The individual spiritually-transcends the group, yet our material society depends on categories - A sign of the End Times?

I have often discussed the change in human consciousness by which our original state of near-complete (albeit largely unconscious and spontaneous) immersion in a group identity; has transformed to the modern experience of - on the one hand - alienation, cut offness from community and indeed the world; and - on the other hand - freedom, agency, the autonomy of the individual. 

We modern Western people need to be conscious of our understandings, and to choose our affiliations and motivations, in a way that was impossible in the past - but unavoidable in this present. 

Hence we are responsible, in a ultimate way, for our beliefs. Including the primary assumptions we make concerning the fundamental nature of reality (i.e. we are responsible for choosing out metaphysical system). 

We Just Are responsible - although, at present, this responsibility s largely shirked... 

Instead; people prefer to take refuge in assertions that they have no choice, or that their understanding is compelled upon them by facts and reason. Yet what counts as facts and reasons are, in actuality, themselves a consequence of prior metaphysical choices. 

What this means is that the individual is the primary unit of spiritual discourse, in a way that undercuts not only such groupings as nations, races, sexes, and the like; but also church institutions of all kinds. When the individual is primary, the group must be secondary - and derived. 

Yet our society is based in groups. 

All of our social institutions already (and, in some ways, increasingly) regard individuals in terms of their group identity; and this applies to laws, rules, procedures, mandatory-"guidelines", economic formulae, and the like. 

This seems both practically and conceptually inevitable in political terms; such that we cannot even imagine how a human society, in this world could possibly function - on the basis of consciously-chosen relationships between individual persons!  

In sum: The group collapses, and is transcended - spiritually. 

But, at the same time; materially, the group has not been transcended - and there seems no sign that it shall be. 

We are materially ruled on the basis of categories and algorithms; even as spiritually we are free and responsible agents of our own salvation, learning, loving, and creating in this world.

The spirit and the material now pull us in opposite directions. 

To satisfy the one, we must subvert, weaken, and perhaps destroy, the other. 

Perhaps this is another indication that we are in the End Times?