I'm a big fan of people figuring things out for themselves; but if your conclusion is "I can do it all by myself, with the power of my own mind" (or "mindfulness" if you prefer to use an American Buddhist Weasel Word), then you're deluding yourself.
That's not exactly what I'm saying, or meant to say. I'm saying - creating "movements" like a religion or whatever in order to mass-produce a "thing" will inevitably miss the finer, and in my experience - the essence of Buddhist practice.
By all means - Guru/Pandit/Teacher-to-student dynamic needs to exist. Because as history has shown us even in the Buddists Sutras themselves as well as the rather large summations of various traditions - the road is fraught with egoic peril that not only *can* - but *will* yank your ass off course.
My point is as an individual you can't, and shouldn't concern yourself with saving others before figuring out your own course. I'll address this a bit more below...
One of the big points in the Dharma is that "You can't get there from here", the "here" being your own head, your own perspective, your own conditionings. There MUST be an outside Spiritual Crisis. That means things like initiations, and gurus, and surrender, and devotion. If at least some of those things aren't happening, if you aren't having outside forces that drag you (usually kicking and screaming) outside of your own box, you're just going to be going around in circles in there thinking you're making awesome progress.
...this is exactly right. But to the degree that one even realizes they're having a "Spiritual Crisis" - requires the individual to make the necessary movements to address them. <---this is what I'm referring to by the individual agency.
Everything after that - we are in agreement with.
I'm more interested in that moment of the small but significant realization that the vast majority (my bullshit statistic) of Americans don't 1) understand what Spiritual even means or is 2) don't understand that the very suffering they project outward and inward is by Buddhist conception the very ground of the definition of what reality IS - Life is Suffering. And *You* are the primary cause of it.
What you're referring to is what comes *after* the first conscious observation of the Four Noble Truths - heh most westerners don't even get *that* far. That starts with each person. Not with movements. If that weren't the case, I'd argue there would be a lot more Buddhists.
After all - you have Baptists declaring things like Yoga and Meditation to be insidious attempts to introduce "spiritually dangerous" pagan practices to American culture. This is the type of mass-herd mentality that Buddhism can likewise induce, and has done so, and will continue to do so as long as there shall be people who profess to teach without themselves succumbing to their own base bullshit.