It seems completely obvious that individuality is the basic state, and then we come together to form friendships, families, societies. But I would hold that ac

It seems completely obvious that individuality is the basic state, and then we come together to form friendships, families, societies. But I would hold that actually our collectivity and connectedness is actually logically and historically prior to any individuality -- we evolved from social animals, we are still social animals, and even the language with which we say "I am an individual" is a testament and an inheritance from this collectivity. In fact, our feeling of separatedness might be the illusion, not our feeling of union. Of course there is a Marxist angle to this: the relations of production in Capitalism are based on contracts between individuals, so we become steeped in this ideology from before we are even born and it just becomes "obvious", even though it makes even less sense than earth's seeming flatness. Even the nasty, brutish, short competitive phase of human history was likely not competition between individuals but between groups whose unity and homogeneity was probably almost total. Anyone who was not one with his / her group was probably ostracized, then died shortly thereafter.