Social Addiction

Ruminations on Nietzsche and Collective Consciousness

The excerpt below is from Friedrich Nietzche’s The Will to Power:

“The “conscious world” cannot be a starting point for valuing: an “objective” valuation is necessary.

In comparison with the enormous and complicated antagonistic processes which the collective life of every organism represents, its conscious world of feelings, intentions, and valuations, is only a small slice. We have absolutely no right to postulate this particle of consciousness as the object, the wherefore, of the collective phenomena of life: the attainment of consciousness is obviously only an additional means to the unfolding of life and to the extension of its power. This is why it is a piece of childish simplicity to set up happiness, or intellectuality, or morality, or any other individual sphere of consciousness, as the highest value: and maybe to justify “the world” with it.

This is my fundamental objection to all philosophical and moral cosmologies and theologies, to all wherefores and highest values that have appeared in philosophies and philosophic religions hitherto. A kind of means is misunderstood as the object itself: conversely life and its growth of power were debased to a means.

If we wished to postulate an adequate object of life it would not necessarily be related in any way with the category of conscious life; it would require rather to explain conscious life as a means to itself….

The “denial of life” regarded as the object of life, the object of evolution! Existence—a piece of tremendous stupidity! Any such mad interpretation is only the outcome of life’s being measured by factors of consciousness (pleasure and pain, good and evil). Here the means are made to stand against the end—the “unholy”, absurd, and, above all, disagreeable means: how can the end be any use when it requires such means? But where the fault lies is here—instead of looking for the end which would explain the necessity of such means, we posited an end from the start which excludes such means, i.e., we made a desideratum in regard to certain means (especially pleasurable, rational, and virtuous) into a rule, and then only did we decide what end would be desirable….

Where the fundamental fault lies is in the fact that, instead of regarding consciousness as an instrument and an isolated phenomenon of life in general, we made it a standard, the highest value in life: it is the faulty standpoint of a parte ad totum—and that is why all philosophers are instinctively seeking at the present day for a collective consciousness, a thing that lives and wills consciously with all that happens, a “Spirit”, a “God”. But they must be told that it is precisely thus that life is converted into a monster; that a “God” and a general sensorium would necessarily be something on whose account the whole of existence would have to be condemned…. Our greatest relief came when we eliminated the general consciousness which postulates ends and means—in this way we ceased from being necessarily pessimists…. Our greatest indictment of life was the existence of God.”

Emphasis in bold italic mine. What he’s delineating here is the Epicurean paradox. An omniscient, omnipotent god that allows “evil” in the world for the sake of bestowing free will upon his creatures—presumably out of charity—can be neither benevolent, omniscient, nor omnipotent. Therefore, such a God does not exist. This holds true as well for “collective consciousness” and other pantheistic and/or secular attempts to transfer the old religious feeling onto the burgeoning awareness which rises from having long practice in utilizing our consciousness as the diagnostic tool that it is. This is a dissociative psychological natural disaster that, it seems to me, our species is doomed to wreak upon itself for many generations hence before the accumulated cognitive dissonance can be resolved down to the individual level.

For it is always the individual’s dissonance, not the collective’s. The individual uses the collective, safety in numbers, oxytocin/dopamine immersion, etc., like the drug it actually is, to self-medicate against the existential despair that threatens one at every psychological turn outside the insulated sphere of group dynamics. Socialization is, far and away, the most dangerous drug, in that it inevitably does irreparable harm to the entire group, as well as groups to which it is opposed, whereas even an addiction to drugs as hardcore as coke, crack, meth, or smack will yield such visibly bad results for the individual that the group will inevitably shield themselves from the worst of the fallout, and the individual will even isolate themselves as such from the group in order to protect the individual addiction.

WAR is the result of a collective addiction to socialization. A collective “will to power” is far more dangerous than an individual will. Nietzsche took this as another fact of collective life, and I must concede he was right. However, I cannot concede that we individuals should not work toward a philosophy of life, a transvaluation, that might one day remedy this before it is too late.

There are no guarantees other than that we will certainly fail for lack of trying.

So my question for you to ponder today, dear reader, is: how do we keep our need to cooperate socially from becoming an addiction that causes us to blindly support atrocity?