Did I stumble upon a new field of study?

So I titled my last post "Collective Existentialism" after stumbling across the phrase in my mind-wanderings at 5am. I think it has a lot going for it so here goes:

Collective existentialism grows from individual consciousness. For an individual, there are many escapes from the rush of consciousness: unconsciousness, cultural simplicity, etc.. Collective existentialism is a symptom of one or more of these escapes.

In my last post, I suggest that a true genius is someone who can create change that overcomes collective, unconscious restraint in an elegant way. To put it another way, a true genius can create change that does not cause a collective existential crisis.

A collective existential crisis might look something like a leader persecuting someone unjustly and the community going along with it even though there is little logic to support the punishment, in whatever form. The community would go along with it because of a collective, unconscious aversion to something that the persecuted individual represented. The collective would accept the injustice because of it's function in stopping a collective existential crisis.

It's important to point out that existentialism and crisis are a part of life/consciousness and there is no value judgment as to what is better, only that perhaps the ideal would be to live as consciously as possible and never experience crisis.

I believe that a prime example of collective existentialism is death, generally, and funerals in particular. This is to say that funeral rituals serve, in part, to avoid a collective existential crisis. The ritual in itself reflects he existence of the collective existentialism. As children, many of us attempt to take on the issue of death by ourselves, experiencing a few sleepless and tear-laden nights as a result. Most of us transition from this individualized existential crisis, however resolved, into collective existentialism with regard to death.

Collective existentialism is very powerful in temporary instantiation as well. A group watching a performance can begin to perceive reality in similar ways and this is in fact part of the reason that people enjoy large performances. This group perception is a kind of break from individual consciousness. The existential aspect of this phenomenon consists of the conscious processes that are not occurring as they normally would in the individual or collective mind.

For example, an individual at performance is not asking him or herself, most likely, why am I doing what all of these other people are doing? generally, is this what I should be doing? and likely not having the same kind of sexual thoughts that occur when surrounded by strangers normally. If this individual were to suddenly awaken in a room where hundreds of people were sitting in chairs and looking at a performance, there would be a period of existential crisis, perhaps slipping into a collective existential peacefulness but likely causing a panic.

This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of collective existentialism. A person allows it to happen in a semi-conscious or ritualized manner. This process then becomes unconscious, especially when the ritual is similar to a previous experience with collective consciousness. For example, a good way to get people to be calm in a crowd and not worry about what might happen in a small, enclosed, area that they have never been to before is to give them each tickets, take the tickets at the door and give back stubs, have seats in the room, etc.. This ritual will cause a reduction in the conscious processes that might question the situation. In short, this is a great way to reduce individual consciousness and promote collective consciousness.

If, instead, a large group of dispersed people were told to go into a room and the room had no chairs (just beds?), no clear front or back to the room, no tickets, no stubs, etc. then you can be sure that many people would panic or simply refuse to go in, whatever the non-ritualized content might be. At the same time, this could perhaps be overcome by simply having music playing and a table with drinks prominently displayed.

What I'm really curious about, is how to get a group of people who, for example, have stopped worrying about why they are a a certain location and doing a certain thing, to start thinking about that and other things, as a group or individually.

I mean, could there be a way to make a hundred people seated in a movie theatre suddenly feel as if they are one hundred people standing up in an empty warehouse? And would it be possible to get people at a funeral, besides the grieving widow, to have existential crisis concerning death?

The fact is that I believe that this collective existentialism creates a problem. I believe it carries over into daily life for many people and essentially stops them from having certain conscious thoughts and reacting to experience in certain ways. Perhaps church-goers are less able to experience the divine outside of church, in nature of in the eyes of another person. I'm just saying that this might be the case. But also, people who watch lots of tv news and political talk might find it difficult to fully engage in a political discussion with a friend, or an interesting stranger.

When collective existentialism extends into daily life, there is the problem that the individual is neither having that portion of consciousness available to them, nor experiencing the collective. It's as if no change can occur until another ritual has occurred and what are the chances, in modern times, that another ritualized, collective consciousness event will be liberating for that person?

I worry that people are not really small-minded, that much of their minds are trapped in a collective perception of reality. Going back to politics, it seems that many people believe that television pundits bring up all of the important political issues. And so, an individual might hear of another issue from a friend or stranger and not be able to have a fully conscious reaction to that new piece of information, perspective, or what have you until they hear it on television or perhaps begin to reject the ritual of televised political debate. The sad thing is that if a person hears about something and cannot fully experience it until the next ritual, they are almost guaranteed to adopt one of the perceptions that exists in the ritualized presentation.

In this way, collective existentialism is the result of a ritualized perception of reality.

Collective Existentialism

Do we revere things because we hope that other people will too?

Maybe openness is the real way, tempered by experience. How many people really die in bar fights, blind rages, etc? But then I see those back-alley people. Women who don't realize how badly they are treated, constantly tense. Men who are ready to lash out at a moment's notice. There is little room for growth there but wasn't this a natural restraint on progress? Before conservatives, there was the reality of slowness in the conceptual evolution of, and implementation of, progress. Now we have some restraint on the implementation of progress and varying levels of theoretical restraints on the evolution of progress. We have outgrown the base-emotional restraint and yet have not devised any system to replace that restraint. The fact is that most people are still functionally the same as the back-alley types that used to be the ruling majority except they no longer restrain anyone else with their backward culture (maybe because of police, distraction, apathy?), fear, violence, etc.. Where has this balance gone?

The worst thing is that I can hear the responses now, from the mediocre intellects of our time. They will say that all these new conceptualizations of progress and the wild implementation is nothing but good, perhaps not incrementally but in the long run. They ignore the complexity of the balance that we have lost. The fact is that those of us who can control our more base emotions are doing just that, controlling them. They exist, they are human responses, they carry information. A true genius listens to his unconscious.... somehow. And a true genius knows with some certainty whether their increment of progress sits well with humanity as a whole, the whole that includes the base emotions. This is how the geniuses of the past avoided ostracism, to an extent which allowed the acceptance of their progress, but perhaps more importantly earned the respect of their communities over the course of their lives.

This is the heart of the matter, the tribe mentality, the violence, the superstitions, the small-mindedness circumvented by genuine genius, the kind of mind that listens to the whole of humanity (at least within that community) and earns the awe-struck respect of that community over a lifetime, leading to an instance of progress that is accepted by that "tribe". This process ensured that growth was harmonious with consciousness, and vice versa.

The fact is that consciousness has been scattered in the modern world. Divide and conquer, right? this is how capitalism has survived so long without a re-organization of wealth. All these different "progresses" that don't mesh with consciousness.