Structurally, neither individualism nor community is primary. They are contemporaneous, though distinct. However, this is so only for an outside analyst. My informants perceived that individualism generates community. For them, individualism is natural, community problematical.
Society has to be built.
Society was created by a joining of individuals for the greater good of each of them. And the institutions of' society down to the Farm Bureau were created in the same manner for the same purpose. It is because my informants put individualism first that I also decided to deal with it first. And it will help the reader, I hope, not to read the forthcoming discussion of ideas about social organization as if it were a study of the dynamics of social structure as a separate domain. This is so radically opposed to what I as a social scientist consider to be the true reality of the human condition and what I take to be the central message of the social sciences in general that it must be stressed at the onset, and the organization of the presentation itself must reinforce the point.