What are the pros and cons of identifying with the group instead of with the self?

This concept, in my mind, builds on an idealized idea of village life. Everyone living in a village is blood, even if they aren’t blood. Everyone takes responsibility for everyone else—so that if someone wasn’t doing well, others would help him or her to do better. Kids participate in all the social activities with adults and learn through doing.

One of the things I am interested in is the notion that judgments wreak havoc on many people’s psyches. If you didn’t identify with yourself so much as the village, then it wouldn’t matter what you think of yourself, or what other people think of you. Your primary identity would be associated with the group, not the individual self. You couldn’t see yourself as others do, because no one would be focused on any particular individual. You couldn’t have bad feelings about yourself because you didn’t identify yourself as separate from anyone else.

Can you imagine having an identity tied to a group, rather than to yourself? What would happen in a society like this? How would it be different from life as we currently know it?