Collective

“ 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? ”

“ The essential fact in man’s history to my sense is the slow unfolding of a sense of community with his kind, of the possibilities of coöperation leading to scarce-dreamt-of collective powers, of a synthesis of the species, of the development of a common general idea, a common general purpose out of a present confusion. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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? ”

“ A second very important condition, essential to any highly developed form of collective life, is that in the minds of the mass of the members of the group there shall be formed some adequate idea of the group, of its nature, composition, functions, and capacities, and of the relations of the individuals to the group. ”

“ Therefore the collective actions of a crowd are not simply the resultants of all the tendencies to thought and action of the individuals, as such, but may be very different from any such resultant. And they are not merely the expression of the individual tendencies of the average member, nor yet of the mass of least intelligent and refined members ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is collective in so far as each individual acts under the influence of a mood or a state of mind in which each shares, and in accordance with conventions which all quite unconsciously accept, and which the presence of each enforces upon the others. ”

“ It is, I repeat, only in crises that this power appears. But such as it is, it plays a part much more real and much more expressive of the collective will than does the more ordinary organization of other peoples. ”

“ The essential conditions of collective mental action are, then, a common object of mental activity, a common mode of feeling in regard to it, and some degree of reciprocal influence between the members of the group. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Individualist doctrines celebrate the ‘I’, collective movements the ‘we’. Devoid of the fullness of self-assertion or the positive connotations of friendship, community and political solidarity, ‘you’ can tend to get overlooked. ”

“ We have seen that, in the well-organised group, collective deliberation, judgment, and action are raised to a higher plane of effectiveness than is possible to the average member of the group. But apart from that, the group spirit continues with us, as with the savage (though in a less effective degree) to be the great socialising agency. In the majority of cases it is the principal, if not the sole, factor which raises a man’s conduct above the plane of pure egoism, leads him to think and care and work for others as well as for himself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Almost the whole of the religion and morality of the average civilised man is based on his acquisition of such collective representations, traditional sentiments grown up about ideas of objects, ideas which he receives ready made and sentiments which are impressed upon him by the community that has evolved them.
It is no doubt true that in the main the field of objects to which collective representations apply is larger in savage life; and these ideas are more uniform and more powerful and unquestioned, because the group is more homogeneous in its sentiments. ”

“ There are five conditions of principal importance in raising collective mental life to a higher level than the unorganised crowd can reach, no matter how homogeneous the crowd may be in ideas and sentiments nor how convergent the desires and volitions of its members. These are the principal conditions which favour and render possible the formation of a group mind, in addition to those more fundamental conditions of collective life which we have noted in the foregoing chapter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Many of the great events of history have been determined by ideas that have had no relation to individual welfare, but have inspired a collective enthusiasm for collective action, for national effort, of a disinterested kind; and the lives of some nations have been dominated by some one or two such ideas. These ideas are first conceived and taught by some great man, or by a few men who have acquired prestige and influence ”

“ I propose now to discuss very briefly the peculiarities of groups of several types. Some classification of groups seems desirable as an aid to the discovery of the general principles of collective life and their application to the understanding of social life in general. It seems impossible to discover any single principle of classification. Almost every group that enjoys a greater continuity of existence than the simple crowd partakes in some degree of qualities common to all. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This brings us back to the goal with which we began this discussion of the collective goals of civilizations: The primary task of any civilization is to survive.
Each individual human being, living and working in a civilized community occupies a sphere of action, enjoys the advantages and disadvantages and accepts the responsibilities and duties which pertain to his sphere. Within his sphere the individual succeeds or fails in so far as he leads a rewarding personal life and contributes his share toward the collective life of the group to which she or he belongs. ”

“ Unity and difference here too weave their eternal web, the greater social scheme which none of us who are part of it can ever see in its entirety, but whose infinite subtlety and harmony we may more and more comprehend and admire. As a community grows in civilisation and culture, its traditions are no longer clear and definite ways of thinking, its usages are no longer uniform, its spirit is no longer to be summed up in a few phrases. ”

“ There will be found in every progressive community societies and organisations which represent a far higher level of public spirit and enterprise than that possessed or displayed by such communities in their collective capacity. ”

“ Conscious of the usefulness of solidarity, the group, as it becomes self-conscious, endeavors by definite policies so far to prescribe individual conduct as to control and limit variation from type. Society thus becomes a type-conforming group of associates, endeavoring, by self-instituted discipline, to maintain, as a type, its distinctive characteristics.
To observe the successive stages, and the complications of man's collective struggle for existence, is to examine the evolution of tribal society and to follow the history of civilization—a large undertaking. ”

“ My contention is that the most highly organised groups display collective mental life in a way which justifies the conception of the group mind, and that we shall be helped to understand collective life in these most complex and difficult forms by studying it in the simpler less elaborated groups where the conception of a group mind is less clearly applicable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For convenience in our discussion we will take up, first, civilized societies as collectives, and then the operation of civilized ideology as expressed in the lives of individuals.
Presumably the most immediate purpose of all civilized peoples has been survival, getting on as a collective or group from day to day, through summer and winter, under normal conditions, and/or in periods of stress and emergency. If the group cannot survive it loses its identity, breaking up into the self-determining parts of which it is composed. ”

“ The unorganised crowd presents many of the fundamental phenomena of collective psychology in relative simplicity; whereas the higher the degree of organisation of a group, the more complicated is its psychology. We shall, therefore, study first the mental peculiarities of the unorganised crowd, and shall then go on to consider the modifications resulting from a simple and definite type of organisation.
Not every mass of human beings gathered together in one place within sight and sound of one another constitutes a crowd in the psychological sense of the word. ”

“ And it is collective volition in so far as the deliberations by which the decision of the nation has been reached have been effected through those formally and informally organised relations and channels of communication and by means of all the various modes of interaction of persons by which public opinion is formed and in which it is guided and controlled by the living traditions of the nation. ”

“ He argues that each such society of blood-relatives is a harmonious whole only because it enjoys a ‘collective consciousness’ over and above the consciousnesses of its constituent members; that, for example, a swarm of bees, which exhibits so great a uniformity of feeling and action and of which all the members come from the body of one parent, is in reality the material basis of a ‘collective consciousness,’ which presides over and is expressed by their collective actions ”

“ the category of class was at first indistinct from the concept of the human group; it is the rhythm of social life which is at the basis of the category of time; the territory occupied by the society furnished the material for the category of space; it is the collective force which was the prototype of the concept of efficient force, an essential element in the category of causality. ”

“ A second condition, which co-operates with the foregoing to keep the intellectual processes of crowds at a low level, is the increased suggestibility of its members. Here is one of the most striking facts of collective mental life. A crowd impresses each of its members with a sense of its power, its unknown capacities, its unlimited and mysterious possibilities; and these, as I have shown in Chapter III of my Social Psychology, are the attributes that excite in us the instinct of subjection and so throw us into the receptive suggestible attitude towards the object that displays them. ”