Is "can breed" the ultimate clue of individualism? But again, this makes most of our cells... "individuals".
Breeding is sexual reproduction. Parthenogenic whiptail lizards lay eggs and reproduce themselves, but they don't breed.
Only our gametes can undergo meiosis and recombination, the necessary processes for breeding. Our other cells can engage in mitosis, duplication. There are only the two processes, which is why I say this is fundamentally incorrect.
The queen and drones are the gametes of hymenopterans in a very real sense. They have cells which can undergo meiosis and recombination, workers do not.
In fact, in some unusual species of ant, there are motile and fertile workers, in addition to and sometimes instead of the sessile queen. These are called... gamergates.
This is glossing over some of the weirdness found in various hymenopterans, it's an ancient and diverse clade.
Individual ants are animals, that's not controversial. Eusocial animals are less individual than any other animal, and their social groups are more like a single organism than the social groups of any other sort of animal. This, too, is not controversial.
One is not an individual or a group inherently, it is solely based on the concepts you are using to create the context.
That doesn’t mean the rest of our cells don’t exist in a state of genetic indifference. They have evolutionary pressure to improve the fitness of the individual, otherwise it’s a dead end for all genes involved.
Competition between reproductively capable individuals is different. An ant that acts selfishly will reduce the fitness of the hive with no genetic reward. It’s a losing strategy. But in a society, a selfish person can reap the rewards while taking advantage or damaging the society they belong to.
The fact that humans exhibit behaviors like self sacrifice and loyalty points towards the idea that humans’ evolutionary strategy is somewhat mixed. Selfishness and selflessness coexist because our fitness is to some extend, dependent on the society, or to the hand that feeds us.
I imagine some cells like cancer cells also act selfishly while damaging the host and reaping temporary rewards themselves.
So it seems like analogy of people and few bad actors makes even more sense in terms of cells as opposed to ants who all act only towards the greater good.
Tldr; In order to succeed and survive you need many working together, however it is possible to get ahead temporarily acting selfishly, not caring about the greater good, but having too many of those bad actors will end bad for everyone. Which happens with both, people and cells.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality
This does make individual hymenopterans less like individuals of other species, which are in competition with others of the same gametes for the privilege of breeding and the survival of their offspring.
Hymenopterans are more individual than slime molds: they're multicellular, have their own organs, and so on. But less individual than any other form of multicellular animal life. It isn't altruistic, in a Darwinian sense, for a drone to give its life for the colony, because it isn't able to breed, the only way it can pass on its genome is by protecting the queen.
I'm pretty confident what was meant is "than more individualistic animals".