I think it's subverting any deep or functional concept of human individuality, by treating it as a matter of simply not having specific enough categories (anyone wanting to be this precise about their sexual preferences would do better to explain them directly than to label them)
But what made those societies not-individualistic was the degree to which so many of their members saw their sense of self through the lens of membership in the group--your argument is they would be more individualistic if there were hundreds of little independent USSRs instead
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I don't think we have evidence about how many people in those societies saw themselves through the lens of membership in the group. I'm guessing it's high, but the point is, no matter what it was, those societies didn't *recognize* individualism.
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I could be wrong, but I feel like your vision of "individualism" is something along the lines of "shut up and go feel like an individual by yourself, and if you want to interact with society you have to do so as part of the big group"...which isn't how I see individualism.
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Your guess is correct, that isn't my vision of individualism. I would say that a person's desire for everyone to know their precise sexuality is more revealing of their individual character than that precise sexuality itself
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Sort of like if there were a person who wanted everyone to know exactly what house he grew up in, and made a flag for it and everything--this behavior would tell me more about him than the house would.
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But so what?
End of conversation
New conversation -
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