Collective success and individual failure vs collective failure and individual success.

MayCaesar

I think it is more complicated than this. While societies can be individualist or collectivist at large, ultimately every individual is a member of the collective, and it is hard to put responsibility for a failure on one without involving the other. More so, collectivist societies treat individuals as members of the collective, and individualistic societies treat the collective as consisting of members. It is a subtle difference, and not a binary one.

Consider the Japanese society. It is highly collectivist; every individual is expected to put the good of the collective before their individual interest. The individual is valued for their work towards the well-being of the collective, and the collective is valued for its work towards the well-being of the individual members.
If the individual does something that is considered an act of transgression by the collective, then the individual is considered responsible for failing to meet the collective standards, and the collective is considered responsible for failing to integrate the individual. In corporations there, you will often see a two-step process, where first the worker who violated something is reprimanded in front of the group of coworkers and managers, and then the coworkers and managers get together and effectively reprimand themselves, vowing to do a better job in the future.

Now consider the opposite: the American society. Highly individualistic, in this society the individual's personal success is valued above all else (not as much lately as a few decades ago, but nonetheless), and the collective is viewed as merely a means to an end. If the individual fails at something, then the collective will consider that the individual is responsible for the failure, but also individual members of the collective will see the system as guilty for creating conditions in which it became easy for the individual to fail.
You will see both discussions - the one concerning the individual responsibility, and the one concerning the legal framework in which the individual operates - happening at the same time, often in the same argument by the same person.

More so, consider what a crime fundamentally is. There is no crime with regards to an individual: a couple of individuals do not form any meaningful legal framework, and, at the very least, a third person is required to serve as a mediator for any legal framework to appear at all. "Crime" in any society, even the most individualistic one, fundamentally is viewed through the lens of the collective expectations. The system I advocate for personally - anarcho-capitalism - is, probably, the most individualistic system imaginable, as it rejects the notion of the collective altogether; there is no authority assumed by anyone by default, and everyone decides for themselves what authority to accept. Yet even in this system the notion of crime does exist, and it is partially derived from the societal consensus: for example, murder is going to be outlawed, pretty much, no matter what individuals choose to do. And while formally the anti-murder "law" is justified based on the individual interest of the murdered, it is the collective that gives this justification real power.

From this, it should be obvious why the bottom-right quadrant is never occupied. It is impossible for individual transgression to not be held against the individual, unless we discard the concept of the individual altogether and consider the whole society to be a hive of ants, working towards the single goal of the hive. Then, indeed, a failure of the individual will be considered equal to a failure of the hive, because there is no individual to speak of.
I do not think such hive societies have ever existed either, hence I am not sure I agree with your placement of communism and socialism; I would place them in the upper-left quadrant, albeit, perhaps, pretty close to the Success axis.

As a deeply individualistic person myself, I feel that the distinction between collectivism and individualism is not as much in formal organisation of the society, as it is in how people interact within that organisation. The Japanese society is collectivist, and the American society is individualistic - yet, if you just look at the laws in these two countries, you will not see that much difference. Japan has stricter social laws and bigger welfare state, but the differences are not all that drastic. What really differs is the culture of the interpersonal interaction. Japanese just see each other differently than Americans do. Japanese do not compete that much against each other, and, rather, they compete as collectives. It is hard to express the exact difference in words, and you really need to live in both places for, at least, a few months each to start appreciating it. I will just say that in my 6 months in Japan I only saw an argument between two Japanese people exactly once, and I have seen a Japanese person getting promotion exactly 0 times. This is the best illustration of the difference I can think of. Which, again, has nothing to do with the laws. Nobody prohibits a Japanese worker from negotiating a higher salary, and nobody prohibits an American worker from putting his company's interest above his own - it just does not happen for cultural reasons.

It is very hard to be an individualist in a collectivist society; you just do not belong there and cannot get along with the culture, feeling constantly pressured by the environment to do something you do not want to do. Similarly, I would expect a collectivist in an individualistic society to feel abandoned, having a hard time finding a collective to merge with.
However, if you just look at both societies superficially, then you will hardly be able to tell the difference. The devil is in the details. Individual and collective are inseparable; the question is how they relate to each other, and certain aspects of this relation can sometimes be very subtle.

Happy_Killbot

@MayCaesar Absolutely agree with everything you said, as this is more or less what I am trying to convey.

I suppose to accurately model a society you could not do it as a point, but for simplicity's sake I use a point that could represent the average of that society.

Your placement of Japanese cultural collectivism makes perfect sense, I would definitely place that on the left side of the graph somewhere between where I put socialism and center.

The reason I placed communism where I did is because communism is the overall embodiment of collectivist thinking, and socialism to a lesser degree. In practice, I would place the major communist and socialist societies above where they are represented on my graph. For example the USSR was very collectivist when it came to any accomplishments, but they would not hesitate to throw any dissenters into the gulag.

I only seek to illustrate this somewhat odd gap in the way we think about and perceive society. We just don't see societies that consider every criminal to be a failure of the state to provide an environment for that person to thrive as an individual. I think this type of society would better for its citizens than any system that currently exists.