What group is it you're hiving off from society exactly?
Because in the same way that your arm is an integral subunit of a whole which makes no sense without that contextualising state, any organised subunit of modern society will stop functioning in its subunit sense.
An isolated business, or factory, or town, or neighbourhood, or even family, will no longer have its prior context.
You'll all but certainly see a massive amount of mortality.
Some very small sets of individuals might survive, but, again, within an entirely different context. And only in the right nourishing environment.
Much as a few select cells from an arm might, if sufficiently general, continue to exist if put in an appropriate nutrient solution, protected from bacteria or other disease, and generally cared for.
I don't think you're conning on to the systems view of this concept, and the distinction between individual and society, or cell and organism.
I agree with everything you said, but I think you're completely missing my point.
> any organised subunit of modern society _will stop functioning in its subunit sense_.
Yes, there will be high mortality, but that former subunit can go on and recreate a new, different society. An arm will just die. A 90% mortality rate is completely different than 100% mortality.
My point is that the analogy between society and the body is very imperfect. The body is much more fascist, and the biggest reason is because of how reproduction works.
Evolution has spent over a billion years shaping multicellular, sexually reproducing organisms; sexual reproduction provides strong selective pressure to favor cells that contribute to the organism as a whole. By contrast, large-scale human society (larger than a tribe of ~100 people) has only existed for a few thousand years.
That's why we value individualism, liberty, and so forth -- it's literally against human nature for society to completely dictate to the individual, whereas it's natural and correct for a cell to sacrifice everything (e.g. apoptosis) for the body, because only by helping the body can the cell help propagate its own genes.
Just think about it for a second -- cells regularly check themselves for damage, and if they determine that they are too damaged, they immediately commit suicide. If they fail to commit suicide, the immune system kills them. Can you imagine mass, compulsory euthanasia for terminally ill people, but enforced by the police + military? Because that's one implication of the 'society == body' analogy.
If you want another example, ant and bee society show much more eusociality than human societies. Workers very readily sacrifice themselves to defend the colony/hive, whereas it takes a lot of training and effort to get humans to fight effectively. That makes sense, because eusocial insects are more closely related to one another than humans are to each other, and workers cannot reproduce while there's a queen. The mechanism of reproduction strongly influences the level of eusociality.
Because in the same way that your arm is an integral subunit of a whole which makes no sense without that contextualising state, any organised subunit of modern society will stop functioning in its subunit sense.
An isolated business, or factory, or town, or neighbourhood, or even family, will no longer have its prior context.
You'll all but certainly see a massive amount of mortality.
Some very small sets of individuals might survive, but, again, within an entirely different context. And only in the right nourishing environment.
Much as a few select cells from an arm might, if sufficiently general, continue to exist if put in an appropriate nutrient solution, protected from bacteria or other disease, and generally cared for.
I don't think you're conning on to the systems view of this concept, and the distinction between individual and society, or cell and organism.