Critical Reasoning

 The ability to separate our logos or critical reasoning from our mythos or those things we do not understand, cannot prove, and believe without question is what I was referring to when I said: ----"This allows the crowd to remain independent, and decentralized."  Reasoning skills and the ability to reason is a global or universal phenomenon. The problem arises when one attributes faulty logical deductions as reasoning. This is a common denominator in terrorist belief systems.

The term "collective wisdom" that I use is used in the sense that James Surowiecki used when he wrote the book, "The Wisdom of Crowds." This talks of the ability that groups of humans have in figuring things out when given the proper opportunity.

The collective intelligence of crowd’s often mirrors what is known as the "global mind" that Howard Bloom spoke of or what Carl Gustav Jung labeled the "collective unconscious." These shared attributes make up our species as a whole.

The problems that arise when we apply or observe order in the human condition is that we often superimpose our belief system onto what we observe. This is normal when one person is making observations or when a tight group suffering from "groupthink" as Irving Janis called it imposes a hidden political agenda. We have a tendency as humans to judge the infinite through using finite tools, e.g. the unexplainable with the already accepted explanations.

The ideas that  "human life starts at conception, everyone needs someone to be happy,  drugs  kill, god is benevolent, there is only one true god, children don't know anything, people are different." represent what can be called memetic structures as used by Richard Dawkins that hold cultural information that is transferred to progeny to maintain societal norms. The idea of memetics could in itself if held as a belief system without question become memetic.

For more on memes check out http://www.memecentral.com/ and read the online book “Virus of the Mind” by Richard Brodie.