Can't you just read this as two complementary perspectives? The systemic stuff you're talking about has to operate on and through actual people. So the "personal" contributions are just specific instances of systemic forces. And we're so programmed with the norms of our society that the systemic aspect is perpetuated by the sum of millions of individual experiences.
[WS:] I have no problems seeing the two (complementary or not) in human behavior. In fact, this is how I normally think.
What I am saying is that other people tend to see it as either/or and tend to get upset at fellows like me who try to see both sides of the coin. This pertains to much more than a handful of highly politicized issues. In everyday life situation, this is being seen as indecisiveness, speaking on both sides of one's mouth, being wishy-washy or a flip-flop. The fact that the charge of being a flip-flop effectively derailed a politician who does not speak in simplistic sound bites speaks volumes.
I cannot help but cite the notorious HL Mencken:
"when a candidate for public office faces voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas or even comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost."
I would go further and say that this pertains not just to politics, but to everyday as well.
My problem, therefore, is not multidimensionality, but unending confrontations with one-dimensional thinking that most people tend to espouse.
Wojtek