly-homogenous, high human capital society with a relatively but not completely inflexible social structure, where it's possible for the most intelligent people to rise in rank and to move around but doing so is neither common nor expected.
To return to our original point of contention, I also have a strong sense of my people as a people, and I care about maintaining my homeland's culture. 20 years ago, when I thought that liberal globalism really was hugely beneficial, I pushed those feelings down and supported mass immigration because I thought it would be worth it. Now, it seems very obvious that mass immigration wasn't and isn't worth it, and so I strongly oppose mass immigration. Discussing this with people, I was horrified to find that many people who I thought were likewise patriotic pragmatists aren't - some actually do regard people as completely fungible, and others support mass immigration in order to destroy a traditional English culture that they despise.
(*) For me, this depends on scale. Only considering your friends and family for a job is very bad, only considering those in your local church is pretty bad, only considering those within 100 miles is understandable most of the time, only considering those in your country is basically fine. 60 million is a big pool.
In your linked comment, you talk about Von Neumann, Einstein, and Edison; I'm happy to let the few thousand literal geniuses in the world go wherever they like. Say, those with IQ > 140 if you want something quantitative.
I'm going to first go even more annoyingly meta: I'm not so happy with this sentence because it seems to be framed as just a personal preference that can't really be justified by more than "I personally like it". Everyone sort of has "inner values" based on such idiosyncratic preferences, but it always feels to me very morally wrong to try to argue with others by nakedly stating them (in harsher words, this is what I called "naked selfishness" before). Rather, you ought to find universal reasons that work for everyone---either extremely compelling "poetry" to convince others to have your same idiosyncratic preferences, or better, links to universal values like reducing suffering. Obviously you have a lot of these universal reasons which are explained more later in the post, so this is a nitpick. Also obviously, I have nakedly selfish reasons for preferring individualistic meritocracy since it gets close to my shining example of something like early 2010's San Francisco Bay Area (before housing availability/infrastructure issues really started kicking in). However, if I can't find universal reasons to support it, I should seriously question whether this preference is reasonable. At the very least, I should never expect them to be compelling to anyone else and keep them to myself.
So now lets get into the universal reasons.
I don't have much personal experience with Britain/Europe, but I don't really see much decay in the US, not coincidentally, the country where individualistic meritocracy is the strongest. Particularly in technology, the US continues to produce world-changing breakthrough after breakthrough---AI systems, fracking, mRNA vaccines, etc. Though it's hard to feel this because of relative status effects and short memories, people in the US have more than they ever used to---bigger houses, better cars, more variety at the grocery store, better entertainment, etc. It's also not a coincidence that the technological breakthroughs in the US come from its most individualistic, diverse, and open areas like San Francisco or Cambridge, MA.
I would even say that the most compelling explanation for decay in Europe is actually this attitude, which is far more prevalent there:
This promotes a sort of closed-mindedness and resistance to change. If you want scientific and technological progress, you need novel ideas. If you want novel ideas, you need to be tolerant of weirdos, immigrants, and outsiders. Conversely, if you close yourself off to the unusual socially, you're also going to lose the drive to create the new technologically---"why do we need more, our village is good as it is!".
Finally, 60 million is not a big pool at all. I'm in math, and the median best mathematician from a region of 60 million doesn't hold a candle to the world's best. Furthermore, agglomeration effects are really important for new ideas so it makes a big difference if one country can concentrate high-performers in one place. I guess if you're making this exception:
then it's not so bad (though 145 IQ is 3 standard deviations which is on the order of magnitude of 1/1000 people so there are around 10 million of them in the world. This is smartest kid in your year in your school district level, not world-changing genius).
I think this is the most compelling argument against my point. As far as naked selfishness goes, I much prefer the rat race since it pushes me to achieve much greater things than I would otherwise. At some level, you can justify it in this way: sacrifices we put up with currently to make the future better. However, I think a much better justification is that the people happy with the rigid social structure were those on top. For everyone else, being at the bottom is even worse if you're forever stuck there and there's nothing you can do about it. Having hope and agency over your life is really important for happiness, and if sacrificing the top 10% to stress is worth it to give this to the bottom 90%, then that's a worthwhile trade. I realize though I might just be typical-minding here---maybe as you say the chance to rise makes most people more stressed and unhappy than being stable in even a pretty low place.
Either way, once society is wealthy enough that everyone's non-status needs are met, I expect the rat race to eventually resolve itself by splitting into a million parallel races so that everyone can feel high-status by being in the top 1% of something---some niche video game, sport, academic field, etc.
As the final point:
Do you have universal reasons why maintaining your homeland's culture (in more of a sense than various minority groups are able to maintain their cultures within US-style multiculturalism) is important? I think there's something around monocultures being bad---like you can argue that my vision of progress coming from all the new ideas from mixing cultures is sort of a dead end since it won't work anymore once everything is mixed and homogenized. Again, however, I think US-style multiculturalism resolves this issue pretty well.
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