It is a very curious facet of the need to work together that we seem to be a species that needs to think together as well. I am not sure anyone has done much research on this outside of looking at ‘cultural homogeneity’ and I am sure that when a group goes through the same experience it throws up relationship-bonds in similarities of response.
But the animal in us is very strong which is why, it appears, we need leaders so much. One person to represent us all. There is a joke in Israel that is it a country where there are six million Presidents. And in a way that is how the world should be, a place where there are six billion leaders. Surely that is a better world to live in that one where there are six billion followers?
I am always amused by how people pass through the years of their lives and somewhere along the way, become a ‘generation’. I heard a musician say once that he didn’t know what it was but something ‘happened’ to music when he reached the age of thirty. This is why people ‘look-down’ at others for the way they dress, they way they speak, the music they play.
But they fail to look down at the way we all follow. The way we give away power. The way we all accept inventions without question as part of the human way of doing things.
I wonder how much of civilisation really exists in any of us. How many values would survive if any of us were the last human being.