I remember as a teenager reading of the few instances on record of feral children being encountered by those in society. I always found it fascinating to consider the circumstances that could have led up to such an instance. These stories have been handed down culturally, as well: look at ancient Rome and its myth of Romulus and Remus, raised by the she-wolf. A child raised outside of society is the ultimate mirror of what does and does not make us human. What exactly is human nature, to those of us who have been tamed by civilization?
Even a feral child was born of a female human; but that child could not interact with the rest of human society because s/he was not raised within the social web of relationships.
But even babies born of females in human society and denied caregiving do not exhibit ties to the wider web of community. These children, who otherwise would be archetypal individuals, don’t exist because they die. Human children specifically need love to thrive.
So it is not the biological state, or a state of nature, that gives rise to individualism. It is care and nurturing (which is not gender-dependent) that engenders humanity itself, and that in turn is a state of being brought about by interconnectedness.
There is no individual without the group. It is an interrelation. The group fosters individuals so as to benefit the group as a whole. Libertarianism, an ideology based on the fiction that the individual can exist as an entity separate from society (atomised through economic efficiency), is a perversion, a subversion, an inversion of the actual relationship as it exists in the material world. They operate through a distortion in the fundament of human relations.
This inversion, incidentally, is why capitalism, as an official mechanism of protecting disproportionate and/or unearned wealth as a badge of “superior” individualism, should be altered or abolished.