Last night, I finished the book Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches by Marvin Harris. It is a fascinating look into different cultures and beliefs and the reason these cultures have or had these beliefs. While the author is first and foremost an anthropologist and sociologist, his epilogue does mention behavioral science several times and the book was purchased at the annual Association of Behavior Analyst Conference (ABA). If you are interested in understanding the real reason why cows are worshiped in India or how educated people could have put 500,000 people to death for witchcraft in the 1500′s and 1600′s, I highly recommend it.
For me, the book brought into sharp relief the idea of our collective consciousness. We, as a society of people who live together, share common beliefs in what is natural, normal, and status quo. Individuals have the ability to influence these beliefs, but it takes a collective movement to make these trends wide spread. While our internal verbal monologue tricks us into believing that we can exercise our “free-will” at any moment, we are bound by this collective societal consciousness, and, with very few exceptions, don’t even bother to try and predict what is outside this structure.
Examples of this collective consciousness include the idea that America is free. This idea is taught to our youth growing up with grandeur and rigor. It is celebrated with fireworks and hot dogs. But yet we pay the same taxes our fore fathers fought to avoid. We have immigration issues and strict rules on what is acceptable behavior in public. I am not criticizing the USA. In the bounds of the United States, we are more free than the bounds of almost any other country, and I appreciate this and wouldn’t choose to live any where else. I only mean to articulate that when a sociologist looks back on the United States in three or four hundred years from now, will this idea of freedom be as foreign to the people of that time as the idea that God would deliver riches on the back of a cargo ship as believed by people in New Guinea is to us now.