If freedom swings to extremes; if the largest group, as I indicated above, affords greater play to extreme formations and malformations of individualism, to misanthropic detachment, to baroque and moody life styles, to crass egoism—then all this is merely the consequence of the wider group’s requiring less of us, of its being less concerned with us, and thus of its lesser hindering of the full development even of perverse impulses.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 648