Collective image psychology - Theory

  Egalite! - Why Not Utopia? - Theory

1. Chapter - Theory

    No age murdered more than ours. National antagonisms, exaggerated by technology, generate atrocity. Drive-by homicides turn cities into shooting galleries. Pollution is ubiquitous. With so many evils loose in our world, it is painful to contemplate what we have become, but perhaps we need not be as bad as we think.

Hope begins with ancient philosophical observations. Inanimate matter springs to life possessing consciousness and chromosomes. Philosophers call this vague dichotomy, mind-body dualism. Other disciplines grapple with notions of heredity or environment, nature or nurture. They boil down to a choice between free will or determinism. We either control ourselves, or innate drives put our behavior beyond our reach. If one thing distinguishes our times from those before, it is our acceptance of individual behavior's psychological source. Freud started psychology, but New Age theoreticians expand Freud's ideas to the point where a multitude of theories promise to make wild behavioral dreams come true. All one individually need do is change his or her mind.

We are not so hopeful about collective possibilities. We have battled so long, we think war an inescapable aspect of the human condition, but individual and collective interact. When Descartes said, 'I think, therefore, I am', he implied, 'We think, therefore, we are'. We are individuals and citizens of a society and view these separate aspects differently. Collective (group) behavior is perceived as genetic and immutable, but if collective behavior has psychological roots, we can behave differently. All we need do is change our minds.

  The suggestion garden variety psychology explains marching armies seems preposterous, but present dire straits are reason enough to pursue the speculation. The required philosophical leap is nothing more than inductive reasoning, the trip from singular to plural we make so often we think nothing of it. We use inductive reasoning to extrapolate solitary scientific experiments into universal conclusions, and have only to look to see how well we have done with it. It has been said a grain of sand contains the secrets of the universe. I do not carry induction that far, but I carry it far enough to conclude other human societies resemble mine. Farmers in my society use tractors where other farmers use oxen, but everywhere, farmers plant seeds and pray for rain. Since societies gratify individual need, group conduct mimics individual behavior. War can be perceived as the collective equivalent of a punch in the mouth and sewage disposal the collective equivalent of personal hygiene.

Induction notwithstanding, we have cause to believe group behavior has genetic origins. We lack a collective brain, and have not discovered anything resembling a collective 'mind' on which to work psychological magic. We distinguish 'mind' from 'body', but the distinction blurs, and we fall into inconsistency. Freud said innate drives, libido and the like, motivate human behavior, but if psychoanalysis thwarts innate compulsions, behavior's roots are no longer genetic. Freud divided the brain into three parts, calling the part weighted with group directives 'superego', but we need no physical explanation to concede we obey group command. When trendsetters decree longer (or shorter) skirts, women change wardrobes regardless of what they think of the new style. When collective issues are urgent, penalties for opposing group fiat are severe.

We tend assembly lines when we would rather picnic because we see no alternative to lifetimes of toil. Martin Duberman says community requirements and the cultivation of the sovereign self must always be somewhat at odds, but his conclusion that tension between individual and group is inescapable may be overly pessimistic.

Equating the individual with the collective is consistent with the philosophical thinking of any day. Collective thinking, the same perception believed by a number of individuals, has no greater validity than individual ideosyncracy because 'truth' has nothing to do with the number of believers. Since societies supposedly gratify the desires of their citizens, collective behavior reflects widespread individual inclination. When Ronald Reagan insisted the United States be number one, he meant strong enough to bend other nations to the collective American will. It stretches nothing to see a national need for triumph as the equivalent of the need some individuals have for economic or physical victory over others.

Needing distinction, we create groups in which we pledge different allegiances, dress differently and speak different languages. Different nationalities persuade us we are different, but at a more profound level, we remain human. Despite cultural differences, we share a group behavior whose universality makes it fair game for psychological speculation. Human societies, primitive or technological, capitalist or communist, maintain hierarchical social structures and use money as a medium of exchange. Since wealth determines hierarchical position, money and hierarchy can be perceived as the same psychological phenomenon. We do not ask why we choose hierarchy and class over its alternative, equality. We assume the urge to hierarchy is genetic, and let it go at that.

Underlying hierarchy is the notion that some of us are better than others. We collective decide the standard we use to make this determination. Western societies use free markets to separate human wheat from human chaff. Economic decisions propel some to glory, others to bankruptcy. The comparative result of our economic game divides members of society into inferior or superior groups. This end product is perceived as natural selection, like cream rising or class telling. Darwin's theory of evolution corroborates the legitimacy of hierarchy in that it assumes survivors are better than those who succumb. When nature decides, survival may be an objective evaluation. We may be fitter than dinosaurs because we are alive and they are not, but it is an unnecessary and probably incorrect judgment. Should we kill ourselves through war or an overburdening of the environment, extinction may result from stupidity rather than lack of fitness, but the judgment has no cosmic significance and proves nothing, anymore than the survival of roaches unchanged from prehistoric times proves their superiority.

We have no basis for comparison, no way to know the shape of things to come, but we compare nevertheless. We decide humans are better than non-humans and some humans are better than others. Then we stop. We do not see strong lions as better than weak lions. Dogs are not better than cats, nor are roses perceived as superior to daffodils. We also avoid comparative judgments about the physical universe. Things like deoxyribonucleic acid (D.N.A.) simply exist and are neither good nor bad.

Equality is the alternative to hierarchy. Putting aside for the moment the generally believed notion that classless human societies are impossible, the philosophical implications of equality, turn everything we believe on its head. Equality rejects collective comparisons as figments of the collective imagination. No feat of acquisition or art translates into an objective judgment of greater or lesser. Egalitarian philosophy implies inferiority motivates power seekers and authoritarians. Compelled to prove themselves by transactions with others, they demonstrate an inferiority-based need to go outside themselves for self esteem. 'Ambitious' describes individuals who utilize group agreement to increase their stature. Nationalism, the collective manifestation of collective inferiority, represents a group effort to enlarge a society's stature by triumph over other societies. Egalitarian philosophy concludes we do foolish things to accomplish something forever beyond us. Posturing and privilege are meaningless compared to eternity. Rich or poor, gifted or bereft, we face death together and alike.

Classless societies seem so ideal, inequality can not be explained without the justification of genetic inevitability. We think no one willingly chooses inferiority, but inferiority's gratifications are obvious. Inferiority eliminates responsibility. Everything becomes the superior's fault, but if history proves anything, it is that we are foolish to follow leaders. They squander life and property. Having paid that price, we cannot bring ourselves to see our obedience was a profound error of judgment. We are not ready to admit submission gratifies the follower's pathological need for irresponsibility at the same time dominance gratifies the leader's pathological desire for glory. Leaders, even those who see reverence as their due, wonder at the intensity of our devotion. Here is Jack Valente describing life on Lyndon Johnson's staff:

Woody Allen was equally incredulous at finding himself America's premier movie maker. "Had you told me fifteen years ago," he confessed to an interviewer, "that I was going to be the lead in a movie I would have thought you crazy. It's the funniest thing in the world to me. So I make movies because I feel if I don't make them, someday I'll look back and think to myself, 'they were dumping this stuff in my lap and I didn't take advantage of it'. So I do it."

I leave it to sociologists to discover whether everyone who climbs the greased pole of success finds the same mixture of euphoria and disbelief on reaching the top, but there is no doubt those society recognizes are glorified by the rest. In the process we invest our lives in other men's dreams and discount the validity of our perceptions. The surrender of self intrinsic in believing we are not as competent, intelligent, or talented as those we obey makes social position the most pernicious collective truth of all.

When lineage matters and individuals know their place, hierarchies prosper. Reciprocated perceptions of individual worth reinforce hierarchical understandings. New perceptions threaten that status quo. Kings who ruled by divine right burned heretics because doubt about God imperiled the legitimacy of royal rule, just as doubt about the relationship of money to wisdom endangers capitalism.

Hierarchical societies are ubiquitous because inferiority is intrinsic in the human condition. Marooned on a speck of dust hurtling through an enormous universe, we watch helplessly as nature rampages through villages, destroying huts and crops. We have, from the beginning, worshipped chiefs whose high offices lift life's burdens from our backs, but technology emboldens the less than primitive. A nation that puts men on the moon sees the moon differently than tribes for whom it remains mysterious. Technology, unfortunately, cannot tell us what happens after we die.

We escape the trap of hierarchy by seeing individual and group behavior as the same psychological phenomenon, extrapolating individual motivations to explain group actions. Individuals have perceptions, gamuts of ideas they believe 'true'. 'Collective perceptions' arise when many individuals believe the same 'truth'. The perception humanity is innately aggressive is collective because many believe it. The perception utopia can be imminent is individual because few believe it. Individual perceptions make one visionary or eccentric depending on whether the group adopts the new vision. Christianity was a lunatic sect that became the dominant religion of the western world. We see its triumph as the victory of the true God over false gods. The triumph can also be perceived as a change of minds.

Equality eliminates hierarchy but its price is high. When we are equal, individuals become responsible not only for their individual lives, but for the activities of their societies. We prefer the irresponsibility of following leaders and believing what everyone believes. Collective truths are the stars we live by, and to be told after life is spent, that God was not interested, or that virtue was incorrectly defined, is too tragic a denouement. No matter how avant garde we see ourselves, rejection of expertise and authority disquiets. The nightmare of anarchy forecloses further exploration of the possibility.

No society, capitalist or communist, treats citizens alike or considers universal equality a desirable goal. The American Revolution, fought in the name of equality, ("We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal...") was not intended to create a classless state. Founding fathers debated the amount of freedom ordinary men might accommodate and devices like the electoral college represented a compromise between those who believed in democracy and those who did not.

The argument continues as today's elitists condemn mass man as brutish and nasty. They see in equality's absence of standards a degrading step towards mediocrity. A well known critic says lack of standards means "...pretentious non art or anti-art posturing as art and subverting artistic integrity by turning inhuman, pseudo art into something the semi-literate, the inexperienced young, and the learned fools with anti-establishment axes to grind can hail as daring, relevant, and artistically important." The vigor of his attack illustrates the distaste for diversity inherent in group thought. Shakespeare is better than pulp fiction. Bach is better than Beatles. Those who know this are better than those who do not.

At this juncture it seems appropriate to define 'mind', but I leave that to others. Should group behavior change, it is unnecessary to know whether billions of ganglia were modified in the process. For our purposes it is enough to define individual behavior as individual reactions to individual perceptions. Extrapolation defines group behavior as group reactions to collective perceptions. The Protestant paradigm illustrates collective perceptions at work. Some collective Protestant ideas, God and the divinity of Christ, are common to every denomination. Subsidiary collective beliefs distinguish one Protestant sect from another.

My credentials for these conjectures include brief employment in a mental hospital. I suspect that after thirty-five years, the staff remains uncaring, and run-down facilities have been further ravaged by time. Although I did not know it then, an experience in that place demonstrated the interaction between individual and collective minds. A patient claimed he was Jesus Christ. In those less circumspect days, I opposed rejecting his claim to divinity. He was an unpleasant, scowling man who intermittently shouted, "I am Christ" to no one in particular. I maintained it might be God's idea of a joke or a test. Since my Christian friends believed Christ walked the earth and might again, I said denying the man's divinity endangered eternal rest.

When theory took shape, I saw the inmate's perception of his divinity was individual, something only he believed. The perception he was not Christ was collective, something so many believed he was institutionalized. Conflicting perceptions condemned him until we decided he was Christ or he decided that he was not. That is the curious thing about mental disorder. Victims are trapped in lonely, depressed, hostile lives, with cure a change of mind, or minds, away.

Most individual beliefs are collective, concepts shared with friends and neighbors. Citizens of developed nations think themselves better than citizens of undeveloped nations, responding to a belief system that uses scientific achievement to separate inferior from superior. Frenchmen think culture distinguishes them from less civil societies. Jews believe God's choice makes them different. Italians remember the glory that was Rome. We enjoy establishing differences between our group and the rest, and go to extremes to prove the point. The result is a hierarchy of nations, collective equivalent of hierarchies within single societies. In the hierarchy of nations, stronger nations are perceived as better than weak ones. Within individual societies, different collective perceptions make rich (powerful) people better than poor (powerless) ones. More arcane perceptions allow intellectuals to believe themselves superior to those perceived as less wise.

I ignore all but the two hierarchies every human confronts, the hierarchy within a society which determines individual status within the society, and the hierarchy of nations that establishes a society's status among other societies. Both influence behavior because individual citizens are gratified when their society succeeds. The words, "I am an American" are spoken proudly because Americans know how much better we are than the others. We count, like blessings, differences between 'us' and 'them'.

Collective perceptions protect us from error. If friends and neighbors believe what we believe, we think it likely we are right, but if we are wrong, we expect eternity to treat us no differently than it treats them. Concern for eternity explains why we treat heretics badly. Heretics destroy the rocks on which we build our faiths. Egalitarian notions, heresy on a grand scale, reject present collective understandings. If we, individually, are what we think we are, we can do as we please because there is no collective truth to tell us we are wrong. We worry that without morality, we lapse into debauchery, but equality prohibits atrocity more effectively than divine mandate. With everyone equal, we lose the right to enlighten heathens because when one belief is good as any there are no heathens. Equality shifts moral measurements from actor to recipient. Instead of the golden rule, equality proscribes anything imposed against a will, another departure from a convention that allows superiors to abuse underlings.

I assume individual inferiority motivates destructive individual interaction and since I use individual psychology to explain group behavior, I assume group inferiority motivates destructive group interaction. I take other liberties. My perceptions of what is believed by people I have never met are neither scientific nor conclusive, but the human condition is such that we know something about each other. I grew up in the north end of Bridgeport, Connecticut, which is different from growing up in a small midwestern town or a large city. As a six year old, I did not milk cows or ride subways, but those differences are irrelevant to the central theme of growth. I was small and dependent and so were you. I lived and learned and so did you. When we reduce human experience to essentials, similarities are constant and difference is the fashion of a particular day.

Like philosophers before me, I presume to take the measure of mankind. In the process I recount events in my life which I believe have implications for the group. I assume we exist and I come to what I think are reasonable conclusions. It is not the most precise of enterprises, but it is foolish for a species poised on the brink to quarrel about certainty. I assume this is not the best of all possible worlds. I use individual experience to explain group reality and I find in group behavior equivalents of individual behavior. I see things differently, but you will find the terrain familiar. We are, after all, in the same boat. Eternity awaits.

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Book chapters

1. Chapter - Theory Overview
2. Chapter - Self Image Psychology
3. Chapter - New Answers for Eternal Questions
4. Chapter - Sources of Collective Inferiority: Religion
5. Chapter - Sources of Collective Inferiority: Sex
6. Chapter - Sources of Collective Inferiority: Parents
7. Chapter - Pollution and Other Terrors of our Times
8. Chapter - More Problems: Representative Democracy
9. Chapter - More Problems: William Toste
10. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Television
11. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Computers
12. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Floating
13. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Scenarios
14. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Utopia