The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [431]
We see this most obviously when they are swept up in some great shared emotion, as in the collective state of hysteria which grips a crowd at a football match or the sense of collective unity associated with times of war. But in any group it is possible to discern what may be called its ruling state of consciousness: that which determines what views, values and behaviour are at any time generally considered acceptable, and those which are regarded as beyond the pale, condemned as disruptive, eccentric, alien or mad. And one has only to consider what extraordinary changes come over the state of consciousness prevailing in any society through different times in history (the dramatic variations in what is considered acceptable that we see in everything from patterns of moral behaviour to fashions in clothes) to see that there cannot be any time when the ruling consciousness is objectively right, by some absolute standard, in everything it holds to be important or true.
It is naturally easiest to appreciate this in societies where the prevaling consciousness is furthest removed from our own. Until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for instance, the ruling consciousness decreed that the earth was flat and that the sun went round it. To challenge that consciousness, even though it had no basis in fact, was virtually unthinkable. As the old song had it, `They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round'.
For challenging the received wisdom that it was the sun which moved while the earth stood still, Galileo faced such duress from the Papal inquisition that publicly he conceded the point (even though, as he did so, he was said to have muttered under his breath `but it still moves').
We may today laugh knowledgeably at the blindness and arrogance of those inquisitors, because we have inherited the new prevailing wisdom which Galileo helped to shape; just as we may express moral outrage at all those who became rich from the eighteenth-century slave trade in the days before moral perceptions changed and the inhuman cruelty of the slave-system became obvious for all to see. But what we may not recognise is just how many firmly-held convictions making up the prevailing consciousness of our own time are just as ill-founded as the belief in a flat earth or the social acceptability of slavery: because the point about any state of ruling consciousness is that it is based on unconscious assumptions so deep and all-pervading that they are taken for granted. In any society, organisation or group, the unconscious psychological pressure to accept those assumptions is so great that only a few outsiders have the clarity of vision to perceive from `below the line' how baseless and unjustified they are.
In fact the ruling consciousness of any group with a sense of common identity provides an exact parallel to the state of consciousness in individual human beings. Because it is centred on a collective ego, it can exhibit precisely the same tendency to distortion and subjectivity that we see in human individuals. As we see in, say, a political party, there will thus be a significant element of unconsciousness in the way that group behaves, whereby it remains collectively unaware of its own deficiencies. Just as we see in an individual, the more one-sided the ruling consciousness becomes, the greater the area of shadow its one-sidedness creates. And the denser those shadows, the more we are likely to find within them people who represent those values