Intellectually, as a culture we've bought into an underlying individualistic/libertarian 'philosophy' built on certain insane ideas about individualism that are reflected in everything from our infrastructure( we're still building suburban sprawl and living in cities like LA with "no there there") to our ideas about taxes (from a social perspective most reasonable individuals understand the necessity of taxes; except, of course, in the U.S. where reasonable talk about taxes went out the window about the same time that Reagan came into office ) to the constant denigration of any mandated 'social' programs or nanny state regulations that we try to reduce and eliminate as rapidly as possible. The fact that disasters --both physical and cultural--are the end result of this so called 'philosophy' is just now beginning to be understood (I hope).
The positive thing you want is the assertion--almost completely ignored or devalued in the US--that a 'we' transcends an 'I', that what makes the community stronger and better able to cope with crisis is also a benefit to the individual; and conversely, what makes the individual able to become strong and rooted is a strong sense of responsibility to the community and vis versa.
I'll probably get in trouble for saying this, but I suspect years from now the kind of resource wasting, community destroying 'individualism' that's worshipped in the U.S. today will be looked upon with the same kind of anthropological awe that we feel when we gaze at the ancient Mayans who occasionally pierced their penises with threads and practiced ritual sacrifice to obscure gods with strange habits and names; an amazing culture, really, but, in many ways, gross and ultimately, self-defeating.
