[ninly]

The survival and progressive sophistication of human society and culture has always depended on the effective function of community-level values -- whether understood in terms of duty, honor, shame, mores, rule of law, or other mechanisms. Some influential portion of a population agrees (organically, culturally) that certain ways of behaving are more valuable (or unacceptable) to the community, even if not every individual necessarily agrees. This can obviously result in extremely non-free societal structures, as you suggest, but community at any significant scale will always require some compromise of individual freedoms.

This is necessitated by the very diversity of individual human proclivities and interests. To refer to the compromise, sacrifice, or diminishment of some of those interests as "oppression" strikes me as selfish and melodramatic, even if it is often regrettable from certain perspectives. Certainly sometimes it is oppression, and it is frequently unfair, but extreme individualism doesn't fix or even address this fundamental tension.

[zajio1am]

> The survival and progressive sophistication of human society and culture has always depended on the effective function of community-level values -- whether understood in terms of duty, honor, shame, mores, rule of law, or other mechanisms.

IMHO progressive sophistication of human society goes hand in hand with replacing informal relations and processes (like duty, honor, shame, charity) by formal laws and institutions (rule of law, public welfare).

There are always some necessary compromises of individual liberties, but that can be handled by formal institutios, which generally have limited scope all control mechanisms compared to informal but unchecked power of society.