/ dave / wrote:
>
> Isn't it more accurate to say that people pay lip service to an ideal of individualism, but
> in practice this takes the form of its opposite?
Look. An atom can be an individual. A microbe can be an individual. A rock can be an individual. I guess a mouse can be an individual, though it is becoming debatable. I guess aberrant chimpanzees can be individuals. But "individual" and "human" are simply contradictory. If you are human, you are not an individual. If you are an individual, than you simply are not a human. I can not for the life of me see why anyone not seriously brain damaged would want to be an individual. Wherever and whenever we find ourselves, we are always already implicated in a complex or ensemble of social relations apart from which we simply do not exist as human beings. "Biologically modern humans" go back a hundred thousand years or so. Human social relations seem to go back around one or two million years.
The very use of "individual" as a noun rather than an adjective (except in some technical philosophical senses) is crude and misleading.
Carrol