Fictions of the Collective

National interests are interpretations, not primitives

“The ‘realist’ view of international affairs is false. People don’t, and can’t, act in their interests because they don’t know what those are until they have a world view.” — David Deutsch¹

Few phrases in politics carry as much moral authority while concealing as much conceptual confusion as national interest. It appears in speeches just before wars begin, in memoranda authorizing surveillance, in arguments for secrecy, sacrifice, and coercion. It is spoken with the cadence of inevitability, as though it names a hard constraint imposed by reality itself.

That cadence is doing almost all the work.

The Individualist Premise identified the category error of attributing mental states and moral standing to abstractions. “National interest” and “collective will” cash that error out politically, converting group reification into a license to compel members and disabling the mechanisms that could expose a mistaken policy.

Two errors stack: interests are treated as objective facts waiting to be read off the world, and a nation as the kind of thing that can possess them. They fail independently.

Interests Are Not Primitives

An interest presupposes an explanatory framework: a model of the world, causal theory, evaluation of outcomes, assessment of risk, and time horizon. Actors fail not only by irrational pursuit but by misidentifying their interests through a false worldview. Political realism treats interests as fixed inputs; they are outputs — conclusions of fallible theories wearing the costume of premises.

Acknowledging this does not require denying hard constraints. Annihilation is incompatible with continued agency. Suffocation is incompatible with life. There are physical and biological limits that no worldview can negotiate away. But constraints are not interests. They rule out futures without selecting among the remaining ones. The moment a society moves from “we cannot survive this” to “therefore we must do that,” it has crossed from physics into interpretation — and interpretation is fallible. Physics never issues policy. It closes doors; it does not tell you which of the open ones to walk through. Every “therefore” in a national-security argument is supplied by a theory, and theories can be wrong.

Interests are therefore conjectures about which actions produce futures an actor would endorse. Knowledge grows through conjecture exposed to criticism, not by reading certainty off the world (Rationality Without Foundations). Talk of interests is useful while contestable, revisable, and answerable to outcomes. Trouble begins when a conjecture becomes a command.

Nations Are Not Agents

A nation has no unified belief state, value function, or vantage. It is a changing aggregate of individuals, institutions, incentives, traditions, and power relations, often in conflict. Treating that pattern as a chooser is an analytical convenience; national interest silently converts the convenience into ontology and presents erased individual agency as collective rationality.

This critique is not aimed at shorthand. Historians and analysts who write “Britain sought to contain France” are compressing a pattern of individual decisions, filtered through institutions that amplified some voices and silenced others, and the compression can be useful. The critique is aimed at the elevation of “national interest” from analytical device to justificatory principle — where uncertainty may be acknowledged rhetorically but is erased operationally, and one faction’s judgment is enforced on everyone as necessity. That elevation is what gives the concept its political potency, and it is exactly the move The Individualist Premise called the compression becoming a lie.

The Vanishing Intersection

Could aggregation rescue the idea? Sean Carroll defines government as “the organized expression of our collective will,”² the instrument of society’s shared priorities.

Define that will operationally as the intersection of preferences held by every member. Small, intimate groups may share enough experience and tradition for the intersection to have content.

Scale up and the intersection shrinks: every member is another chance for a preference to be absent, while differences in upbringing, priorities, and belief magnify divergence. At city or national scale it approaches empty.

The standard reply is that the collective will operates at the level of abstract values rather than particular preferences — surely everyone wants “fairness,” “freedom,” “prosperity,” “security.” But this agreement is superficial, and it fractures the instant it touches policy. Everyone endorses fairness until fairness must be cashed out as a tax schedule; everyone endorses security until security must be cashed out as a surveillance program, a conscription order, a war. The abstract word gathers unanimous assent precisely because each person fills it with his own theory of what it requires — theories that contradict each other at every concrete decision point. Consensus on the syllables is not consensus on anything a government can do.

At governance scale, government expresses majority, elite, or institutional preferences under rhetorical cover. “Collective will” borrows the standing of unanimous consent for decisions lacking it. This does not settle when governance is justified — The Grey Zone does that — but it prevents the phrase from making coercion disappear.

How the Fallacy Licenses Harm

The phrase endures because its indeterminacy is useful: power can fill it, and necessity shields it from reply.

Once policy becomes national interest, a hypothesis becomes a requirement. Disagreement is moralized: a rival model becomes disloyalty to a will already declared. A judgment defended as necessity handles criticism by reclassifying the critic.

The claim also becomes unfalsifiable. Disaster becomes unavoidable sacrifice, insufficient resolve, or necessary cost. A framework in which no outcome counts against policy does not choose policies; it insulates them.

Once this structure is in place, coercion ceases to be a regrettable last resort. It becomes a duty. Individuals are no longer agents whose judgments matter, but instruments whose compliance is required. Extreme harm no longer requires pathological actors; it requires only ordinary officials operating within a framework that has reclassified choice as necessity. This is why the strongest form of the fallacy always appears where the stakes are declared highest — above all in defense, where “the national interest” underwrites the claim that protection requires sovereignty, a claim The Hardest Case: Defense examines in full. The same structure reappears wherever safety is invoked to place some judgment beyond challenge — including, in our own moment, the politics of AI safety, where “alignment” quietly presupposes an agreed collective target that does not exist.

Catastrophe as Epistemic Failure

The historical record reflects this pattern with disturbing regularity. The most destructive regimes of the twentieth century did not collapse because they were insufficiently committed to their interests. They collapsed because they enforced false explanatory models, suppressed dissent, and thereby froze their own capacity for error correction.

Once disagreement is criminalized, rational execution accelerates descent. Policy becomes more coherent, optimized, and catastrophic because its false model cannot be challenged. The state executes the plan faithfully; the plan executes the error faithfully.

Censorship, propaganda, and punishment are symptoms of epistemic weakness: judgment defended by force because it cannot survive argument. Free speech, criticism, and contestable authority are the machinery by which civilization converts coercion into coordination. National-interest rhetoric switches that machinery off.

Best Current Judgment, Not Destiny

Leaders still must act under pressure and genuine uncertainty. Corrigibility is not paralysis, and action does not require pretending uncertainty has vanished.

Planes fly before theories are complete; treatments proceed without certainty. Successful action remains open to criticism, reversal, and learning. National-interest language converts provisional commitment into dogma. Centrism as a Discipline owns the positive method of acting decisively while keeping correction possible.

Political action shapes possible futures without knowing which will occur. National-interest claims collapse that uncertainty prematurely and enforce one account of which futures count, foreclosing alternatives as well as producing outcomes.

Interests must remain conjectures rather than commands: contestable, revisable, and exposed to criticism. There is no national interest or collective will in the sense political rhetoric requires, only agents acting through imperfect models. Abandoning the fiction requires neither passivity nor indecision, only leaders willing to say: this is our best current judgment, not our destiny — and to remain answerable when it proves wrong.

That is why some of the worst acts in history have been justified in its name — and why they will continue to be, as long as the fallacy goes unchallenged.