As with most things, you need to find a balance between the two. All-or-nothing is rarely a good approach, no matter what you're talking about. Everything taken to extremes turns bad.

> rampant individualism also makes society weaker. It reduces a societies ability to collaborate.

Let's not mistake diversity for individualism. We can be diverse, yet share overarching ideals - such as living together peacefully and in solidarity.

> We can be diverse, yet share overarching ideals - such as living together peacefully and in solidarity.

We can, but increasingly I see people arguing that we should forgoe those and determine our actions in society based on our own individual interest and market mechanisms.

Increasingly I see people argue we should take up a socialist society.

Not hard to see why a raise in either of the above would result in the other side getting even more extreme in reaction.

I feel like capitalism vs. socialism is a false dichotomy. We could and should have a society with somewhat equitable outcomes that nevertheless uses market mechanisms to achieve that. It's this cold war attitude of us vs. them which is the problem.

I probably agree with this, at least to some extent, but if the question is what is the better form of society, I'm not sure how relevant it is.

You can have societies that are very community minded and govern them in a free way and with a democracy. You can try to govern very individualistic societies with an autocracy.

There's probably an optimum level of accepted dissent in a society, depending on what it wants to achieve, and I tend to think that social democracies come the closest to achieving it, and certainly much closer than most autocracies.