Some half-remembered college notes (it appears) are dredged up for application to current debates in the "Herald-Mail":
Plato talks in "The Republic" about the earliest men who lived in caves and cared only about themselves and their own families. This was prior to the development of the community. Hobbes talks about men in the State of Nature, which is the condition of man without the social contract.
In ancient Greece, persons whose concern was concentrated solely on themselves were called self-focused people - the word in Greek is idiotes. These people were always compared unfavorably to citizens whose principle concern was the politeia or the city-state. The Greek concept of politeia was adopted at least by the Romans who said Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is a beautiful and proper thing to die for one's country).
Well enough of that classics stuff, let's get back to S-CHIP, which I think is a talisman of whether people see the future of the U.S. as being more like Sweden, where everyone has a huge stake in everything the government does, or more like Sudan in which it's basically a state of nature, every man for himself, grab, root, growl - and where life, for the most part, is solitary, nasty, brutish and short.
To be fair, regarding Plato perhaps there's conflation of the Cave with the Protagoras myth:
[Mankind] was not long in inventing articulate speech and names ; and he also constructed houses and clothes and shoes and beds, and drew sustenance from the earth. Thus provided, mankind at first lived dispersed, and there were no cities. But the consequence was that they were destroyed by the wild beasts, for they were utterly weak in comparison of them, and their art was only sufficient to provide them with the means of life, and did not enable them to carry on war against the animals : food they had, but not as yet the art of government, of which the art of war is a part. After a while the desire of self-preservation gathered them into cities ; but when they were gathered together, having no art of government, they evil intreated one another, and were again in process of dispersion and destruction. Zeus feared that the entire race would be exterminated, and so he sent Hermes to them, bearing reverence and justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of friendship and conciliation.