So Maciamo, if I trust your map, it means that there is a direct correlation between individualism and economic success. At the risk of being politically incorrect I would even say that there is a link between individualism and hardworking.
This is not difficult to understand. the more efficient and productive you are, the more individualistic you tend to be.
Not necessarily. East Asians are strongly collectivist (more than southern Europeans), but among the hardest working people in the world. You can see they are collectivist by how much they (the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese) care about their national image, and their governments are willing to (occasionally) distort statistics to make them look better in international comparisons. In Europe, the genes for hard-working tend to correlate with individualism (both are higher among Germanic people, probably due to a founder effect before the Bronze-age Germanic expansion), but that doesn't mean that they are the same genes !
A hermit (or an Indian Sadhu) would be an example of a very individualistic person who choose a life of not working. Hippies also somewhat fit in that category.
In modern society the greatest industrial and technological achievements almost always start with a personal success.
when you force collectivism on People (like in the Soviet Union) people lose their motivation and very little intiatives take place.
You cannot force collectivism (in the meaning of genetic trait of character used in this thread) on people. A collectivist-minded majority in a country's population can create a more social or communal society, the extreme of which being communism, but they are completely distinct things. Collectivism isn't about redistributing wealth; this is about egalitarianism (and the most egalitarian societies on Earth are the Scandinavian and the Japanese; the former being strongly individualistic, the latter strongly collectivist).
It's absolutely vital to understand this thread that you clearly separate some concepts in your mind.
- collectivism : caring about what others in your group think of you, caring about the image of your group from the outside. It's essentially about image, respect, interpersonal relationships and emotional dependence on the group.
- egalitarianism : feeling/opinion that other people in society deserve the same fundamental rights (which nowadays has come to include social security and education, in addition to freedom).
- socialism/communism : economic system in which the state owns a large part of the economy and plays a strong role as a regulator (using restrictive laws, taxes, subsidies, etc.).
None of these are related with one another other than by chance and circumstances.
Collectivism is a character trait set in the genes.
Egalitarianism is a variable opinion that depends a lot on the (genetic and cultural) homogeneity of society, but also on basic cultural values that evolve with time.
Socialism is a political and economic system which popularity depends on the electorate, the socio-economic history of a region, the current economic climate, and many other factors.