"The question lurking at the back of my brain was "Why do we now always have this obsession with the self?" This is so dominant at the moment in society, whereas the sense of doing your public duty, or fighting in a war or being involved in a political revolution, where your self is absorbed into a grander project, has all but disappeared."

this sort of thing kind of confuses me, actually. the strands of individualism in western societies but also groupthink. can you speak to this? bc i feel like self-absorption and consumerism is present, but aggressive conformity is also present in the form of patriotism and right-wing conceptions of unity that hinge on excluding/punishing ethnic and racial outsiders and gender non-conforming people.