Collective image psychology - Theory

  Why Not Utopia? - Collective image psychology - Theory

Life is But a Dream, Shaboom

Originally I presented the collective image theory in small bits, to entice readers to purchase my book. You were supposed to be so taken with my logic, you'd do just about anything, including buying my book, to see it through. Ah, the hopes of youth and middle age! Didn't entice readers and ended up posting the book on the Net which left me with these pages. Self image psychology, Harry Stack Sullivan's widely accepted theory, starts it. Self image psychology holds that self image, the perception a person has of him or herself, motivates individual behavior. If we are what we think we are, we are, in the baldest sense, figments of our imaginations.

There's logic to it. An interaction between belief and behavior colors almost every human behavioral possibility. If we can't see ourselves playing the role, we don't audition for the part. We don't use image psychology to explain collective (group) behavior because we don't see collective imagery as something we, collectively, choose, but collective thinking is just generally believed ideas, a condition created when many individuals reach the same conclusion. Since we also like to believe what we believe is "true", we protect collective thinking. We burn heretics because their deaths demonstrate that we are "right" and they were "wrong", much like the primitive tribesmen who eat the organs of those they vanquish to gain their strength. There is also social pressure. When our society believes in God, we find ourselves drawn to the belief.

Individual and collective thinking resemble each other. Collective behaviors have individual equivalents to the point where it is reasonable to see collective and individual behaviors as more or less the same, the difference being the number of individuals involved. We collectively wage war for the same reasons individuals fight barroom brawls, and the boom busts of our economic cycles are no different from the individual mood swings we diagnose as manic-depression. When we equate individual and collective behavior, that is assume they are governed by the same psychological principal, our concept of "human nature" becomes the collective image. If, like self imagery, collective imagery is self fulfilling, we are the species we think we are. If individuals change behavior by changing self perceptions, it follows we can change national behaviors, by changing our perception of "human nature". Simplistic? Bizare? Keep going.

Marshall McLuhan said "The medium is the message." He believed a television set broadcasting a test pattern in a desert would change desert societies. That's not how it works. The medium is not the message. It is the messenger. Technology changes societies by broadcasting information, changing the citizen's perception of what he or she knows.