Ironically, to the extent that the collectivistic schemes are permitted to proceed unchallenged, society itself—in its benevolent sense of voluntary associations based on mutual benefit—is destroyed. As we saw repeatedly in our analysis of market interventions, and as we shall see further in Section 5, the substitution of coercion for peaceful relations creates artificial divisions among people, separating them into antagonistic and mutually suspicious groups, dividing them by race, sex, age, economic class, religion, and life style.

Since our approach is based on reality rather than collectivistic fantasy, it recognizes that individuals act qua individuals. Consequently, when a phenomenon arises out of social interaction, our ethical judgment is ultimately on the actions of individual participants, not on the phenomenon as a whole. Suppose, for example, that in a certain social context individual X acts immorally, while individual Y responds morally; furthermore, the composite effect of X's and Y's actions is some phenomenon that we shall call Z. We can represent the situation symbolically: X + Y = Z. In such cases, it becomes highly misleading to classify Z as ethically either "good" or "evil." If we call Z "evil," then we implicitly condemn Y's moral actions; on the other hand, if we call Z "good," then we also justify X's immoral behavior.