The car is one of the ultimate goals of individualism: constant access to what Mills called "Negative Liberty", essentially the freedom to do whatever physical thing you desire to do at any given time. Unfortunately, that means that the subject must self-coerce themselves into believing it's ok that everyone own a car, and something that we can maintain forever. I wonder how many people in the US refuse to believe climate science simply because the idea of losing their car is physically painful.
When individualism leads us down a path of bad decision making (building electric cars rather than the far superior collective path of building up mass transit), I'm always reminded of a scene from the Cixin Liu "Rememberance of Earth's Past" books, where an individualist decision is made that ultimately dooms the people of the solar system, and the person who would have been the true hero of the story only gets to tell that decision maker that they are a child before he is sent off to prison.
This is essentially our battle against climate change right now: technologists trying to make enough toys to keep the rabble of toddlers happy so that we can actually fix the problem.
Owning a car is absolutely not an example of negative liberty. Owning a car is a privilege. Negative liberty is the freedom not to have your basic freedom infringed (it's essentially analogous to the non-aggression principle). Not the freedom to do "whatever physical thing you desire to do."
There's huge tradeoffs between cars and mass transit that you're completely failing to acknowledge. Mass transit works fine when you have a high density urban core. It doesn't work well for suburban or rural populations, which is most of the land area of the U.S. Not everyone is going to live in a dense city nor should they.
When individualism leads us down a path of bad decision making (building electric cars rather than the far superior collective path of building up mass transit), I'm always reminded of a scene from the Cixin Liu "Rememberance of Earth's Past" books, where an individualist decision is made that ultimately dooms the people of the solar system, and the person who would have been the true hero of the story only gets to tell that decision maker that they are a child before he is sent off to prison.
This is essentially our battle against climate change right now: technologists trying to make enough toys to keep the rabble of toddlers happy so that we can actually fix the problem.