I agree with proreason #20, with his comment that the focus on the primacy of the individual is a recent development in human history.
That is because this conflict, if I may use the term, between the collective and the individual only emerges in a socioeconomic system that requires change.
First, our species is by nature collective. That is because our knowledge base, of how to live, is not genetically stored as it is in all other species. It is socially stored; that is, it must be learned-from-others. The medium of this knowledge is of course, language.
I disagree with truepeers #24 and his suggestion that ‘culture’ came into existence to sideline aggression. Since our species has no innate knowledge, then ‘culture’ or social knowledge must be developed as our species develops. Its function is to generate and store knowledge; nothing to do with aggression repression. And nothing to do with mystical connections of ‘pure essence’.
During human history, the majority of societal organization was tribal, which is to say, collectivist. The focus was on the stability of the group and the agenda was a no-growth stable society. This is valid both in the pre-tribal hunting and gathering systems, which were also no-growth, and in the larger non-migratory tribal food-producing systems. Individualism was repressed because variations in behavior destabilized rather than stabilized the society.
The west, alone, developed the privileging of the individual. This is because Western Europe’s ecological reality, its biome, is the richest ecology for agriculture on the planet: moderate temperature, regular rainfall, rich soil, plenty of animals and plants to domesticate. There is no ecology like it elsewhere on the planet. This led to consistent increases in population. But, as long as the technology and ideology remained static, the economy could not produce enough food and health care for the exploding populations. Results would be famines, plagues, wars.
Finally, – and it took several centuries – the rigid top-down ideology which posited that no individual had the ability or right to reason, to dissent, to question – began to waver. Individualism began to emerge with questions, doubt, exploration of the material world – and this required individuals who dared-to-doubt. With this change, came an explosion of new technology, new approaches to farming, to travel, to health care…and the populations began to rise and sustain themselves.
That is, the individul is vital in a growth economy. In a no-growth economy, individuals are repressed because the focus is on No Change. When the focus is on change, to accomodate increasing population needs, you will get a demand for dissent, peripheral thinking, questions.
