The group comes first

The argument

Humans have evolved to depend on socialization and group settings to succeed. As we evolved it became beneficial to forage and hunt together, share, and socialize: a group could bring down what an individual could not, absorb the failure of any one member's day, and pass on what it had learned to those who came after. Eventually, through evolutionary processes, humans came to use socialization as our primary advantage — not speed or strength, but the capacity to coordinate with others. An advantage of that kind does not stay in the environment; it becomes part of the organism. Our biology evolved for us to psychologically depend on socialization, which is to say that the need for company is not a preference layered on top of our nature but a feature of it. That is why the absence of social contact registers the way hunger or pain registers — as a signal that something necessary is missing, rather than as a mild disappointment. The consequences follow directly. When we are not able to socialize in groups, it can lead to psychological and physical health problems. This is why isolation due to coronavirus measures is so difficult for us; we biologically depend upon socialization. What made the experience revealing is that it was involuntary and near-universal: a great many people, not only those who were already isolated or unwell, discovered how much of their ordinary functioning had depended on other people being physically present. Coronavirus has revealed just how important groups are to us humans, and that we often are lonely, depressed, or anxious when not able to socialize. Socialization is crucial to the psychological well-being of the human race; without it, we are mentally depleted. What the pandemic exposed about our self-perception is that the group comes first — the sense we have of ourselves turns out to be inseparable from the company we keep.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Humans have moved past group effort being the most important thing to our psychology. The rise of capitalistic ideals shows that individual effort has taken over the limelight. There are many facets of life affected by the pandemic, and the stress people apparently feel due to no group interaction could just as easily be from another cause. The fact that a large percentage of people are disrespecting social distancing regulations and putting the human group at stake for personal gain demonstrates that humans are inherently self-serving, not group reliant.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] An evolutionary account of why sociality was advantageous is a claim about ancestral conditions, offered here without evidence beyond the plausibility of the story. [Rejecting P2] That isolation is associated with poor health outcomes does not establish a biological dependence, and the period in question supplied many candidate causes at once — illness, bereavement, lost income, disrupted routine — which the argument never separates. [Rejecting P3] Loneliness during lockdown is equally consistent with the rival positions. As the counter-argument notes, widespread disregard of distancing rules for personal benefit is available as evidence too, and reads as self-interest rather than group dependence.