Collective Thinking

On a road trip, during the summer of 2019, my wife and I were driving along I95 through the countryside.  As we went along, we approached a slow-down of traffic, our GPS instructed us to exit and follow a route around the stoppage and back to I95.  When I recounted my amazement to my daughter, wondering how in the world?  She enlightened me.  She said it was the cell phone location signals that, when analyzed, identified the slow down and sent advice to our GPS!  This technical application leads me to the subject of this post.

The compilation and analysis of cell phone signals is an example of data collection and analyzation, and it may just be an example of a phenomenon of nature, Collective Thinking.  Herds of herbivores, such as cattle, or bison, or those on the plains of Africa, panic and stampede.  It is the result of a similar circumstance, where a reaction to a threat is passed along from one animal to another in a sort of chain reaction and, voila! we have a stampede.

This same phenomenon occurs in crowds of humans in a confined area when all of a sudden, they fear for their safety and run. The panic spreads very quickly and people have been known to be trampled to death in the melee.

Then there are financial panics where panic selling drives down the cost of stocks for, often, no more than rumors that circulate among investors.  The resulting reaction is often unfounded, and smart investors take advantage of such a dip in the market price of good securities.

Organizations attempt to guide our thinking in ways that are favorable to their programs and policies to so that they will be supported by those who are in their sphere of influence.  In times of prosperity, it is easy to accept the propaganda and go along with the program.  Then when it is seen to be fraudulent and/or detrimental to the population, the house of cards comes tumbling down.  We use elections to "right the boat." When the scale of the fraud is national, revolutions occur and whole governments are displaced.  Populations that are oppressed, rise up and take down the establishment.  Some great examples are the American, French, and Bolshevik revolutions.  Totalitarian governments find ways to suppress rebellion before it gets traction.

That to which all of this leads is Collective Thinking where, at first, the ideas, and the activity  they engender, are innocuous, but as more and more get involved, and the reactions are amplified, the results can be either constructive to an extent not thought possible or destructive to a similar degree.  Each individual feeds off of the emotional reactions of the others and the fire can burn out of control.  It is a good analogy of this phenomenon, that of the wildfire, because that's what it is, an emotional wildfire.

Other strange examples of Collective Thinking are what we know as prayer, and "Positive Thinking."  It defies reason, at times, the way the desired results occur for no apparent reason, or for some out-of-the-blue reason, it happens, just the way the participants wanted.  Could it be that Collective Thinking instigates forces in the immaterial, or spiritual, world to produce desired results?