“1. Each member of Alcoholics Anonymous is but a small part of a great whole. AA must continue to live or most of us will surely die. Hence our common welfare comes first. But individual welfare follows close afterward.” (The Twelve Traditions, Short Form)
Tradition One might seem to favour a collectivist philosophy, with a willingness to sacrifice the individual for the common God. This is not true. ‘Our common welfare comes first’ is not a primitive condition but an entailment: since the individual is part of the great whole, if the individual is to survive, the whole must survive. Antecedent to common welfare is the philosophy that the individual matters, and the individual’s survival matters. That’s the primitive value from which all else stems. The paradox is that, for the individual to survive and thrive, the common welfare must be maintained and prioritised over individual welfare. In those rare occasions that there is a conflict between common welfare and personal welfare, common welfare wins, but only for the sake of each individual.
In short, you matter, and I matter, and because you and I matter, the collective ‘we’ matters.