There’s a story about two communist dictators standing in a field of corn stalks, one old and one young. The young dictator who had just won control over his country asked the elder dictator how he managed to keep the populace in line.

The elder dictator grabbed a sharp tool, walked toward the corn stalks, and began hacking off the tops of the corn stalks that had grown higher than the others.

The moral of the story was plain to the young dictator.

Eliminating individualism from a society tends to keep the populace in line more than guns and bombs ever could. For dictators, someone thinking for themselves might end up being the wrench in the gears that brings a system crashing to the ground. Ideas become dangerous and if that individual infects others with these ideas, then the threat is all the greater.

Keep individualism to a minimum, and you keep your problems to a minimum.

Thing is, you don’t have to be a dictator to understand this lesson. Democrats know full-well that individual thought can lead to big problems and so they do what’s necessary to make sure that collectivism rules the day. They often rely on “moral equivalent of war” positions that help them unite voters against a certain person, group, or thing. They target, denounce, and mock anything inconvenient or oppositional with the help of platforms that spread the message wide and far.

Maybe you’ve noticed the direct attack on individualism happening right now. You often see it nowadays during arguments about whether or not we should end the lockdowns revolving around the coronavirus. Many Americans want to go out and live their lives after calculating the risks and agreeing that certain precautions should be taken to protect those who are vulnerable. These people are often accused of being uncaring and only devoted to the pursuit of selfishness and money.

It’s a shallow argument. Many people need to work or go out for mental health reasons. Depression, addiction, and suicides have shot up over the lockdowns yet we’re still being kept from living our lives over a virus that you’re around 99.6 percent likely to survive.

An individual would be able to weigh risks, find solutions, and create the best possible means by which to handle the virus that won’t completely demolish our society, but this line of thinking is greeted with anger and ridicule. The left and the media have done their work. They created an enemy, spread fear, and made it clear that the people with certain answers are the only ones that should be listened to if they want people to survive.

People aren’t surviving. They’re dying anyway, and not just from the virus.

Individualism isn’t just being attacked over the coronavirus either. On Thursday. I wrote an article that detailed how one of our federally funded nuclear weapons labs was forcing white men to participate in a reeducation seminar about their “privilege.” One of the things targeted as being an attitude of white men that they needed to ditch was “rugged individualism.”

Individualism is one of the most valuable things America has as a cultural standard. This country was founded on it, and through it, we’ve continued to create and produce things that we would have considered “science fiction” about fifty years ago.

Individualism is the spirit that drives America. It’s the main ingredient in our freedom-centric culture. Without it, we become like everyone else, but for the social justice crowd, being like everyone else is exactly the goal.

If you’re running a country where everyone is just like everyone else, and moreover, wants to be like everyone else, then obtaining and keeping power is far easier.

The honest truth is that the left has all the advantages here. With their larger platforms, they can convince more people of narratives that drive away from the idea of individualism and from there, our nature as pack animals will drive us to want to fall in line with a group’s thinking in order to fit in and avoid social conflict. Moreover, it’s harder for individualists to hold their position as we have to go out and search for our information outside of mainstream channels while the collectivists have it delivered to them via talking points from any working screen or speaker.

The left knows this and takes advantage of it constantly.

Immense pressure is put on individuals to stop being individuals all the time and holding your ground can result in big trouble but that’s the price of being an individual, especially today. That’s the cost of thinking for yourself and not allowing others to think for you.

But I’d rather go down as a free-thinking man than a slave to anyone else’s will or opinion. Living the latter life isn’t really living as yourself at all.

(READ: You Can Be Angry All You Want, But I’m Still Going to Go Out)