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It's interesting your question brought to mind for me the famous JFK line, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Which is not a statement I have ever found myself whole-heartedly agreeing with, yet which does have some merit when we accept the purpose of government to protect the weak and provide for the common good.
I've always been a pretty strong individualist, which is something I always admired about Sonic Youth. I heard Thurston say in an interview on Canadian radio in the '80s that Sonic Youth believed in the "politics of the individual, because group politics in America is largely a joke". Certainly something I identified with, and yet there are actually some moral reasons for a system of government, even if such systems seem to fail so often.
In Oregon where I live there is a huge debate over land use and property owner rights versus the common good. After untold decades of pretty strict land use regulations, an initiative passed last year that turned all of that upside down by allowing property owners to sue the state if such zoning could cause them demonstable financial suffering. Almost immediately tons of people in farming zones who want to sell to huge developers launched suits, and now there is a new initiative currently being voted on to repeal the last one and once again give the government more ability to tell land owners what they can do with their property.
Certainly it's easy to say that people ought to be able to do whatever they want with their own property, but the thing is, it does affect their neighbors. It's impossible to keep your farm if you've got massive housing developments on every border of your property, and our local sustainable food economy is severely damaged without some sort of restriction to what people can do.
So arguably, citizens have a responsibility to participate in a government that provides for a greater good beyond themselves and their immediate next of kin. I have very mixed feelings about this, but I do see some truth to it as well.
The other answers people have given here are all really good ones too. It's a complicated issue, which is part of why things become so messy (along with the corruptable nature of far too much of humanity.)
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