We often talk about "individual vs collective", but often the best framing to understand what's going on is "individual vs group vs world". The tricky bit is that what's good for the group and what's good for the world are often in conflict...
... and it's often the *individualist* mindset that can make closer links with the world at large.
See eg. this picture from Richard A Nisbett's "Geography Of Thought", though this is not just about "East vs West", it applies to more vs less group-oriented thinking everywhere.
See eg. this picture from Richard A Nisbett's "Geography Of Thought", though this is not just about "East vs West", it applies to more vs less group-oriented thinking everywhere.
A lot of very successful ideas are successful precisely because they combine individual-oriented and world-oriented thinking: free trade, the early internet, cryptocurrency, etc.
The group level is dangerous because self-sacrificially acting for one's group *feels* noble and altruistic, but at world level those actions sometimes end up outright harmful. (Extreme example: brave soldiers fighting for their homelands... which happen to be WW2 Axis powers)
But groups are necessary for human cooperation. We are not "equally spaced atoms"; cooperation inevitably requires each person to work with some people more than others.
And group psychology *is* a powerful tool for cooperation, it would be a shame to throw it away entirely.
And group psychology *is* a powerful tool for cooperation, it would be a shame to throw it away entirely.
Hence, even in the internet and cryptocurrency, new groups inevitably re-emerge. The challenge is how to keep these three (not two) layers in balance.
The "polypolitan" ideal is that we want to have many intersecting groups, with none of them becoming far more dominant than the other, because that's the structure that's most likely to preserve both global cooperation *and* individuality.
I'm definitely a proponent of this.
I'm definitely a proponent of this.
But even there there's always tensions, and sometimes tensions with no clear answer!
One example: marketing. How much should a group promote itself? Promotion is good for the group; at world level, zero is bad (you need *some* to get people interested in things) but too much becomes a form of zero-sum conflict between groups.
Conclusion: thinking about conflicts in terms of this three-layer structure (individual vs group vs world) is often the correct frame for better understanding things that thinking about eg. individual vs collective misses.
