@amerika @h4890 @korsier @Cosmic @FourOh-LLC @cjd @verita84

I skimmed your essay. Some of it rung true to me, though I personally happen to like individualism and equality. However when I speak of those terms I mean specifically individual liberty, and the equality of rights (specifically rights to dissent). That said, I do think having a goal which the whole society is working towards is beneficial as you said. It's how the Giza pyramids were built for just one example. But I don't think such a goal needs to be so grandiose to fulfil the same function.

For instance, the late Elinor Ostrom provides many examples of communally self-organised and self-governed management of what she terms "common pool resources", which can include things like an area of forest for logging, an estuary for fishing, an irrigation system, an aquifer, etc, which is public in nature, but requires a framework of communal trust and cooperation to manage equitably and sustainably for all who require access. She concludes with 8 principals which make or break the ability to do so effectively, based on 1,000's of case studies both historical and contemporary.

Even something as small as several farms having to share a stream for irrigating their crops, and maintain the system, schedule time and duration of access, and have a framework to keep each other honest and accountable, is more than sufficient to provide the kind of goal you're advocating. It doesn't have to be on the level of an entire civilisation necessarily. You're quite right that no man is an island, and without that kind of sense of shared ethos and public responsibility, we've lost the heart of what makes us noble as a people. Yet it's far easier to take modest steps to get back to that on a smaller community by community basis, rather than trying to forcibly manufacture agreement of people numbering in the millions or billions.

Anyway, if you're interested, here's a synopsis.

https://earthbound.report/2018/01/15/elinor-ostroms-8-rules-for-managing-the-commons/

And here's the entire book, which in 2009 won her the distinction of being the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

https://wtf.tw/ref/ostrom_1990.pdf