Are you part of the collective?
Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer
When birds flock into those amazing patterns, what do they see or know about the patterns? When ants build totally awesome structures with air-conditioning, what do they know about what they have built and whether it works? When crowds behave as if they had a single will, what do the people in them know about that implied purpose?
We have commented many times in this blog that we, all of us without exception, are not individuals.[1] Weirdly, I must admit that in writing this some aspect of what I write is not exclusively mine to write. There is, must be, a recursive structure in which I write of things that are not available to introspection. My inner sense of my freedom to think about things has to have a context in which my thoughts are not mine to call my own. Confused? We should be.
The person that I am aware of who grappled with this most mightily was Jung. Jung’s life has a hiatus of 12 years in which he reconstructed his sense of who he was. Call it a breakdown if you will: another place of confusion. His terminology is of the collective unconscious, which we will tentatively adopt here. There are collective things that we think collectively and which we are not aware of thinking or of that thinking being collective. Maybe thinking is too strong a term. Jung had dreams about the bloodbath from the onset of fascism: how much of that is what we would call thinking?
When we spoke in a previous blog about angels and other superior beings we had a parallel difficulty. If we cannot understand our part in a collective intelligence, that is a bit like meeting an angel: how would we know? I am used to understanding that our institutions are being stupid compared to some of the individuals that work in them and for them. But if they were really smart would I be able to perceive that smartness? There is a tradition in the mafia and the military of only being told what you need to know. And there are plenty of tales of people and teams desperately trying to understand what they are an unwitting part of for their own protection.
But we are after something subtler here. We invent rationales for ourselves that describe why we just did what we did. But many times, those rationales are simply self-serving defensive manoeuvres and the deeper understanding comes from coming to perceive the collective unconscious. Many consultation procedures implicitly believe that people’s self-reporting is accurate: it is not and cannot be.[2]
I was taught by the late great Noel Cobb that one way to feel the collective unconscious is to feel the guilt that accompanies the first steps in more independent thought. We are social animals and we think together, in concert as it were, and when we don’t, we feel a dread of losing our connection with the group. A group that often, we think in our individual rationalism, doesn’t exist. No such thing as society and all that neoliberal crap.
Truly independent thinkers are as rare as hen’s teeth, are rarely seen in a positive light, and are often vilified. Why would anyone choose that? The paradox in employment is that the independent thought that is needed is systematically excluded. Because the people “in charge” necessarily believe the collective unconscious truths of the organisation which are challenged by independent thought.
The Century of the Self
There is a two-part documentary film by Adam Curtis called the Century of the Self. That is, the 20th century was the one where powerful people undertook to engineer what we think of as our selves, for their own gain. The key player in that story is Edward Bernays, a nephew no less of Sigmund Freud. Bernays used theories of the unconscious to sell us stuff that is not in the least in our own interest. As I remember the film, the first successful foray was into getting women in the USA to smoke, hitherto a male dirty habit.
In this blog post, the first point we want to hammer home is this: there are techniques for engineering who we think we are. The success of these techniques confirms and underlines that we are subject to controls that we are not aware of. These controls result in us thinking collective thoughts.[3] Those first women smokers knew that they were breaking into a brave new world even as they were being sold down the river.[4]
How modern is this from 65 years ago?
One of the outright deceitful acts of Bernays under the umbrella of shaping public opinion was his way of making Guatemala look like a communist threat to the US and overthrowing its government. Bernays sent over American journalists and made sure the people they talked to painted the picture he wanted. He went as far as organizing an anti-American demonstration and setting up a fake news agency just to spread fake news about the threat Guatemala posed to the US. He did all this with the justification that the cold war had to be won and the American way of life had to be preserved. However, the masses were not able to act rationally so they had to be manipulated. Bernays called this the engineering of consent.
It is the legacy of Bernays that gives us the central paradox of Western life. The more we try to exert our freedom to be who we are and who we want to be, the more we end up as passive consumers of what some corporation wants to sell us. How can that be? And we see it everywhere we look, even in ourselves. It is even visible recursively in the way that corporations become passive consumers of each other’s products and each other. A mindset thing.
Getting to grips with patterns
There is a recent 15 minute Financial Times video by Gillian Tett, on the ten years since the crash. I follow Gillian because she is trained as an anthropologist and so she has some ability to step outside the thinking that dominates the financial world. Call it Greenspanism. The video, brief interviews with the top players including Greenspan, majors on whether the culture of the banks has changed in those ten years.
So, the culture says that CEOs are in charge of the global banks. And Gillian Tett says that the culture of those institutions was centrally involved in the recklessness before the crash. I listened hard to the interviews to see if anyone, CEOs or regulators, was taking any ownership of outcomes. They all said that they had their finger on the pulse, but the subtext I heard was that they were doing what they could and if anything went wrong it wouldn’t be their fault. [5] What I didn’t hear was any whisper that major institutions would collaborate to prevent the worst outcomes of the coming crash. That may even be illegal for all I know.
I also failed to hear any words about service and about the needs of customers. There was a sales pitch about the banks needing to lend to keep the economy going, but that is political spin and exactly what they don’t do. As an aside, we know that the economic models in use in the banks is wrong, so the way they predict the effects of their behaviour is also wrong. Plain wrong. Remember that microlenders establish beyond doubt that the ability of people to repay loans is largely dependent on policy, not on the collective unconscious delusion that it is down to the borrowers.
If we go back to thinking about flocking birds and ants doing construction, the question we started with was whether the individual creatures know anything about the patterns. A CEO and a regulator are just birds in the flock, ants in the heap. We may glorify them with roles and responsibilities but the question remains whether the pattern can be seen or acknowledged. The roles and responsibilities are directly blocking the ability to see, because they say that outcomes must be under control, even though they are not and maybe cannot be. No part of a system can control the system as a whole.
Bernays knew how to manipulate this sort of system. He and his uncle Sigmund I have never trusted in terms of their ethics and intentions. Someone in the wider context knows how to get this system into self-destruct mode, and the people in the system will think they are making the system more robust or more profitable as they take it over the cliff. After all, the “resources” of the whole world are concentrated there, waiting for the heist. We have allowed a system to be built in which finance is deemed to be more important that the things it finances, to build a central stranglehold on economic activity. Why would this heist not be essentially certain to happen at some point?
But the general point about patterns still stands. What are the patterning forces? Why do starlings create murmurations? What do we observe when we defocus away from intentions and stated purposes and Machiavellian CEOs and complicit governments? Certainly, we see manic cycles, but beyond that? We need to understand the forces as Bernays needed to understand smart young women if we are to have any awareness of the likely behaviour of the system in the large. I was looking to Gillian Tett for some hints, but she is an editor of the FT, which has its own collective unconscious.
More paranoia
In the previously mentioned Southern Reach trilogy by Vandermeer, people in Area X get invaded and taken over by life forms mediated by spores. We live in an era of genetic determinism (also plain wrong) but of our “own” genetic material a high proportion is furnished by other organisms and freely exchanged with the environment. There are certainly parasites that work by controlling the behaviour of their hosts. So, there are life forms that have both an interest in our behaviour and a way of inserting that interest, as Bernays did in a more cognitive fashion.
The biologist in the first of the Southern Reach books feels her infection as a “brightness” that gives her improved powers of observation and reaction. Something that co-opts our self necessarily feels like an improvement, a breakthrough even to new hope and new possibility. We do not have a way to ground whether that is a delusion or an insight, because our minds are so social and the collective unconscious is so strong. In my experience, the best we can do is to get used to the work, the guilt of independent thought, and the strength of other people’s reactions to it. And we can become sensitised, as we are in the world of marketing, to the feel of spin and partial truths.
Some of this somewhat paranoid thinking mode gets justified with hindsight. Following their recent large fine, Monsanto are on the warpath legally, trying to get access to the contacts and information from people campaigning against them. Why do we think they would spend so much money and risk negative publicity to do that? My answer would be that they think they can influence the collective unconscious away from the truth of their damage to the world. That may involve bullying and lies posing as science, but fundamentally it will be about finding a way to make their evil appealing to us.
The transcendent function
Most of us have come across Myers-Briggs, or had it come across us. It is a gross distortion for commercial gain of some work of Jung’s on personality types. For the record I hate “personality” and typologies, but here goes. The four functions we live by are thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation. And as the theory goes we generally favour one of these functions at the expense of the others. The point is, I think, that these different ways of encountering the world are not readily reconciled into a single view. In dealing with the collective unconscious that is already a resource, one that we typically ignore and problematise.
Jung’s missing twelve years were largely spent working on the functions that were most weakly developed in himself. He learned to become a builder, as I recall, to improve his sensation access to the stuff of the world, to planning and measuring and handling materials. His findings at the next level up so to speak were that there was a transcendent function, very much Hermes the trickster archetypically, that came into play when the four functions were actually balanced.
So, my speculation is this: that the modes of collective unconscious by which we are all manipulated and used and deceived are escaped by fully deploying thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation all the time. We have a society that over-values thinking and sensation: it is likely to be feeling and intuition that need work and development.[6]
We are, however, back in the paradox of trying to see, implicitly as individuals, what is happening in our collective patterns. It is not at all clear that such an aim makes sense. Jung talked of individuation, and most people I speak to insist that they are individuated: against all the evidence. We live in a culture that idolises the idea of being an individual and everyone ends up very much the same. That is this weeks challenge, to get some perspective on that.
[1] If you’ve ever worked in the restaurant industry, you will have noticed the days when every table orders the same main course. My girlfriend once had the kitchen query what looked like a duplicate order; the next group of four at one table ordered exactly what the previous occupants had eaten, dish for dish from the extensive menu.
[2] Self-reporting is self-delusion, without exception. Scott Alexander writes about the Lizardman Constant, the 4–5% of self-respondents who will, whether through accident, ignorance, or a sense of individualism and fun, give preposterous answers to survey questions. Not unrelated: a comprehensive NCR survey of reported school shootings discovered that of the hundreds of reported shootings, only a handful actually took place. Others were miscategorised responses, genuine incidents outside of the time period, or incidents that didn’t germinate because warning signs were seen and it was “nipped in the bud”.
[3] Originally: In this blog post the first point we want to hammer home is that the success of these techniques of engineering who we think we are absolutely confirms and underlines that we are intensely subject to controls that we are not aware of that result in us thinking collective thoughts.
[4] Catuskoti, anyone? Both are true, but at different levels. Something that co-opts our self necessarily feels like an improvement, a breakthrough even, to new hope and new possibility. More below.
[5] Conversely, one journalist I know privately cites several examples of corporations and partnerships that have deliberately put figureheads in place that can be sacrificed when needed. He likens corporate structure to a set of lego blocks, each replaceable.
[6] My continued thanks to Noel Cobb for the work that we did together.
