What Makes a Society More Resilient? Frequent Hardship

Focusing on the level of society as if it's a corporate entity that should profit, rather than on individuals, is a major error in conceiving of our communities and countries; that assumption or premise is the root of our greatest evils:

When some leader starts saying that we should serve 'society', it is a rationalization of corrupt power [0] - they mean others should sacrifice for the leader. First, the leader is free to sacrifice if they think it's important, but somehow that is always for others to do. Second, who defines what society needs or should be? It's mostly an abstract question. Inevitably, it is defined to serve the leader - and notice also the usual corruption of such leaders. Third, it usually also involves hurting others. Everything, every moral, is sacrificed to 'society', i.e., to the leader. ("You shall know them by their fruits", said the authors of the Gospels, millennia ago: good leaders bring out love, freedom, peace, prosperity; bad ones bring out hate, violence, division, greed.)

The point of society is individuals, each person's freedom, welfare, and opportunity; "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". Rights belong to individuals; free will and choice are theirs; justice is on an individual basis, not for groups. 'Society' exists only for its individuals: "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed".

The 'societies' that recognize individual rights are the most free (of course), most prosperous, and most safe and stable in the history of the world.

[0] I'm not at all rejecting service. The idea is that we should serve each other, not some mythical 'society'. Society is a tool to serve each other, and nothing more.