Maybe I'm not disagreeing with you at all, I'm just making the orthogonal point that individualism is very different than self-interest. I believe that other th

Maybe I'm not disagreeing with you at all, I'm just making the orthogonal point that individualism is very different than self-interest. I believe that other than basic human needs, most desires more complicated than that are in large part socially determined. Individualistic societies (as you describe them) inculcate individualistic desires into people and the health of a society is determined by how effectively it instills prosocial behaviors in its populace. American individualism is actually a collectivist enterprise! So something like the stock market, as the engine of American capitalism, only works if everybody in your society believes that it is worth taking risks in order to possibly get a huge windfall. But is that really in people's self-interest? Maybe what one would interpret as some kind of natural individual desire is actually a particularly American level of risk tolerance that has been inculcated because it has led to a lot of collective success.