I think that's fair to look at it societally, but the concept of a collective goes up and down fractally. You have self, family, neighborhood, town, etc going up... and then going down you have organs, commensurable organisms, cells, genes, etc. All replicable and self interested in their own contexts.

While we can argue against overgeneralizing, models from one scale often elegantly explain dynamics in other scales. Apoptosis, auto-immunity, depression (learned helplessness) can emerge at scales other than where they are most familiar.