In the world of politics, few arguments are more consistent than the debate about what an individual owes to society: Their time? Their money? Their talents? Their entire lives? You can see this back and forth in debates about everything from tax policy to family formation to war and the draft; the individual versus the state or the collective is a—and perhaps the—defining conflict in democratic politics.
When transmuted into narrative form, this argument is barely an argument. Instead, it almost always lands on the side of valorizing great sacrifice, in which an individual gives up everything in order to save the collective. Pop culture tends to deliver stories in which noble self-sacrifice is not only good, but the highest good and even, at times, the only good. The underlying assumption is when the individual and the collective are in conflict, the individual has an affirmative duty to sacrifice, no matter what it takes.
