What does it mean to be an individual?
It means that you are separate, unique, distinguished, and different. You are discriminating yourself from all other human beings as being special in one or many ways from any one other person.
To be an individual means your actions are free and uninterrupted or affected by other people. And thus effect only yourself. The idea of a true individual is an illusion as such is free will.
All people are the same, when you discriminate differences you generate the individual sure, but by causing these discriminations you create the duality of superior and inferior. Those who are lesser individuals than you or vice versa. Though as we disect a single person, we may be made differently but that does not mean we are separate or unique seeing as the end result is a sentient, feeling, thinking being. The misconception that you can be an individual and all individuals can be equal is a falsified delusion, because being an individual means that you are discrimination differences, good and bad.
In all truth, though we are constructed from diferent parts and people, we are all connected, our actions and choices ripple across the globle and ultimately affect every other human being, animal, and plant on this planet. Through science we have found that we are all made of atoms, and atoms together create matter, and for as far as we know now atoms are infinitely divisible, such as to say, on some level whether we have the technology to ever see it, everything thing on this planet is connected to one another. Because on some level we are connected that means the space we call nothingness does not exist because it is full of something, that something is connected to everything else, and thus the individual as we call is is merely a macroscope view of the way things really are.
We see no connection so we believe there is no connection, but connections exist, empathy and compassion, love, hate, all these bind us, our place at the top of the ecosystem and all other symbiotic organisms trying to find an equilibrim on this planet are connected, and our slightest sneeze can throw the balance into chaos, cause death, destruction and mayhem.
Thus, such dualties as the individual, (the illusion of difference) causes discrimination, and thus the bad and good is brought to light, those desiring to have good and replace bad, those who desire this and that to suffice as a representative of their life or uniqueness, that which is desired to further "independance" only to fail and realize we are dependant inexoribly on each other, we come to realize we are connected, cause and effect, you bought this, this company profited, this person did not, thus his family is not feed, thus his children starve. We are connected and our actions effect all things. Individualism places no heed on the ramifications of our selfish selfserving actions, thus causing suffering on others.
This is why life is suffering. This is why it is the first noble truth of Buddhism, and this is why there is only Karma, and no God to save us from ourselves.