Survival of the fittest?!?
No, only the demise of the unfit!
Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is?

An end in itself…

For whom? For the concerned individual?
For the philosopher pondering the concept?
For the ideologue promoting the idea?

And who determines ‘the interests of the state’?!?

“Plato suggests, and all later collectivists followed him in this point, that if you cannot sacrifice your self-interest for the sake of the whole, then you are a selfish person, and morally depraved.”

Since there’s no better judge for ‘sustainability’ than mere history, let’s ‘look back’.

Whenever the powerful of the day considered that everything belonged to them, and that the collective wasn’t worth any consideration, that ‘arrangement’ soon ended in chaos. From Alexander the Great to Saddam Hussein. Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu…
Whenever the meek had accepted everything which came from ‘above’, very soon the ‘arrangement’ also ended in chaos. The Khmer Rouge experiment, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, communism being instated in the Eastern Europe by the Soviets…

As a rule of thumb, individuals can exist only as members of a collective.
None of us can birth itself (?!?)
None of us can educate itself ON ITS OWN. OK, one might teach itself to read. And then devour a whole library. But for that to happen, somebody else must have invented the letters first!
None of us can develop into a conscious human being without living with other human beings.

Furthermore, the same rule of thumb states that collectives which value their individuals, all of them, fare a lot better than the highly ‘hierarchical’ ones.
In this sense, Popper was right. ‘Individualistic’ societies – the collectives which ‘see individuals as ends to themselves’ – fare better than the collectives which allow, for a while, their temporal leaders to lure them into obedience.