You, nor I, nor anyone can never really know the true thoughts of another. I can guess that when you see green, or feel lonely, it feels pretty much the way I feel when I see green or feel lonely. The nearly-identical structure of our nervous and glandular systems makes this likely; and the fact that we can all respect the same traffic signals and enjoy the same kinds of stories also makes it a very good bet; both points make solipsism untenable. Just the same, all experience is inescapably private; however much I might want to really understand you (or merge with a lover, or dissolve into the world) I can't breach the self-boundary. This leads to important consequences.
The Moral Onus
An important consequence is that all our decisions are necessarily our decisions. If we can't think other people's thoughts, nor they ours, then we can't make their decisions nor they ours. Whatever may cause me to act (free will is a whole 'nother discussion), my act is inescapably mine and nobody else's: my response to circumstances in the light of my desires. Issues of free will aside, this is the basis of moral responsibility.
In the event of a bad outcome, I can claim that I acted based on a mistake—a misinterpretation of circumstances—or was deceived; or was ignorant; or was compelled, e.g. by an addiction or mental illness. But I can't deny that the act was mine.
The Lone Cowboy
Another outcome: if nobody else can be responsible for my acts, equally I can't control anyone else's. I can try; and we all spend our lives trying to influence other people's actions; but in the end their decisions remain theirs. We can only hope they will do what will be good for us, much as farmers can only hope for good weather.
The result is a motive for acting as if we were solipsists, even if we aren't. The only decisions we can control are our own. The only partner we can really depend on is ourselves.
Obviously people do combine and work together, but we can benefit only if we can somehow persuade (or coerce) other people into acting the way we want. Success at this calls for high development of many subtle skills of communication, empathy, and native insight.
In adolescence, when these skills are raw and undeveloped and the complicated rules of societal interaction are still strange, influencing others seems just impossibly difficult. We find ourselves being manipulated and are just bright enough to detect it but unable to manipulate others in turn. It's deeply confusing and frustrating.
The confusion and frustration drive many to take refuge in a comforting fantasy: that we can be self-sufficient Lone Cowboys, riding alone the range of the world, free to go and come, owing nothing to anyone and disdaining to take any offered help.
The stance of the Lone Cowboy has its highest and most complete statement in Objectivism,
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
Ayn Rand
There is great comfort and release in the Objectivist stance, or in the less-sophisticated, but basically identical, notion that forms in the mind of just about every adolescent at some time: it is impossible to handle all the claims and obligations the world places on me, impossible to really be understood by others, impossible to be successful through manipulating or enlisting others' help. So I will chuck it all, reject it all, focus on my own needs and be self-sufficient.
Political Cowboys
There's a political dimension to this as well. Libertarianism is the extreme political expression of the Lone Cowboy stance: it flatly denies all involuntary claims on the individual. The only debts or obligations the individual Libertarian can acknowledge are ones that yo has voluntarily incurred.
As with Objectivism, there is great comfort, ease, simplification and clarification to be found in the Libertarian stance. To adopt it is to slash away in one stroke a whole tangle of confusing and contradictory claims on one's time, one's attention, one's wealth. Are there complex global problems whose solutions, if any exist, would be complex and would impact many people? Not the Libertarian's issue unless yo chooses to participate. Are other people sick, needy, starving, oppressed? Not the Libertarian's problem—nor the Objectivist's: there are no sick, no elderly in Rand's novels, and the only poor are presented as whining beggars with shifty eyes, clearly moral defectives and thus responsible for their own condition.
To become a Lone Cowboy, a self-suffient monadic unit gliding freely through the world with minimal attachments and obligations, lets one shed a vast load of ill-defined obligations and guilt-trips, pare the complexities of human interaction down to the simplest and clearest channels, focus on one's real abilities and ignore the things one is bad at. It's a great role.
The Bubble Boy
There's no denying the attraction of being a Lone Cowboy. And that stance has some justification in the brute fact that each of us is a Bubble Boy, permanently sealed into a transparent sphere out of which our real thoughts and feelings can never leak, and into which the real thoughts and feelings of others can never enter.
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