People need meaning in their lives, and the decline in faith and uptick in socialism mark a very dangerous shift in that search. 

Allan J. Feifer | August 26, 2026

The West is losing faith in God, individual responsibility, and the institutions that restrain our worst tendencies. In their place, an increasingly secular culture is bending the knee toward collectivist ideas. Collectivism falsely promises to solve problems that neither human beings nor traditional institutions have. In doing so, it completely forgoes history’s lessons.

As a belief in God declines, people are not abandoning a desire to believe in something larger than themselves; instead, they are looking to the collective—in a misguided belief that government, society, or some other institution will magically deliver equality, justice, security, belonging, and moral order.

This ongoing transposition is accompanied by a loss of faith in individualism and institutions built on individual liberty, private property, voluntary association, and personal responsibility. Increasingly, individualism is viewed not as the cornerstone of a free society, but as the source of inequality, injustice, and social disorder. The collective, by contrast, is portrayed as society’s savior.

Western civilization did not achieve its wealth and power accidentally. Our best features—individual liberty, private property, limited government, and the rule of law—are bedrock requisites for a civil society, developed through centuries of painful trial and error. Human beings are imperfect, and the power of the state is an omnipresent danger to our essential freedoms.

Our founders did not assume perfect individuals would lead us. To the contrary, they assumed that leaders would frequently pursue their own self-interest, that governments might become oppressive, and that even the best of us might abuse their position. Our system is not perfect; however, it was designed to be realistic: intended to prevent imperfect people from acquiring too much power over one another. These are the classic checks and balances collectivists wish to dispose of.

Collectivism is diametrically opposed. For socialists and........

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