"The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation."¹ These words were written more than a century ago, and to many of us they undoubtedly still make a lot of sense. I wonder, should not these words make less sense to us by now? Notwithstanding the advent of individualism as an ideology, one is not mistaken in claiming that in the feud between the Individual and Society, the latter has by and large been the victor. The last century has been a century of political mass movements — fascism and communism, to summarize them in a very lapidary manner. Today the socalled "affluent society" has taken over in Western countries, while diverse variants of religious-nationalist ideologies are prevailing in the peripherical regions ("the South"). This surely is a rather simplistic summery, but let me detail my argument in my following paper. I will focus on the Western-style civilization.