I think that your entire thought process can be hypothesized all the way back to the first cellular colonies. Individualist needed the sustainable colony to get the chance to grow and thrive. The Colony needed Individualists to innovate and diversify, because with a growing population, new needs and wants are born from evolution, subconsciousness, experience and choice and the freaking environment changes so new sources need to be processed according to possibility and taste.
The fun part is that the preserving part of the colony needs the kind of remembering and honor you are talking about to maintain the ground on which individualists can grow. At the same time individualists need to be strong enough to dessert the colony and establish a new one. And if they do, their only way to survive is to build a culture of remembering and honor that enables the growth of new individualists.
Sometimes I find myself playing with the thought that Empires only fall if their conserving body fails to serve the diverse range of needs, desires & kinks of it's population, the breeding ground of and by individualists & for everybody. It's as if too many good men die in wars and the politicians and administrators back home just don't have what it takes to be grow strong enough people because they themselves can only survive and thrive in submissive, pseudo-dominant hierarchies that don't cherish innovation & individualism and tend to be predatory & oppressive, fostering cultures that are build on shame, guilt, fear and manipulation because these things are efficient enforcers of conformity, cooptation, and create adjustable competition, which is exactly what makes colonies weak and poisons the ground, air and food of both, the social body and the individualists.
Consumer Culture might have been maximized as a hack around this, I believe, not necessarily as a conspiracy of men who tried to standardize the way of money, but of the social body itself, in order to create a clandestine womb for individualists, because mothers noticed what the fuck and how the head aligned their offspring after too many fathers died in wars & too many natural leaders withdrew from top level positions and went into the crafts and engineering because so that the mafia guys wouldn't gang up on them & their offspring. Too much corruption, even when they were only just tiny clumps of cells! ... and now we have "the age of consciousness" vs/or/and/not/nand "mass information flow"