The mystery of this “power of the collective” is not in the overt presence or tidal, cultural and narrative-psychological force it compels. It is in the many and diverse ways that individuals bound together by information, communication and shared experience or role find themselves as bearers of a meaning and a message which is hardly theirs, although they reflexively treasure it as an expression or assertion of effective, adaptive self-identity.
We ourselves are the transmission medium for autonomously self-propagating patterns of information and energy-processing that are precisely so successful in maintaining environmental or contextual tenure because they hoodwink us into thinking that we are all anything other than the transmission medium that these patterns leverage for their own memetic continuity. Effective cultural information patterns self-replicate – in, through and as us.
Daedelus Kite 