Individualism grew out of Christianity, originating with the biblical idea that every single human soul is equal in the eyes of God and every single soul will be saved through faith in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  It then became enshrined by Enlightenment thinkers like Descartes, who declared "I think, therefore I am."  Unfortunately, in the process, a universal and shared moral structure that provided unity was dismantled when it became subjectivized where it once was an objective standard held by everyone, even by kings and monarchs in eras preceding modern times.  By eliminating the shared Judeo-Christian morality, the Enlightenment created relativism.  The most pernicious and destructive version was moral relativism. 

It devolved to where every individual is now allowed to set his own moral standards by which to live without being questioned.  The result is that the individual has basically become his own god because of the all-pervasive hyperindividualism of our modern secular and liberal society.

The enforcement mechanism for modern relativism is political correctness, a new code of extreme ethics that everyone must accept and live by.  If not, cancel culture will most likely come after you in the form of making you lose your job or public shaming for deviating from the new orthodoxy. 

The paradox of individualism becomes apparent when you investigate its origins and genealogy.  At first, it seems, though, that authority resides entirely with the individual through unrestricted choice.  But that power to seek absolute freedom through an unobstructed will inevitably leads to anarchy and nihilism.  Logically, then, the next step as the chaos increases, as we are seeing today, is that an outside enforcement mechanism will be required in order to restore safety and security. 

And who is it that always steps in to fill that role?  None other than the State.  This is why Democrats are the party of drug legalization, abortion, and LGBT.  They know that as long as they keep advocating for issues that supposedly liberate the individual from restraint and inconvenience, it will eventually require the intervention and heavy hand of the government to restore order when the inevitable conflicts occur between the overlapping rights of each individual.  From the book Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty:

The tendency for extreme individualism to coincide with a kind of political collectivism in the modern era is something that thinkers have observed from a variety of perspectives, from Hobbes and Hegel, to more recent thinkers such as Robert Nisbet. The logic behind this tendency is two-fold: on the one hand, from a practical point of view, the disorder of extreme individualism, lacking an internal and organic principle of organization, calls on an imposition of order from the outside, an external imposition that extends as far as the potential disorder, and that reflects the undifferentiated abstraction of the equal units on which it is imposed: it is thus absolute and monolithic... the absoluteness of individualism and the absoluteness of centralized government inevitably coincide, which means that an insistence on equality tends to subvert itself, once again, into a mass capitulation to power imposed mechanically from above.

This is what makes the upcoming election so important.  If Biden and the Democrats win, you can bet that the current progressive forces will become even more chaotic and disruptive in the quest for liberating all the categories of victimhood both individually and collectively they claims to represent, once political power has been recaptured.  It will not be pretty, and the counter-forces of authoritarianism to quell the nihilism of unrestrained rebellion will be the final piece in the puzzle of consolidating and solidifying the complete power of the federal government over all of society.