Quotes About Collective

Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?

Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.

It is not the monsters of the world who make such chaos but the collective shadow to which every one of us has contributed.

The tendency to see one's shadow "out there" in one's neighbor or in another race or culture is the most dangerous aspect of the modern psyche. It has created two devastating wars in this century and threatens the destruction of all the fine achievements of our modern world. We all decry war but collectively we move toward it. It is not the monsters of the world who make such chaos but the collective shadow to which every one of us has contributed.

The tendency to see one's shadow "out there" in one's neighbor or in another race or culture is the most dangerous aspect of the modern psyche. It is not the monsters of the world who make such chaos but the collective shadow to which every one of us has contributed.

Of course, industrialism (the Second Wave) produced much illth along with its new wealth; and most of the wealth was ex-(or ap)-propriated by a minority. However much this may pain socialists, it was inevitable in a domesticated primate species. A few alpha males can always see their own advantage more clearly than the majority can see their collective interest.

Must have been dual hallucination. If one person sees a blasphemy, that is simple hallucination. Two people — dual hallucination. Many, many people — mass hallucination

Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.

Experimentation had made it clear that large-scale collective quantum phenomena were happening in every brain; there existed in the brain both global quantum coherence, and quantum entanglement between the various electrical states of the microtubules; and this meant that all the counterintuitive phenomena and sheer paradox of quantum reality were an integral part of consciousness.

Another man said I don't own my kids' teacher, I don't own my doctor, I don't need to own my house. I just want to pay the collective for it, not some landlord.

But the problem of utopia, of collective meaning, is to find an individual meaning. —Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia

I imagine that all Americans have a unique relationship in their individual present to their collective past and how that relationship might shape their identities and experiences.

Religion is a collective insanity.

We cannot hope for a society in which formal organized religion dies out. But we can stop behaving as if it was worthy of our collective respect.

Religion is collective insanity.

I'm an atheist, a devout atheist, but I find religion fascinating. Primarily because of cultural references, as in: This is what we grew up with. Both on a personal level and a collective level.

Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.

Can there be greater foolishness than the respect you pay to people collectively when you despise them individually?

There are many sparks of sanctity in each person in [a] group. And when you collect all the sparks of sanctity into one place, as brothers, with love and friendship, you will certainly have a very high level of sanctity...

But there is no such thing as individual knowledge, a particular knowledge belonging to one special person or group. Knowledge is the sea of humanity, the field of humanity, the general condition of human existence.

So perhaps happiness is synchronizing one's personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.

But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

So our medieval ancestors were happy because they found meaning to life in collective delusions about the afterlife? Yes. As long as nobody punctured their fantasies, why shouldn't they?

Consumerism and nationalism work extra hours to make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community as ourselves, that we have a common past, common interests and a common future. This isn't a lie. It's imagination. Like money, limited liability companies and human rights, nations and consumer tribes are inter-subjective realities. They exist only in our collective imagination, yet their power is immense.