One of the unresolved debates of the communications revolution is whether the increasing amount and intensity of violence in the popular culture both fosters violence in real life and numbs us to its presence. How gruesomely ironic, then, that accused Aurora, Colo., gunman James Holmes chose a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” for the shooting spree that left 12 dead and nearly 60 wounded.

“But the biggest surprise of all,” movie critic Jenny McCartney wrote of the second-in-the-trilogy “The Dark Knight” in 2008, was “the sustained level of intensely sadistic brutality throughout the film.” The other two films are no less brutal, and they are but a small part of violence in entertainment that assaults us every day. Our children especially are exposed to escalating levels of violence in everything from popular music to video games and movie and TV entertainment.

Should this be a concern? If so, is there anything we should do about it? Is there anything we can do about it?

This isn’t an either-or proposition. We don’t have to choose between individual accountability and collective guilt. Ultimately, people are responsible for their own actions. But none of us live alone on a desert island – our lives are interconnected, and what we collectively do has an effect we might not understand but can’t deny. Popular culture creates the milieu we all live and choose in.

This one-or-all dichotomy is now being engaged in our national politics because a defining moment has been reached in the presidential contest. In what has become known as the “You didn’t build that” speech, President Obama distilled the essence of his progressive, statist view of the world. It’s not individual effort that makes this country great; it’s the way we are obligated to each other through government action. Republican challenger Mitt Romney immediately took up the challenge and positioned himself as the champion of entrepreneurship and freedom.

We have our choice now: the individual or the collective.

Again, this isn’t an either-or choice. Neither personal freedom nor group dynamics is ever in complete control of a society – there is always a mixture of autonomous effort and mutual obligations. The question is whether one or the other is too ascendant and if we can or should therefore put a renewed emphasis on the other. It would be hard to argue that pathological individuality has been a problem in recent decades. Voters this fall will decide, among other things, whether the statist collectivism of the Leviathan state has gone too far and needs to be scaled back.