Been working on notions of humanity built from the idea that God is Trinity. The raw framework of the world is unities in diversities. Individualism was roughly cobbled together as a kind of defense of property rights against governments and monarchies. That someone might be considered a “collective person,” having no identity per se apart from the broader community, was a problem for the tyrannical instinct among human rulers. The point is that much of the 19 and 20th century has been a reaction to protect and defend the common man against the elite, against the privileged, against royalty. Individualism, then, is much the birth child of a politico-economic theory even though in today’s parlance is it tossed around in pre-dominantly psychological ways. If every child born is the union of a mother and father, how would this child be an individual? Isn’t the raw makeup of this child already a community event? Once born, isn’t every feature of that child’s thinking an accepting and using of what he or she is taught, mimicking it, and then extending it into new avenues? If every child is biologically already the mother and father, and every thought that child has is already the thoughts of others made his own, how is it that an individual could exist? If we concede that an individual is really “a community in a person,” why bother with the term individual at all? It is misleading.
Prime Theologian