Ants and Organisms

There are roughly 2 kinds of societies in the world today. The first which puts the society before self and the second which does the opposite. Typically, eastern cultures demonstrate the former and western cultures demonstrate the latter. It's hard to compare the two as they both have their upsides and downsides, but a recent podcast got me thinking about this

Think about an ants. A tiny creature, which will get easily squashed under the weight of a human's foot. I'm pretty sure that we unknowingly kill a few ants everyday. On its own, a single ant can't do much. However, a colony of ants - those guys can wreck havoc. The death of a single ant doesn't affect the colony much.

You can apply a similar thought process to the cells and organs in our body. Individually, they are just pieces of bio-mass and can't do much. However, when put together to create a human, they can do wonderful (and horrible) things. The death of a single cell, doesn't affect the body much.

When it comes to us humans, things suddenly change. Each human life is treated as pristine, even divine. But when you look at the ability of a single human and compare it what we have accomplished as a race, it's insignificant. There's a saying that there's no one this Earth who can make a pencil from absolute scratch.

All the innovation and progress we've made is thanks to the collective action of our society. And when you think about it that way, as individuals we are closer to ants and cells, whereas our society is closer to the ant colony and human body.

What if the actual organism is the society and not our fragile bodies? Would that put society before self?