We have to be careful here. Individualism is not the same thing as respect for person. Individualism is a recent development in the West, specifically a tenet o

We have to be careful here. Individualism is not the same thing as respect for person. Individualism is a recent development in the West, specifically a tenet of liberalism in the tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Mill. The liberal tradition cannot be understood completely except as a Christian heresy as it takes a properly Christian anthropology and distorts it by, in this case, exaggeration. So, in this case, while Christianity elevates the human person by recognizing his dignity as a rational and free agent, liberalism atomizes persons in a manner that effectively destroys or distorts their social nature, and in doing so, diminishes their humanity (Aristotle once famously said that a man who does not need society is either a beast or a god; I have my opinion about which tends to characterize our relationships today, and which tends to characterize our opinions of ourselves.) Now, the East does not have this Christian respect for persons. Indeed, it tends toward the opposite error of subordinating the person to society and instrumentalizing persons and making them expendable for the "greater good". We see something like this in the old pagan societies in the West as well (though, as we often see, this "greater good" is a tyranny). In the traditional, pre-liberal Christian vision, still taught by the Catholic Church, there is a simultaneous recognition and respect for persons, and a recognition of Man's social nature and the common good which precedes him and toward which he has a moral duty. We are born into societies (the family is the first and most important society from which the entire tapestry of mankind is woven). And it is the common good: it isn't the "greater good" of society that permits the sacrifice of others, but a good held in common, and also by which many goods are had, including things like private property, which follows from the common good (liberalism has it exactly backwards, because it conceives private property as prior and proper to the individual first, and the common good as something grudgingly ceded by individuals for common benefit).