Collective Consciousness and Instincts
The Collective Foreman
I’ve written a fair bit about the foreman before. That tireless voice of the ego, running the warehouse of our mind, comparing what is against what should be, and whispering the results to us whether we asked or not.
What I hadn’t fully considered until recently, is that the foreman might not just live in me.
Collective Consciousness and Instincts
The Mountain Pathway is founded on a metaphysical perspective that the universe operates as a closed system. That means that everything this that is here now, always was, and always will be. The energy that makes up our physical bodies and courses though us as vitality can be regarded exactly the same as the conscious element of our mind and all other aspects of the universe. It is all simply in flow and flux.
This perspective opens the possibility for consciousness to exist as something separate to all living organisms, which then invites this angle of questioning: is the collective consciousness of humanity something we are developing, an evolutionary adaptation bolted on as our species gets more sophisticated? Or is it something we are simply tapping in to — a single consciousness that was always there, waiting for us to grow the capacity to feel it?
Well, with this metaphysical grounding, I of course lean towards the latter. We are tapping in, and that implies the thing already existed and we are simply getting better at receiving the signal.
If that’s true, it reframes instinct in an interesting way. Consider that every living organism carries within it a genetic code — a template, not for the behaviour itself, but for how to channel the collective consciousness in the specific way that suits its species. The salmon doesn’t calculate its way home. The bird doesn’t reason its way south. Something older than reasoning is doing the work, and the DNA is simply the antenna, tuned to receive one particular station rather than another.
There’s a well-known story that gets told in circles like this one: that once enough monkeys on one island learned to wash their food, monkeys on other islands, with no contact whatsoever, started doing the same thing. I want to be straight with you about this one — the underlying claim has been pretty thoroughly picked apart by researchers, and the “effect” itself doesn’t hold up as science. I still think it’s a lovely parable, and I’ll use it as one, but I won’t pretend it’s a fact.
What is real, and arguably more remarkable, is the sheer amount of convergent behaviour we do see across species and geographies with no possibility of contact — the same tool use, the same distress calls, the same migratory instincts, showing up again and again as if drawn from the same well rather than invented independently a thousand times over. Maybe they were.
We call it instinct because we don’t yet have a better word for remembering something we never learned.
The Collective Ego
If a collective consciousness exists, and if it plays out at a species level the way the higher self plays out for an individual, then it stands to reason there might be a shadow side too. Just as my own consciousness has an ego riding on top of it — protecting me, comparing me, occasionally lying to me for my own good — perhaps modern society has grown a collective ego riding on top of the collective consciousness.
Think about what the foreman actually does for an individual. He stores the schema of who you are, compares it constantly against who you “should” be, and whispers the gap back to you as fear, inadequacy, or urgency. He is not malicious. He thinks he is protecting you.
Now scale that up.
A collective ego would do the same job for the group. It would store society’s schema of who we are, compare it against who we’re told we should be, and whisper the gap back to us — not as a private thought in the middle of the night, but as a headline, a notification, a feed that refreshes every time we check it.
An ego that lives in one mind whispers.
An ego that lives in a billion minds shouts, and calls it consensus.
Perhaps what we have done in this modern digital age is create the hardware required to support this collective Ego in the form of social media algorithms…
So Who Benefits from the Whisper?
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. My own foreman, for all his faults, is at least trying to protect me. Who is the collective foreman actually protecting?
Social media didn’t invent the collective ego, but it built the most efficient microphone it has ever had. Engagement is the currency, and nothing engages a mind faster than the exact mechanism the foreman already uses on each of us individually: comparison, inadequacy, urgency, tribal safety in numbers. The algorithm isn’t clever enough to have invented a new lever. It just found the oldest one we’ve got and pulled it, at scale, for profit.
Which raises the question I can’t quite let go of: if a collective ego is being whispered to a billion people at once, whose voice is actually doing the whispering? Is this genuinely an emergent property of the whole — the ego of everyone, belonging to no one in particular — or is it, at least in part, the ego of a small number of people who have found a way to sit at the source of the whisper and shape what it says?
I suspect it’s both, tangled together in a way that’s hard to fully separate. A genuine collective ego, real and self-sustaining, that certain individuals and institutions have also learned to lean on and steer for their own gain. The whisper didn’t need to be invented from nothing. It just needed to be amplified and pointed.
When Consciousness Argues with Instinct
Here’s the part I think matters most, and I want to be careful how I say it, because it’s easy for this kind of thinking to collapse into picking a side in whatever the argument of the day happens to be. That’s not really what I’m interested in.
What I’m interested in is the mechanism, not the politics.
Any framework — of any persuasion, old or new, left or right, religious or secular — runs into the same trouble the moment it asks us to accept a rule about how to think, feel, or relate to one another purely because the framework says so, without that rule being checked against our own direct, honest, first-hand experience of being human. That’s true whether the framework is an ancient dogma or a brand-new social movement. The mechanism of harm isn’t the content of the belief. It’s the abstraction.
The moment we adopt a position because we’ve been told it’s correct, rather than because we’ve tested it against our own lived reality and found it to hold up, we’ve handed the steering wheel to an ego — collective or otherwise — and gone quiet ourselves. We stop checking in with the actual human being in front of us and start checking in with the rulebook instead.
This is exactly the same trap as the “should gun” I’ve written about before, just fired from a bigger barrel. Individually, the foreman tells us who we should be. Collectively, an ideology — any ideology, regardless of what it claims to stand for — can do precisely the same thing, dressed up as righteousness instead of insecurity.
Conscious Dissonance
Consciousness only argues with instinct when something has been layered on top of both of them that neither one actually agreed to.
The good news, if there is any, is that the diagnosis is the same at both scales. When my own ego is running the show, the way back is awareness, honesty, and a return to the present moment — actually looking at the person or situation in front of me, rather than the story I’ve been handed about them. When a collective ego is running the show, I believe the way back is exactly the same, just harder to walk because there are more of us doing it together, or failing to.
Coming Home
I don’t think the answer here is to reject the collective altogether and retreat in to pure individualism — that’s just trading one abstraction for another. The collective consciousness, the real one, underneath the ego that’s been built on top of it, is worth staying connected to. It might be the very thing that lets a bird find its way home.
What we can do — the only thing any of us can actually do — is keep coming back to first principles. Speak sincerely. Check what we believe against what we’ve actually lived, not what we’ve been told to feel. Treat the human in front of us as a human, not as a character cast in somebody else’s story about how the world should work.
Reconnect to your humanity, in the present moment, without the ego.
Do that enough times, by enough of us, and maybe the whisper changes. Not because anyone forced it to, but because some of us are still listening.
Enjoy, for now.