The Myth of the Individual

What if the individual – that sacred building block of our societies, supposedly sovereign and autonomous – were nothing more than a convenient illusion, a metaphysical fiction that has become toxic? We celebrate their freedom, their inalienable dignity. Yet behind this triumph lie silent epidemics and a rapid collapse, on a historical scale, of societies that have made the individual their totem. Here we shall see that contemporary science nevertheless allows us to gauge the extent to which the human being is not a closed monad, but a living ecosystem, a network of permanent symbioses, an immunological complex, a rhythmic unit in constant engagement with the world around it. We are, at a deeper level, Homo symbioticus, and understanding this reality shatters those myths ‘that have done us so much harm’.