In my last post, I established the difficulty of being personally responsible without accountability to something or someone, and hinted that perhaps the tribe should be that someone.
Assuming that my hint was true, when a person would act, he would be responsible to the tribe he lives in. This would lead to the building of trust between the members and potentially to benefits for the entire group that would be impossible for a single person to realize by himself. It would appear that within such a community, a person would truly be able to realize his full potential.
However, wouldn't this land us back in the problem we wanted to get out of in the first place? The supposed trust and benefits could also lead to a kind of group-think that would smother a person's self-agency. Have we not seen societies that suppress the individual in order to maintain the status quo? We have heard the consequences of living in such a group when its members excuse their actions saying, "I was just following orders."
This leaves us in an apparent conundrum, for an individual cannot be a law unto himself, and yet if he is part of some tribe, it will eventually smother his ability to make his own decisions and be personally responsible.
But this very conundrum is based on a flawed understanding of society and how it relates to man, for if society did eventually strip man of his self-agency and personal responsibility, then society, on a scale larger than a few families, would never have formed in the first place. Man must have some need for society to exist for, as the ancient philosopher Aristotle stated, "Man is by nature a social animal." Furthermore, the human person could not exist without society, for it is into society that he is born.
The relation between the human person and society is very tightly knit, for society is necessarily composed of human beings, and we human beings cannot come into existence without the basic building block of society, the family. The goal of society is to accomplish the personal good of man by ensuring the common good of all. Thus it would appear that it is in man's best interest to take personal responsibility of those duties within society which he is capable of undertaking that will accomplish that common good. It would be irresponsible for any person and suicide for any society to neglect or undermine the accomplishment of those duties.
Bearing this in mind, let us return to the original statement: "People need to break from the tribe, embrace their personal agency, take responsibility for their actions, and, by chaining the darkness within, achieve self-actualization!"
Perhaps it would be more reasonable to say: "People need to recognize their duties towards others, take ownership of those duties, strive to overcome the selfishness that is destructive to themselves and society, and, through serving each other each day, achieve the actualization of themselves and all of society."