What is a collective consciousness?

Collective consciousness – fact or theory?

Today, the term “collective consciousness” is overused and implies to a condition of the subject within the whole of society, and how any given person or individual comes to perceive themselves as a part of such given group. Whether or not the term reflects any facts depends on the mindset of the person using the terminology to express their own opinion or theory.

Many social theorists [key hint] like to explicate how an autonomous individual comes to identify with a larger group or structure. One could cite either political groups such as Black Lives Matter or social groups such as Facebook or Twitter as a source of such “collective consciousness.”

Definitively, “collective” means “[formed by a collection of individual persons or things; constituting a collection; gathered into one; taken as a whole; aggregate, collected.”

Likewise, “consciousness,” (a term which is slightly more complex to define with the entirety of its implications) signifies “Joint or mutual knowledge,” “Internal knowledge or conviction; knowledge as to which one has the testimony within oneself; esp. of one's own innocence, guilt, deficiencies,” and “the state or fact of being mentally conscious or aware of anything”

By combining the two terms, we can surmise that the phrase collective consciousness implies an internal knowing known by all or a consciousness shared by a plurality of persons. The easiest way to think of the phrase (even with its extremely loaded historical content) is to regard it as being an idea or proclivity that we all share, whoever specifically “we” might entail.

Many other theorists have engaged the notion and have made it a social term that implies factual collective thinking or ideologies. The term has specifically been used by social theorists to explain how an autonomous individual comes to identify with a larger group/structure, and as such, how patterns of commonality among individuals bring legible unity to those structures.

Society should be concerned with the making of the subject as an aggregation of external processes/societal conditions. Unfortunately, most of these rules are developed on the ideas or mindset and beliefs of socialist with their own theories. This could hardly be accepted as a factual source but rather just what it is – a theory. Society is desperate to know what causes people to think and to act in similar and predictable manners.

There appears to be a social mantra or mandate that if they (we) don’t submit to the conventions of society, e.g. if I don’t dress, talk, act or conform to customs and practices in society, I might be ridiculed, or provoked into social isolation. A form of isolation in which I am kept and punished for not following the collective train of thought on matters of social importance.

This makes it a social fact that needs to be recognized by the power of external coercion which it exercises or is capable of exercising over individuals, and the presence of this power may be recognized in its turn either by the existence of some specific sanction or by the resistance offered against every individual effort that tends to violate it”

Thus, humans come to act in certain ways via a kind of reward/punishment system enacted at the level(s) of both The State and the social spheres; subjects are trained in a kind of inward-outward movement; the individual may have certain barbaric proclivities, but the assimilation process into the social sphere corrects those tendencies by the distribution of positive or negative reinforcements.

Collective consciousness is the effect of the trained subject—through the process of becoming a subject, an individual learns to be common: to dress, speak, and act like her neighbors. The “socially conscious” subject is the legible subject, one who exists in a degree of visible sameness in relation to the other members of the group/society.

At the top of the structure is the government or commonly referred to as the state, which aims to control the bottom (the individual subjects) through a series of institutional mediations. Secondly, this training process or orientation of information to the public comes in every imaginable formats that include social media, public education, the media, reforms in law and religious principles, etc. these sources have or attempt to apply their direct power to the public the subjects (people) at all times drilling them with a honed effort from the outside into the subjective format that becomes suggestive in nature and upholding the intended spirit or thought developed by the state, media or other sources.

This applied power that is subjected in an inwardness of an individual member of the public is born from a lifetime bombardment of external coercion-- individuals come to fulfill certain common duties, have common aspirations, follow common life-trajectories, etc.

The “consciousness” of each individual is not something which originates from a singular interior spirit but rather is pressured into being by the external devices of the State. Thus, collective consciousness again represents the individual’s relationship to a larger group or structure but marks the sameness (the same set of principles sources applies to all subjects) among members of that group, which act to make that group a cohesive whole.

The aforementioned prescriptions of collective consciousness express the phrase as the internal representation of external conditions present in any given society. These are exerted upon the subject in a variety of ways and then assimilated into the subject’s consciousness. The idea is that the collective is a mass of like-minded persons who will (re)emerge to reproduce the production force.

Thus, collective consciousness is the affect/effect upon and inside of any given public whose thoughts and actions are constantly mediated by outside pressures. The notion of collective consciousness also owes a tremendous amount to the emerging popularity of psychoanalysis in the 20th century.

Certainly, if one looks closely to the coined term you can denote the conclusion of shared contexts and meanings of individual dreams or thoughts consciously or subconsciously. Hence the development of pre-set ideas or thoughts exists that set-off motives or meanings of ideas or images that can be found in the myths of one’s own race or those of other races. In some way, these myths develop biases or bigotry which yield a collective meaning, making it a common property of what we call mankind or the human race supported within our society.

The unconscious is the portion of the self of which the individual is unaware, yet which still exerts control over the behaviors, desires, and drives of that individual. As such, unconsciousness is never entirely divorced from the consciousness within the individual, and one necessarily informs the other. One of the main goals of psychoanalytic speech is to bring the unconscious into consciousness, so that the patient may become aware of why she behaves in certain fashions.

The “collective unconscious” is important when considering its other, “collective consciousness” because it suggests an original set of models common to all members of a group, and out of which they formulate meanings, contexts, and patterns within the group. Certainly, you can see the ‘power of suggestion’ at work here.

These mental processes or psychoanalytic readings presents a more classic meaning of collective consciousness, yet its discursive qualities ring true for the ways in which we presently think of the term as a foundation of media studies with the term

media defined as an “extension of man,” indicating that humans create the world and their tools in their image, likening technological apparatuses after their senses. Media, in this vein, is intimately linked with the word medium, described as “Something which is intermediate between two degrees, amounts, qualities, or classes; a middle state”. The internet is the ultimate medium; it provides a virtual meeting place for persons to gather and perform daily rituals of subjectivity (even at the micro-level of person to person discourse) all channeled through a technological network.

Collective consciousness is a term much needed by media theorists because it postulates one, if not the effect of media—whose broadest primary function is to convey, carry or transmit messages it deems important to their core values. Ensuring their message gets sent and received in many places at once can carry with it both social and political power.

Some suggest that this infringes on the will of free people and their free-will power as it binds or bonds them with a message that is distinguished to be from another -will source. Hence the free become unfree of the social pressures applied.

Instead of a multiplicity of singular wills or a disharmony of different spirits and personalities, subjects are transcribed into codes operating via variations of ones and zeroes.

Present media theorists sometimes link the notion of collective consciousness to signal the internet as a major intermediary in the creation of a truly global society. Herein lies my message to my readers – the goal of a truly global society aka United Nations is at stake here. Using the consciousness of Internet culture as “this idea that we live in an age of mechanistic, false individualism and that we are now on the threshold of a new mutation...We all share a collective mind.”

This is the eradication of the "thinking humanity" – the destruction of a singular biosphere transferred into an evolutionary system in which the human recognition is freed from the confines of a single body or a purely organic body and turned into a whole new mechanically developed body.