The competitive nature of the capitalist economic struggle, while it produces progress in products and raises the overall quality of life, also converts humans into individuated consumers, themselves produced and desires manipulated.
To know yourself as an individual (sovereign, autonomous) is to not know yourself as part of a community with reliant ties. You cease to know yourself as we once did, as a piece of a whole in which your identity is integral and there is no desire to differentiate or stive out of it.