Not a human default. A specific historical settlement — moral and economic authority relocated from inherited tradition and community into the sovereign individual — that then got treated as if it always was one.
Individualism versus collectivism is one of the most extensively measured dimensions in cross-cultural research: societies score differently, and consistently, on how much they treat the individual versus the group as the primary unit of concern, with downstream effects on everything from reward allocation to loneliness rates. This is an empirical, comparative finding, not a claim that one orientation is more natural than the other.
The West’s specific version of individualism has a traceable origin. Renaissance humanism recovered the individual as a primary unit of value; the Enlightenment then relocated the grounds of truth and moral authority from inherited tradition and religious community into individual reason, culminating in the explicit separation of church and state — a move that took moral and political authority out of a shared communal frame and set it inside the autonomous, self-governing individual instead.
The Rashidun Caliphate offers a documented counter-case from the same broad historical arc: governance built on shura (mandatory mutual consultation), collective accountability, and khilafah (stewardship held on behalf of the community, not personal possession), rather than a sovereign individual will imposing its own judgement. Neither model is a human default — both are specific, constructed answers to the same underlying question of where authority over a shared life should sit.
Source: Hofstede, G., “The Cultural Relativity of Organizational Practices and Theories,” Journal of International Business Studies, 1983; Shabana, R., Siddiqui, M.M.R. & Taiba, S., “Prevailing Legacy of the Khulāfa-e-Rāshidīn,” Al-Qamar, 2023.