A Portrait of the Collective (political) Brain

  It is one of the great unofficial theories of our time: Public approval is not to be understood in terms of simple individuals making (or not) their choice. On the contrary one must talk of a public, as if they were some kind of communal thinking engine. It is the public that make up their minds about leaders, or parties or products; it is the public who desire that their leader cry or debate or lie in public. It is the public (or at least those who have managed to register to vote – no mean feat since they reformed the system), who will eventually decide the election. - It is all about them or us or it. This Mass-democratic brain theorem makes a tincture of sense, as it certainly captures one aspect of approval – that it is a pack phenomenon. We decide then about politics not as an individual floating in a social vacuum, but rather across all the conversations which we have with one other, and all the images and programmes which we see and hear about our leaders. The issue of government and deciding whom one votes for, is a genuinely collective and interactive act, and the great brain theorem in part reflects that. And yet of course it goes far far further. For it founds both democracy and the position of the media in that democracy.

  Any simple claim that our democracy creates sensible or representative government is tricky. Where is the freedom in only voting once every five years? And what exactly is the logic in a system that demands that one only has one vote, and that in that vote, one must vote for a leader, a party and a representative, in this single act. The idiocy of this is very apparent at the moment. It is all too easy to not want the Tories in power, but not to want Gordon Brown as Prime Minster even more… The system then makes little sense in itself. But if that system somehow can be said, albeit in a backhanded and inelegant way, to represent the decision of a collective mind of the public, then all such reservations are of course mere blither. They are meaningless in front of this dominant political truth. Likewise this truth is very convenient for the media or those who have a power to disseminate knowledge en masse – for they are the very brainwaves of this collective thinking machine. Or perhaps better they are little more than the hormone, communicating and articulating one part of our collective thought processes with another. The great brain theory is then very convenient, and therefore always treated as if it were true. The collective brain has then four key ingredients or aspects, which it shares with the private and individual brain.

  Most importantly of all, our communal brain, is defined within collective thought processes. We think therefore in the action - and through the making up of our minds. And yet this thinking process is defined not within actions such as the registering of opinion. Pollsters are then perpetually painting the portrait of our mind, our collective reaction and judgement. This portrait then describes our thought in reaction to weeping or bullying leaders or vapid and posturing speeches. Moreover so powerful is the thought process taken to be, that its very idea is alone treated as a story. The entire issue in a public debate is coded in terms of how it will play to the public, of how it will allow them to make up their mind(s). The idea of this decision itself becomes then the story, and so itself a power.

  And yet of course there is a natural delimiter to this incarnation of collective thought. Our diviners are prone to mistake our mind or incarnate it in unreliable manners. Pollsters are therefore having to forever define whether they have found a trend or merely a blip. Our ‘collective mind’ is genuinely prone to occasional epileptic spikes, where we create in ourselves a fantasy, but luckily enough the pollsters are there to tell us what is what. And hence the entire back-story of a collective will changing (or not) its mind slowly across time or quickly in reaction to events, becomes then a dominant feature of a campaign. - Much of course to the delight of endless media programmes, which make much out of this pat and easy story. Our collective brain is then drawn all the way up to Election Day, by the unsteady hands of the opinion polls - which tell us what we are all together thinking. On Election Day, it is of course a different matter. On that day and that day alone the collective mind is said to have spoken, and all else falls by the wayside near its divinity and power. 

  The second key aspect of the modern collective political mind lies in its reactive geography. One of the great discoveries of recent years was the MMR scan, and the portraits it paints in electric colours of brains making up their minds and acting. The brain stopped being a lump of fat and gristle or a collective of neurones, and became a luminous agent, whose very actions in the process of thinking were there for all to see. More than that, the brain lost its simple homogeneity. It became rather composed of numerous loops and circuits, or areas where certain decisions were made, and ideas formed, ideas that were then communicated across the whole (or had a consequence for that whole). There has been a similar shift in our understanding of the collective brain. In olden days sociologists would define individuals by type. One was a worker or a manager or a bureaucrat and that was that. One had then as a part of this role, a marked tendency to have a certain set of values and beliefs. It was then to these values and beliefs that different political parties marked themselves out for or not. To win an election was to cobble together a big enough alliance of these eternal verities.

  This static model has by and large been replaced, by a dynamic one. The groups (be they defined by education, consumption, attitude or whatever) are no longer seen as passive entities. On the contrary, the entire logic of these systems demands that they are volatile. What they are thinking then matters - and politicians must worry about this fact (and the media report it). Moreover, these modules of thought are not quite fixed. As the brain itself for certain actions (for example playing tennis) creates certain MMR signatures, so also with the collective brain. Certain events – such as bodies coming back from foreign wars - will create for a while a certain reaction – a certain signature of reaction, and hence collective thought processes in relation to that reaction. What our brain is, i.e., the exact way in which it lights up, changes across time and through places: It is beautifully flexible, as shifting alliances are formed, and communicate their decision to other aspects or parts in the brain. Our minds are our own, in that they can be changed, will learn and might develop. This flexibility is the glory and power of the individual brain and yet can only exist as a nightmare to politicians who would really rather that the world was more simple.

  The third key aspect of our brain is that it is reflexive, and that reflexivity matters. We are then endlessly thinking about who we are and what we are doing. All the more so, because the collective brain is given by and united through its collective identity everywhere the siren voices scream – this is confirmed or rejected in poll evidence. Our ‘evidence’ becomes our collective power. That is, our ability to punch beyond what we are, and demand that others conform to that fact. If we act together, we are a power and know that we are – and in a sense that reflexive knowledge is the power. Indeed one might say that reflexivity was one of the very great powers of modernity, and seeps into everything, and that to be a power one needs to be reflexive and self-defining.

  One of the secret powers of homeopathy lies in that it is necessarily reflexive. The entire juju would not work as a placebo if it were not. Its believers then believe and know that they believe and must continue to believe. A fact lost on its detractors. Worse than that of course the mainstream world is often not so reflexive; It is busy getting on with its own life. The result is then, that in a straight media fight, organized as a sequence of dilemmas across the collective brain, the reflexive nonsense of homeopathy punches way beyond its insight (in terms of knowledge). Its capacity to reflect has become then its true power source.  More than that, this really distorts the process, as it is always easier to be reflexive (and believe) if one is believing against something - some real or imagined foe. It is then easier for clumps of the off the wall to organize themselves than it is for other more representative groups. The result is that there is a real power held in the collective brain, by the off the wall – or at least there is so long as those individuals have access to money to articulate their message to the rest. That is, being self-reflexive is a power as long as one has the ability to communicate that reflexivity to others, and to catch them up in one’s own dream (hence vitamin companies and sellers of cod remedies are a power, in a way that Buddhism is not).

  The fourth aspect of our brain lies in the conscious mind’s ability to delude itself. Our minds are very likely to believe that they have made a choice when actually the brain scans illustrate that the choice has already been made elsewhere, and is merely being reported to the conscious world of thought. Brain as we experience them, then put us in an endless world of backdating and revising. We re-throw what we are in reaction to that which has already been decided and thought. The collective brain of course behaves very similarly both in terms of individual circuits but also as a collective identity. On a collective level, the public would never admit to a mistake. It matters not that the ‘brain’ that is, the will of the mob, is fickle and constantly changing its emphasis. It is always a power in the land, and must always be thought of as such. It must always then be followed, understood, and acknowledged (and need never acknowledge when it is wrong in turn).

  On the individual level, leaders are placed in a world where very often the decisions are made for them or else were not theirs to ever make. At such a time, their only choice is whether to own the decision and so appear decisive, appear that they are in charge, or else fight it, and attempt to create another choice. The latter move is all too often political suicide (it was Blair’s move). One’s reputation will be gambled in a single throw – and one goes against what a people and a collective mind have thought. The joys and perils of being a leader then rest upon either going along with the people, (and claiming credit for success, and blame if it goes wrong) or attempting to fight that will, and risking everything in a single throw. (The latter having destroyed Blair’s reputation in a throw, no matter how good he had been as a Prime Minster – it was only hatred of the Tories that kept him in). Building on from this, is the entire game of whether or not politicians should accept blame (eg; whether then one ought to blame the recession in part on Brown). It is part of the mysticism of political leadership, as it is part of the mysticism of the conscious mind, that it ought (perhaps foolhardily) to accept all responsibility. This is where its power lies. Oh, one can always plead madness or a version of it. A criminal therefore can plead insanity, or a politician that they were victims of forces beyond their control. This appeal is moreover in many ways justified (to a large degree at least). And yet it breaks the spell, the power of politics (or the mind) to act and to claim action. Once one has claimed insanity (or powerlessness) one loses all right to claim good actions for one’s own as well, and all kudos. The result is that while one might be made in the collective or individual brains, one should only say it only in the last resort!

  The classic example of this needing to own the action of others, is the economy. Economic recovery or stagnation is little the product direct or otherwise of government. It is rather conjured up from countless actions and reactions in and across a nation and the world. And yet whatever happens across these reactions, politicians need to claim the credit (if good) or work out a reason why it is not their fault (if bad). Or perhaps more realistically, the face of the conscious mind and politicians are united in this: How they are judged will be defined by how they react to other passions bubbling away inside them. If they accept every opposing (collective) passion too easily or else revel in them, then their fate will be defined by how those passions then play out. If by contrast they oppose in part some of the passions, or warn or hector about where they might lead, then they might gain the rights to stand apart, if it all goes wrong, but will look foolish if is all goes aright. The choice for one’s conscious mind then as well as for one’s politicians is always when and how to join the storms of reflexivity that are composing the thought processes of the brain…

  The equation of the public as collective brain is a complex one. In many ways this is mere laziness of thought by journalists, an easy metaphor; and yet at the same time, the all too easy equation does capture something about both complex systems which are self referential, but also about our ability to understand our being in the context of others. The equation, although ill thought out, and not properly delimited, is then not utterly moribund. And yet the rub lies in that ‘not utterly’, as it is very unlikely that anyone in the media world will worry over much about when the model might work or when it might not. On the contrary, in the build up to the election, the public-as-brain-theorem is everywhere, irrespective of its value or use. It becomes then, the way in which we understand or understand that we understand, our democracy. It becomes then the debate itself, as if it was the sole criterion for making choices (or at least the easiest of criteria). As such it ceases to be a partially valid (or not) theory, and becomes an all too valid political monstrosity, which will dictate, in part, our future.