If you add things together, you have one of something larger. If you add the ingredients of a cake, you have one cake. What 1+1=2 really means, is if you add two sets of one, you have one set of two.
Our culture is built around the premise of atomism. That it is emergent from individual entities at the micro level. Much of the confusion in modern physics is how to deal with he fact this isn't so. Entanglement of quanta is an example. It's like pouring two cups of water in a glass and assuming that when you pour them back out, they are the same cups as before.
The James Webb keeps finding ever further, mature galaxies, that get ever harder to shoehorn in the BBT, but one way light does redshift over distance, is as multi spectrum "packets," as the higher frequencies dissipate faster. So this would mean the photons our receivers absorb are a sampling of a wave front, not individual photons having traveled billions of years separately.
Quantization and all the complexities of life and physical reality emerge as feedback loops of interaction, in which there is no ground state. The nodes are as much an effect of the networks, as the networks are of the nodes and the microcosmic is as much a function of context and the macrocosmic, as the macro is of the micro.
Yet understanding and accepting this would seriously undermine the monolithic, reductionist premises on which culture, especially Western culture, is based.
What if we were to realize individuals are as much a function of the society, as society is of the individuals?
The consequence would be neither individualism, or socialism, but the larger feedback loop between the two.
In fact, individualism keeps people socially isolated and therefore more dependent on the institutional connections, controls and harvesting mechanisms of government and banking.
Or that money, as medium of exchange, is a quintessential public utility, like roads and we own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing through our bodies.
Meanwhile most people are unwilling to think beyond whatever social polarization they are caught up in.
