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.