The cruciform axis: overview

I've been thinking about four related statements.

All four can be justified by observation (and I will do that as we go along) and yet they contradict each other, at least superficially.

I think that these statements are really the four poles of an X-Y coordinate system, and by locating ourselves on the social plane that they define, we can learn about ourselves and say useful things about how we should behave.

Here are the four statements.

1. You are utterly unique, a one-of-a-kind event never to be repeated as long as the universe lasts.
2. You are utterly typical, barely distinguishable from the other 6,000,000,000 people that crowd this world.
3. You are an independent agent, solely responsible for your actions and for your own survival.
4. You are inextricably mixed into human society, depending for your very life on the actions of others and sharing responsibility for every success and failure of your family, school, and nation.

As I say, each of these can be justified by observation, and I mean to do that. Yet each pair is contradictory: a contradicts b, c contradicts d.

Each probably strikes you as having elements of truth, yet each probably seems like an exaggeration. In each pair, one probably seems more accurate and the other, more of a stretch. But which? My expectation is that different people will weigh the statements differently.