After the naive question is asked - in order to tease out more nuanced answers from a set of bedrock analytical positions - a more structural analysis is useful to set out the parameters within which we can reason from our basic assumptions.
And so related to the naive impression of Western individuation is the less naive analysis of the overarching structure within which individuals develop, and within which their ideas and guiding ideals are actualized, which both guides and constrains their paths of development and realization.
We've talked before about the strangeness of complex social organization. In a modern nation you have the uneasy relationship between a regulative state and business and capital, the latter of which ascended to dominance in the Western world, and whose "markets" have created a world that structures and constrains economic, political, and social activity.
So you had the bizarre spectacle of the Truss administration in the UK attempting to solve its economic problems with a holographic set of solutions instantiated through decades of economic propaganda, which given the inappropriateness of the solutions, caused the bond markets to go haywire, with investors ready to pound down the doors of the administration, forcing them to retract their harebrained plans before the plans were even out of the gate, with the professional politicians responsible banished in turn. Local governance is helplessly dependent on a global economic system that itself has become hopelessly unstable.
So who is in control? As the conspiracy theorists like to ask anyway. What it increasingly looks like is a complex system of jostling factions held together with barely aligning interests, which is going supercritical, in which any given attempt at governance by a given faction sets off a cascade of crises, causes the rest of the system to respond in kind, until it settles back into an equilibrium of a resting critical state, weakening with every convulsion.
The strange and pathological contemporary formation of the individual makes more sense in this context. It is difficult for one to sit back and put up one's feet on the coffee table, much less go about one's daily affairs to live in dignity, when the house is on fire. But for many the burning house is all there is. One tries to be oneself despite the expectation that one is to go up in flames.
