"Collectivist" and "individualist" are nonsensical false dichotomies. "Individualists"
love to criticize the "collectivists" for wanting to "sacrifice the
individual for the collective" and insist that "the individual is more
important than the collective". These nonsensical phrases see the
individual as an "island unto themselves", that the individual is
separate from society, and therefore you can speak of the
individual and society as distinct entities.
Yet, this is just objectively not true, the individual is part of that
very same collective. If you sacrifice the collective, you also
sacrifice the individual, as the collective is merely the totality of
individuals.
And, in practice, this is how all "individualists" behave in the real
world. They advocate in favor of the sacrificing of the vast majority of
individuals in order to promote the individuality of a very few number
of individuals.
The most "individually free" society conceivable would be a dictatorship
as the dictator would be individually free to dictate whatever he want
without any hindrance, but this comes at the sacrifice of the
collective's individuality.
The self-contradictory incoherent nature of "individualism" causes
so-called "individualists" to advocate directly in favor of the
enslavement of the vast majority of individuals to a few. It's an
incoherent ideology as "collectivism" and "individualism" are
inseparable, the individual is part of the collective, and you cannot
sacrifice the collective without sacrificing the individual.
Take the issue of private property, for example. Marxists point out that
capitalist societies deprive the vast majority of individuals of the
means of production and destine them to work for others for their entire
lives, so they advocate for collective control over the means of
production so that individuals can actually have control in the economy.
"Individualists" respond to this by saying that this is "sacrificing the
individual for the collective" and vehemently defend the massively
unequal ownership of the majority of the economy by a small handful of
oligarchs because to them, their individual right to be an oligarch is
more important than the individuality of the millions of people
underneath that oligarch.