Sure, that
can be a very bad thing; But that doesn't mean it always
must be a bad thing.
One thing that governments in democracies do is to arbitrarily disenfranchise people below a specified age. Is that a bad idea? Should each person's right to vote be determined by their mere age, as though all 17 year olds were insufficiently mature to have an informed opinion, but all 19 year olds are sufficiently mature? Or should these people be treated as individuals, and each be assessed to determine their suitability to vote?
I am sure that there are examples of this kind of arbitrary discrimination against groups that you approve of (to the extent that you barely notice that such discrimination even exists).
And what are border controls if not assigning collective guilt to a disfavored group to justify racial animus? You allow all 'citizens' to cross; non-citizens might in some cases be allowed to cross after various degrees of scrutiny, but most are not permitted to cross the border without harsh conditions being imposed, such as a promise to do no work, or a promise to leave before a certain date. Citizens would be horrified by such restrictions. Where is the treatment of everyone as an individual here? Each person is lumped into groups which are then treated homogeneously - Citizens, Permanent Residents, Business Visitors, Tourist Visitors, Prohibited Foreign Nationals, Refugees, etc...
If you are guilty of nothing more than 'being a foreigner', then you are treated with harshness and disdain never accorded to someone who is part of the 'citizens' group.
Individuals are substantially and obviously different in character and power from the individuals who make up the group. As I said in another thread:
The fact is that definitions are derived from mass usage; One person using a word in a fashion inconsistent with the dictionary is using the word wrongly; but if a large enough pool of people use a word in a fashion inconsistent with the dictionary, then the new usage needs to be (and is) added to the dictionary - if the people who use the word in a novel way are all in one small area, then the new usage might be noted as being dialectical, regional, or specific to a particular country.
Indeed, these simple and observable facts about how words are defined, are a clear rebuttal to the crazy idea that 'collectives', 'societies' or 'groups' don't really exist, and that all that exists are individuals. IF that idea were true, then either one individual could unilaterally change the meaning of any word, and language would be impossible, which we can see it is not; OR the meanings of words could never change, which we also know to be untrue. So that idea must be false - there must be a collective (or collectives) with the power to change the meanings of words, while no individual has that power.
Therefore collectives exist, and are distinct in their abilities from individuals - the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Of course, many people find this confusing, difficult to understand, and hard to reconcile with their deep-seated beliefs about how things ought to be. But reality is under no obligation to be easy for us to understand; And pretending that things are simpler than they really are is a quick and easy way to be very badly wrong about a lot of things.