What is Mass
Consciousness? Does it Determine Elections?
Charles Jeanes 03 Sep 2015
The Nelson Daily
Mind
With Canada’s
federal election machinery fully-operational, the references among
politicians and media to “the public” and “the electorate” are seen
and heard daily. “In the mind of the public” is a phrase also used
a great deal.
What is this public
mind? I know what I think is my mind. I know it is not a
synonym for my brain, but is rather the “ghost” in the machinery of
my grey matter, my neurons and all the marvellous bio-chemicals and
connective links in that three-and-a-half pound organ. I have read
the numbers: one billion neurons, one trillion connections among
them, account for the biology of my brain, but the mystery of how
it all works to produce human consciousness is still a mystery. The
“I” who identifies himself as Charles is one of the effects of
being conscious, or of possession of consciousness, for “my”
brain. The hows and the whys of mind are not yet answered by
neuroscience.
How does this
individual meaning for “mind” carry into conversation about a
public mind?
Foundations
of human being
Let us dig into the
idea of mass consciousness a little bit. Begin with the simplest
definition of consciousness: “the awareness of being aware.” Or,
from Funk and Wagnalls, “the awareness of oneself.” Descartes said
it succinctly: cogito, ergo sum. “I think, therefore I
am.”
The human mind is
peculiar. You feel, or you think, that yourself and your existence
are “real.” Also, you “have consciousness” of being. These are key
ingredients of a conscious human mind.
You know you live.
You know you are mortal, you will one day die, if you are an adult
human. You know what you need to keep the body alive. These are
some parts of being human common to us all.
Another
consciousness we possess is knowledge of other humans. You know the
fact of being in relationship with other people. Other humans
reflect our consciousness back to us.
The consciousness of
being loved is so profoundly necessary to an infant human that
babies can die for lack of love. I can say from experience that I
feel a great difference in my being when I am in love and in a
special relationship with one person, and when I am not. The
consciousness of being in such a special “I love, and I am loved”
relationship, is an ingredient of mind that in my opinion affects
many, many spheres of one’s life on a daily basis.
Most salient of all
in human consciousness is, of course, the “I.” How is a
single self merged into a collective mind? Bees and ants have hive
minds; it is genetically programmed into those species, all of
which possess one queen ruling over the communication net that
connects all the members. For this, the human species has no
analog. We are not telepathic. I rather enjoy that fact.
“States” of
Consciousness
Awake or asleep are
two basic categories for our state of consciousness; conscious or
unconscious are two others. Drunken impairment is a state of
consciousness, being altered in one’s consciousness by a drug is
another. These are the easy words and phrases we use colloquially
about being conscious. There are no arguments about what the words
mean.
What about “higher
and lower” states of consciousness? Now the ease of understanding
one another’s terms ends, when we start to compare and judge
levels of consciousness. The masters of
meditation in India have a vocabulary for states of consciousness
that is not employed nor understood in Western neuroscience. This
is a “grey area” for mind.
It is commonplace to
hear people judge one another’s consciousness levels, as in, “what
a huge ego that man has -- he’s not a very conscious person,” or
“imagine the level of consciousness in such a materialistic
person.” Another favourite polarity is “enlightened or not
enlightened.” These comparisons are merely a way of establishing
hierarchy; these are not labels helpful to understanding. (But the
labels are a common type of commentary among people I know in
Nelson.) Such phrases are evidence of a vocabulary for
understanding that consciousness is a quality people have in
different degrees. In poetic language, some minds are like clay,
some are like lightning; there is no objective scale of measurement
for describing the qualities of people’s minds, because
consciousness is not a synonym for intelligence and is not weighed
in IQ points. To judge another’s state by comparison with one’s own
seems to me of little worth.
There is an enormous
literature on the subject of states of consciousness in the
individual and in an entire society, and it is an important corpus
of research. Some thinkers hypothesize that a coherent, tight-knit
society bound together in a distinct culture and small geographic
space, might be able to manifest their political leadership and
governing structures in a manner that mass, urban,
socially-stratified people cannot accomplish. That seems
intuitively sensible; perhaps ancient Celt or Israelite lords,
American aboriginals and their leaders, or Tibetans with their
Buddhist lamas, have ordered themselves in ways not accessible to
Canadians in 2015. Therefore the relevance of studies of those
societies to my question about a Canadian public mind, and its
impact on choice of government in our electoral democracy, is not
great.
Historical
“stages” of evolving human consciousness
It is very important
to my exploration of collective mind that there is a large body of
writing about the human species evolving its consciousness over
long epochs of time, attempting to assign descriptive labels to the
stages of our consciousness in (pre)history. Primordial humans,
hunter-gatherers, nomad pastoralists, agriculturalists, urban
dwellers, are assumed to have possessed different kinds or stages
of consciousness as their conditions of life and subsistence were
altered. I have written at more length about this in several past
columns, and named the foremost writers in the field: Ken Wilber,
W. I. Thompson., Jean Gebser, Aurobindo, Don Beck, J. Rifkin. T. de
Chardin.
The uses of the
words (mass-) mind and (collective-) consciousness in historical
discourse need to be noted, because they offer theories about what
makes a collective or mass possess some unity in the mentality or
psychology of the people of an historical period. The theories
differ (each of the writers I named above put forward different
theories) but all of them are evidence that scholarly observers of
humanity possess a consensus: we can write and speak as if
“collective, mass consciousness” has a meaningful
application.
A very widely-held
perspective on human civilization holds that for each major
tradition – The West, China, India, Islam, Judaism, pre-Columbian
America – there are categories for their peculiar consciousness.
The West has a blend of the Hellenic (Greco-Roman) and the Semitic
(Abrahamic/Mesopotamian) mindsets or mentalities, with large
fractions from the Teutonic-Celtic northern world, in its
consciousness. It is a loosely-used phrase, and it is not exact in
meaning, yet the notion that there is a “Western consciousness”
needs to be noted.
As well, one can see
that intellectual historians refer to Ages of the human mind with
words like classical, medieval, modern, and post-modern, and write
books describing a “mind” of the Middle Ages, or the Victorian age,
or the age of the scientific revolution. Historians of ideas and
culture, social historians and historical sociologists, have a
community of understanding about public, mass, collective
consciousness in a society: it
exists. The basic hypothesis for all such writers
is that human societies can meaningfully be said to possess within
their culture, their civilization, an encompassing collective mind
among all.
The language(s) one
speaks is also, by the consensus of a multitude of academic
researchers and scientists, an enormously-significant factor in the
formation of human consciousness. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is a
prime example of research in this field.
An historical
materialist, also known as a Marxian thinker or Marxist, would
insist on adding that social class is extremely
significant in determining which type of consciousness any
particular individual in a society might possess. I am still
sufficiently Marxian in my thinking about politics to agree with
the latter: there is one consciousness for the ruling strata of any
society, the elite culture, and another one underlying it among
people who accept the elite’s rule but have a different
consciousness of politics.
An individual like
myself who is deeply steeped in academic knowledge of the
historical record of how Western civilization evolved,
“possesses a consciousness of history.” That is peculiar to me, my
education and my passions, but unless the great mass of Canadians
are very similar to me in this regard – and I have reason to know
they are not – this type of personal consciousness will not
have an impact on how Canadians choose governments. My “liberal
education” is elite, I cannot deny it. I will say more about this
in the next section.
So, enough said
about how historical eras and epochs possess a unity of
consciousness among all the minds of people living together and
knowing themselves to belong to a society, to a religion, to a
civilization, to a culture. I think I have explained the point
effectively to readers.
I take this
consensus view as a solid reason for me to speculate that a
Canadian public mind exists. The collective consciousness of
Canadians is “manifested” in the governments we allow.
Ideologies,
Beliefs, Creeds, Philosophies
As I wrote above,
Cultures and Civilizations possess broad collective consciousness
across the minds of all the human individuals within their
societies. Religion is one of the great shapers of a collective
mass social consciousness. So are ideologies, creeds, and
philosophies. When very large numbers of people profess a belief in
the same creed or ideology, then we feel justified in saying there
is a collective psychology among those people.
Christians for
example profess faith that Christ is the Saviour of human souls,
and scientific materialists agree that science has answers to the
most important questions humans have about existence. Being a
Marxist/Leninist/Maoist is a political religion. Declaring oneself
a devotee of quantum physics, or of a guru or yogi, or of
Plato/Kant/Descartes, are equally definitive statements about the
thoughts that shape your mind and structure your mental universe.
All are ways in which one uses words and ideas to describe who “I”
am, to identify my “self,” to make my mind “mine.”
Before leaving the
description of making a mind with thoughts and feelings, I have to
at least nod in the direction of the esoteric traditions that teach
that we have all lived lives before this one; karma might
explain a life for some individuals, magical, divine, demonic and
irrational forces explain it to others. Before we are incarnated to
the physical bodies we now exist within as a self/soul, we lived
other lives; I have watched closely as my grandson born 14 months
ago has come from beyond the Veil and slowly but surely grounded
into his material being. My role in his formation as a human is
something I am taking rather seriously.
Call me a credulous
fool, but it has to be admitted that besides the scientific,
secular, materialist, and rationalist inclination of modern Western
minds in wealthy developed nations, there are many other ways to
understand human existence, many other ways to create one’s
individual conscious mind. Philosophers, mystics, messiahs,
prophets, priests, scientists, have this one thing in common: they
intend to instruct individual human beings how to understand life.
An understanding of existence is a basic ingredient of a mind;
there may be no other part of self that is more foundational to
forming one’s mind. The human species appears from much evidence to
absolutely need meaning and purpose in order to live comfortably on
this plane.
Knowledge,
Information, Memories, Expectations
I confessed above
that I own an elite liberal education. Education is an enormous
ingredient in the construction of an individual consciousness. If I
am asked about my personal interior mental universe, I would begin
with the people I know and love as part of my “subjective reality”
– and then I would describe my knowledge, my experiences, my
ideologies to explain the mind I have constructed on the foundation
of my inherited DNA, my brain, my species. I would say, “I live in
the consciousness of being positioned in time because I am
passionate about History.” I think daily about the human prospect
on a global scale, I ponder the “Direction” of human development
and the “Meaning and Purpose” of human life on planet earth – I
would expect that any regular, attentive reader of this column
would have figured this out about the author of such writing as
they have perused here. This is the curse of an intellectual
temperament, a temperament partly inherited and partly generated by
my experiences of living. As I say to my friends, I agree with
Socrates that “the unexamined life is not worth living” – and I add
that examination of my life has to include examining human history.
And I have to be honest that it is possible to over-do this
perspective: “the over-examined life is not worth living”
either.
From myself outward
to the wider world of my society, I proceed to say that every
individual has the same ingredients to make up their unique selves.
Knowledge acquired by formal study and personal interest,
information stuffed into our minds from a universe of accessible
media, never before available to humans up to this moment (and
daily increasing), memories of our own experience and acquired
memory of the history of our people and of many other people, and
expectations about where this species is heading in future – all of
these phenomena are ingredients combined within the consciousness
of one individual human being. From this mix of fact and idea,
thought and feeling, we create our unique individual mind and self.
Some like me examine this all the time, if they are privileged with
leisure and absence of anxiety, and many are not in the least so
inclined (as I am) to be constantly contemplating self and
society.
But I think no one
disputes that after one’s birth on the planet in a physical body,
the material world and the facts one “takes in” to one’s mind,
through the five senses and through the sense of reflection and
understanding, are placed upon the original mind each of us is born
with.
The
Individual and the Mass: the sum of all selves = the social
collective
My consciousness is
unique to me as my ego is, but despite my unique peculiarity, I am
just as much a part of a mass collective consciousness as any other
Canadian. There is a core around which we are all
constructed.
We approach more
closely to the meaning of the public mind and the expression of
that mind in the government voters choose in an election. But how
can one arrive at a statement about the public mind of Canadian
voters? Modern, affluent, educated, multicultural, pluralistic
societies like Canada’s in 2015 are famously resistant to
dissection into overarching narratives. There is no reason at all
to expect that we are united by a common knowledge of Canadian
history, by religion or culture, or by political ideology. What
useful generalizations will be possible about us is a very hard
question indeed.
The hypothesizing of
a Canadian collective consciousness, a public mind of the
electorate, is the attempt to generalize about the essence or core
or common denominator that unites all Canadian individuals. It is
not a hypothesis about what describes our common humanity, however.
It is an hypothesis about our common political behaviour.
It is an hypothesis about why we manifest the people who will be
our governors, how we accept the institutions and laws we obey as
legitimate, and the language we use to talk and think about
government. The hypothesized public mind of Canadians voters is a
general statement about our society, our economy, our culture and
our ideology as ingredients of “constructed reality.” A constructed
reality is not the same as the reality that materialist sciences
(physics, chemistry, biology for example) describe. It is the
reality we make by a “contract” to understand things in the same
way. Our money system is a constructed reality; paper money has
value only because we agree to accept it. The public mind is the
creator of the political order of Canada, of our ruling
elite.
Public mind
and voter behaviour: Harper wants to make you
happy
All of my
observations and arguments offered to this point in the column have
been set forth with the aim of answering whether the phrase,
‘Canadian public mind,’ can be said to have an effective meaning
for the choice of our next federal government. I think the phrase
is an approximation of a phenomenon that decides elections. It is
public mass consciousness that makes sense of the old saying,
“People get the government they deserve.”
What are the
ingredients of the public mind of Canadian voters in 2015? What are
the values we think we live by, and what parts of our lives do we
expect government to direct to the goal of our greater
happiness?
“Happiness” is the
key word here. That is what we want in life. Peace of mind,
contentment, a feeling of satisfaction and self-worth, are other
ways of saying happiness. Happiness is thus the highest value we
profess as a public good.
The ideas of pursuit
of happiness and the greatest good of the greatest number are
rather recent in human history as a mass social perspective, dating
to the time of the American Revolution, Britain’s start toward an
Industrial Revolution, and the evolution of rationalism and
utilitarianism as the dominant modes of thinking about politics.
That was the age of the Western Enlightenment, the century of the
1700’s, the time of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Bentham, Smith,
Jefferson and Paine, Kant and Goethe.
Thomas Jefferson was
very much a man of the Enlightenment, of Rationalism. His was the
mind that penned the American Declaration of Independence, speaking
of the rights of the People to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.” Life and liberty seem self-evident in meaning, but what
is pursuit – not achievement, you notice – of happiness in actual
practice going to look like? Jefferson may not have meant to
prescribe how to pursue happiness. In practice it came to mean
pursuit of security and comfort through material means, and by
means of rational, good, democratic government, in popularly-chosen
institutions and laws.
Steven Harper
understands the materialist concept of happiness. The economy is
practically all that he believes he has to serve, with some
attention to his ideology for war on crime, war on terror, and war
on drugs. As far as paying attention to the intangibles of
democracy and the ethics of honest government, he appears from the
evidence to care very little.
A choice of
Harperite conservatism by Canadians would mean, for me, that
Canadians want more than anything to have the high material
standard of living that recent history, since the Second World War,
established as our entitlement. We will never fear for our safety
from a foreign enemy invading or bombing us, as we have not feared
since 1945. We will never fear a too-small supply of food and water
for our needs; hungry years like the 1930’s will never come again
for Canada. We will always have the most-modern and scientific
methods of medicine, and we will always have access to enormous
amounts of information in our media and in our educational systems.
We will always have leisure to pursue holiday travels, hobbies and
passions away from our workplace, and always have liberty to
worship our private deities with public tolerance. These are the
great foundational facts of the good life of a Canadian.
For all of these
things to go on being true, we need money. Money comes from a job,
and a job comes from making oneself employable by someone else, or
by being self-employed. And so, the economy is the base of our
understanding of happiness, no matter how often we repeat the lines
that “money cannot buy happiness” and “what does it profit a person
who gains the world but loses their soul?” Economics rule us still.
Harper means to present himself as the leader who secures our jobs,
our incomes, and therefore, our happiness.
Conclusions:
parties serve; the ruling class rules
In a column this
Spring I laid out my understanding of politics. I am convinced
intellectually by a class analysis of political sociology; there is
a ruling class, and most voters are not in it. Still I believe the
three parties, which all serve the ruling class by keeping the rest
of us in order, have significant differences. The Conservatives
materially and substantially have policies and ideologies at odds
with what I believe are the best interests of Canadians.
Harper must go. Your vote against Harperism is important. It will
not revolutionize our society and economy, as we need. But the
difference between a Harperite regime and any other will be
noticeable in ways I hold to be formative for a worse Canada, or a
better.