Collective intelligence

“ So, when we hear of minor outrages committed by a crowd of undergraduates or suffragettes, a knowledge of group psychology will save us from the error of attributing to the individuals concerned the low grade of intelligence and decency that might seem to be implied by the deeds performed by them collectively. ”

“ Consider the organs and media of the collective mind as one finds them in England or America now, how hazardous they are and accidental! At the basis of this strange thought-process is the intelligence of the common man, once illiterate and accessible only to the crude, inarticulate influences of talk and rumour, now rapidly becoming educated, or at any rate educated to the level of a reader and writer, and responding more and more to literary influences. ”

“ The principal ground of the low order of intelligence displayed by simple crowds is that the ideas and reasonings which can be collectively understood and accepted must be such as can be appreciated by the lower order of minds among the crowd. These least intelligent minds bring down the intelligence of the whole to their own level. This is true in some degree even of crowds composed of highly educated persons ”

“ In adopting a so far unsympathetic attitude towards this doctrine, we ought to admit that, if there be any truth in it, the ‘collective consciousness’ of even the most highly organised society may be still in a rudimentary stage, and that it may continue to gain in effectiveness and organisation with the further evolution of the society in question. ”

“ The most striking result of the formation of nations and the development of civilisation has been this replacement of the progress of the individual mind by the progress of the collective national mind. And the most interesting and important problem of group psychology is—What are the conditions of the progressive development of the collective mind? ”

“ I have got into the habit of using for it the not very elegant phrase, the Collective Mind. I hope some one will soon find a better expression. This Collective Mind is essentially an extension of the spirit of science to all human affairs, its method is to seek and speak and serve the truth and to subordinate oneself to one's conception of a general purpose. Its immediate social and political effect is an insistent demand for perfect freedom of thought and discussion. Social and political order it values only as a means of freedom. ”

“ Only when the general principles of group life have been applied to the understanding of particular societies, of nations and the manifold system of groups within the nation, will it be possible for Social Psychology to return upon the individual life and give of it an adequate account in all its concrete fulness. ”

“ With the progressive perishing of its ideal the race loses more and more the qualities that lent it its cohesion, its unity, and its strength. The personality and intelligence of the individual may increase, but at the same time this collective egoism of the race is replaced by an excessive development of the egoism of the individual, accompanied by a weakening of character and a lessening of the capacity for action. ”

“ What collective mental life it has is on the plane of impulse and unregulated desire. Such ideas as are widely accepted may determine collective action; but such action is not the result of the weighing of ideas in the light of self-consciousness; hence they are little adapted to promote the welfare of the nation, and, because there is no organisation adapted for their expression, they can be but imperfectly realised. ”

“ It will be maintained on a later page that we may properly speak not only of a collective will, but also of the collective mind of an organised group, for example, of the mind and will of a nation. We must, then, ask at this stage—Can we properly speak of the collective mind of an unorganised crowd? ”

“ The crushing predominance of what is collective should make us realise what peculiar care and attention must be given to the delicate plant "individuality," if it is to develop.
Human beings have a capacity which is of the utmost use for purposes of collectivism and most prejudicial to individuation, and that is the capacity to imitate. ”

“ Coming now to close quarters with the doctrine, we may ask those who, like Schaeffle and Espinas, regard the ‘collective consciousness’ as a bond which unites the members of a society and makes of them one living individual,—Is this ‘collective consciousness’ merely epiphenomenal in character? Or are we to regard it as reacting upon the consciousnesses or minds of the individuals of the group, and, through such reaction, playing a part in determining the behaviour of the group, or rather of the individuals of which the group is composed? ”

“ WHAT then is the essence of the group process by which are evolved the collective thought and the collective will? It is an acting and reacting, a single and identical process which brings out differences and integrates them into a unity. The complex reciprocal action, the intricate interweavings of the members of the group, is the social process.
We see now that the process of the many becoming one is not a metaphysical or mystical idea; psychological analysis shows us how we can at the same moment be the self and the other, it shows how we can be forever apart and forever united. ”

“ If we pass by these serious difficulties, others arise as soon as we inquire what kinds of human groups have such ‘collective consciousness.’ Does the simple fortuitously gathered crowd possess it? Or is it confined to highly organised groups such as the leading modern nations? If every psychological crowd possesses it and owes its peculiarities of behaviour to it, does it come into being at the moment the individuals have their attention attracted to a common object and begin to be stirred by a common emotion? ”

“ Without this freedom of communication the various parts of the nation cannot become adequately conscious of one another; and the idea of the whole must remain very rudimentary in the minds of individuals; each part of the whole remains ignorant of many other parts, and there can be no vivid consciousness of a common welfare and a common purpose. But, more important still, there can be none of that massive influence of the whole upon each of the units which is of the essence of collective mental life. ”

“ If it is possible for the members of a group to evolve a unified consciousness, a common idea, a collective will, for the many to become really one, not in a mystical sense but as an actual fact, for the group to have a real not a fictional personality, this process can be carried on through group and group, our task, an infinite one, to evolve a state with a real personality. ”

“ Then it at once became apparent that both these processes are essentially social; that they involve, and at every step are determined by, interactions between the individual and his social environment; that, while the growth of the individual mind is [Pg 6] moulded by the mental forces of the society in which it grows up, those forces are in turn the products of the interplay of the minds composing the society; that, therefore, we can only understand the life of individuals and the life of societies, if we consider them always in relation to one another. ”

“ These new acquisitions, first made by individuals, are, if true or useful, sooner or later imitated or accepted by the society of which the original-minded individual is a member, and then, becoming incorporated in the traditional stock of knowledge and morality, are thereby placed at the service of all members of that society. ”

“ These springs are all labelled: they form a keyboard to the human psyche, according to modern psychology. And the chief labels are herd instinct, collective interest, hunger, fear, collective prestige, and so on.
But the only way to make any study of collective psychology is to study the isolated individual. Upon your conception of the single individual, all your descriptions will be based, all your science established. For this reason, the human sciences, philosophy, ethics, psychology, politics, economics, can never be sciences at all. ”

“ Since, then, the social aggregate has a collective mental life, which is not merely the sum of the mental lives of its units, it may be contended that a society not only enjoys a collective mental life but also has a collective mind or, as some prefer to say, a collective soul. ”

“ Again, the group spirit plays an important part in raising the intellectual level of the group; for it leads each member deliberately to subordinate his own judgment and opinion to that of the whole; and, in any properly organised group, this collective opinion will be superior to that of the average individual, because in its formation the best minds, acting upon the fullest knowledge to the gathering of which all may contribute, will be of predominant influence. ”

“ Both in the formal organisation of the national mind, which is the parliamentary or other national assembly, and in the informal organisation which is public opinion, we see, then, that (in the nation of higher civilisation at least) organisation results in a raising of the collective mental process above the level of the average minds, because it gives a predominant influence to the best minds who form and maintain the traditions, especially the moral traditions ”

“ There is, however, some difference between the manifestation of the activity of a group of men and that of the aggregate society. Between psychology which studies the individual, and sociology which studies the society, I think there is room for a collective psychology, to study more or less defined groups. ”

“ If, on the other hand, the ‘collective consciousness’ of groups and societies and peoples reacts upon individual minds and so plays a part in shaping the conduct of men and societies, then the conception is a hypothesis which can only be justified by showing that it affords explanations of social phenomena which in its absence remain inexplicable. ”

“ My modest thesis is that there exists nothing of the sort, that the world of men is entirely made up of the individuals that compose it, and that the collective action is just the algebraic sum of all individual actions.
How far the opposite opinion may go, one must talk to intelligent Americans or read the contemporary literature of the first French Revolution to understand. ”

“ It is, rather, one in which the self-consciousness and initiative and volition of individuals, personality in short, is developed to the highest degree, and in which the minds and wills of the members work harmoniously together under the guidance and pressure of the idea of the nation, rendered in the highest degree explicit and full and accurate. ”

“ No matter what the character of the idea, its collective acceptance by a people enhances for the time the homogeneity of mind among them, renders the people more intimately a unity, and serves also to mark it off more sharply from other peoples among whom other ideas prevail. ”

“ The idea of the nation is, then, a bond between its members over and above all those bonds of custom, of habit, of economic interdependence, of law and of self-interest, of sympathy, of imitation, of collective emotion and thought, which inevitably arise among a homogeneous people occupying any defined area; and it is the most powerful and essential of them all. As Fouillée put it, the essential characteristic of human society is that “it is an organism which realises itself in conceiving and in willing its own existence. ”

“ So the main theme of this book is the development of the group mind, the increase of its self-knowledge and of its power of self-direction through increase of knowledge of other human societies.
The age of progress through which the world has recently passed was an age of progress due to increase of human intercourse and consequent increasing understanding by each nation of other nations and peoples. This better knowledge of other peoples is now reacting upon the self-knowledge of each nation, rapidly enriching it. ”

“ In the majority of instances these declared purposes really serve merely or chiefly to exert a certain natural selection of persons, to bring together persons of similar tastes as voluntary associates, to enable, in short, birds of a feather to flock together. Even some of our enduring historical institutions owe their continuance chiefly to the advantages and satisfactions that proceed from group consciousness, for example, colleges, school-houses, and political parties, especially perhaps in America. ”

“ But, as I have pointed out in the Introduction to my Social Psychology, those who approached these problems were generally stimulated to do so by their interest in questions of right and wrong, in questions of norms and standards of conduct, the urgency of which demanded immediate answers for the practical guidance of human life in all its spheres of activity, for the shaping of laws, institutions, governments, and associations of every kind ”

“ And so the form or order of that community becomes more and more human. All its corporate acts express more and more faithfully the human thoughts and feelings with which the minds of its individual members are imbued. Such community is in the human form, therefore, just so far as the individual minds composing it are truly human. It is the tendency of true human life, wherever it exists, to mould the collective as well as the individual man into a corresponding human form. ”

“ We may fairly define a mind as an organised system of mental or purposive forces; and, in the sense so defined, every highly organised human society may properly be said to possess a collective mind. For the collective actions which constitute the history of any such society are conditioned by an organisation which can only be described in terms of mind, and which yet is not comprised within the mind of any individual; the society is rather constituted by the system of relations obtaining between the individual minds which are its units of composition. ”