The Collective Mind and Its Unconscious

Let us begin with one clear image: humanity sprawling across the globe, technological networks glittering like synapses under a vast fMRI scan, fiber-optic cables as axons, smartphones as dendritic tips, missiles as bursts of neurotransmitters, the stock exchange as a convulsive epileptic fit. This is not merely a metaphor. If Lacan’s dictum that “the unconscious is structured like a language” still holds, then the global mind—the planetary nervous system—must be grasped precisely as a split linguistic apparatus, riddled with gaps, repression, disavowal, and symptomatic eruptions.

What if this collective brain is already psychotic? That is, what if the world-mind we inhabit is not a smoothly integrated consciousness, but a fractured subject whose “I” is split between the hallucination of a benevolent ego (the “international community,” as Washington PR departments name it) and the eruptive return of its repressed (Houthis with homemade drones, hackers in St. Petersburg basements, shamanic cults in the Amazon livestreaming ceremonies on YouTube)?

The Ego of the World-Mind

In Lacanian terms, the “international community” is the Imaginary ego-image of humanity. Like the self-image you see in the mirror—slim, coherent, radiant—while ignoring the digestive noises, anal secretions, and pimples, the ego of humanity is the sanitized version projected by CNN, the BBC, the New York Times editorial board, Brussels bureaucrats, and Silicon Valley philanthropists. This Imaginary coherence is always haunted by the Symbolic demand: “Act as if this is humanity as such.”

But of course this “as if” hides the obscene underside. In Žižek’s language, ideology functions not by hiding the truth but by providing a fantasy framework through which contradictions appear resolved. Thus the fantasy of the international community: democracy, human rights, peacekeeping—this fantasy covers over drone strikes, sanctions that starve children, and IMF austerity packages.

To put it more crudely in the Robert Anton Wilson register: the mainstream brain circuit runs on a high dose of semantic narcotics. CNN and the Pentagon beam “consensus reality” into the frontal lobe of the species, and most mammals nod along.

The Repressed Returns

Yet no repression works without the return of the repressed. The global unconscious is the swarm of “outlaw” entities: Russia with its nostalgic dreams of empire, Houthis with their cheap drones puncturing billion-dollar missile systems, Hamas smuggling videos through tunnels, forgotten tribes, cults, and all the nations consigned to the infamous category of “third world.”

From a Lacanian perspective, these are not merely external Others. They are the real of the global psyche, that which cannot be symbolized within the smooth discourse of international community. The Real, in Lacan, is not reality as such but precisely what resists symbolization—what returns as trauma. Gaza, Yemen, the failed state, the starving population: these are not “mistakes” in the system but structural necessities. The more the international community insists on its peaceful humanitarian mission, the more the unconscious erupts in violent spasms, as if to say: “You forgot this!”

Žižek loves to cite the uncanny moment when fantasy and reality overlap. Here too: the fantasy of “fighting terrorism” creates terrorists, the fantasy of “deterring aggression” creates aggression. In the neurotic structure of the global brain, repression always generates its own symptom.

Circuits and Chapel Perilous

Robert Anton Wilson would push the metaphor further into the psychedelic: the species-brain operates on multiple circuits (see his eight-circuit model). The conscious ego of mainstream politics is stuck on the fourth circuit—domesticated social-moral conditioning, parliamentary rituals, the rule of law. Meanwhile the unconscious throbs with first-circuit survival terror (rockets raining down, piracy in the Gulf of Aden), second-circuit dominance struggles (Russia vs. NATO, gang vs. gang), and sixth-circuit shamanic visions (ayahuasca cults, QAnon prophets).

When you widen the lens, what emerges is a collective Chapel Perilous: nobody knows whether the voice in their head is God, the CIA, or a Russian troll farm. The unconscious is not simply “out there” in Yemen or in the caves of Tora Bora—it is also in the West’s own paranoid hallucinations. Every Pentagon PowerPoint about “hybrid warfare” is a displaced dream report, every FBI bulletin on cults is a Freudian slip.

The Global Superego

Let us not forget the superego—the obscene injunction. Lacan taught that the superego does not merely prohibit (“thou shalt not”) but commands enjoyment (“you must!”). On the global scale, the superegoic voice emanates from the very core of Western liberal capitalism: “Enjoy democracy! Celebrate diversity! Consume responsibly!” But simultaneously: “Buy the iPhone, bomb the Middle East, smile while you do it.”

This is why the unconscious eruptions are always excessive. The suicide bomber enjoys his sacrifice. The Russian oligarch enjoys his kitsch nationalism. The Houthis enjoy taunting the Saudi coalition. Their obscene enjoyment mirrors and mocks the obscene enjoyment of the liberal West. What unites them is not difference but a shared excess beyond rational interest.

Consciousness as Symptom

Here we arrive at the most unsettling thesis: what if the conscious space of humanity—the mainstream discourse of reason, democracy, rights—is itself nothing but a symptom of the unconscious? That is to say: perhaps “international community” is not the real consciousness but a hysterical defense against the Real of humanity’s own drives.

For Lacan, the subject is always split between the Symbolic and the Real. For Žižek, ideology is always a fantasy screen. For Wilson, reality tunnels filter the chaos. Put them together: the planetary brain is a schizophrenic subject, clinging to the fantasy of coherence while its unconscious seethes with contradictory drives.

Toward a Psychoanalysis of the World

What would it mean to psychoanalyze this planetary mind? Not to cure it—for psychoanalysis never cures in the medical sense—but to make it speak its symptom. Imagine a global talking cure: the UN as analyst, the nations as analysands, the speeches as free associations. “Tell me, dear Humanity, what do you dream of?” The answer would not be human rights but rockets, not freedom but oil, not peace but the death drive repeating endlessly in the deserts, the jungles, the digital swamps.

Žižek often insists: the death drive is not simply destruction but the compulsion to repeat, to circulate around a void. The unconscious of humanity repeats endlessly: colonialism disguised as humanitarianism, terrorism disguised as liberation, technology disguised as emancipation but returning as surveillance. The world-brain is caught in this compulsive loop.

Wilson, ever more optimistic, would add: in Chapel Perilous, one learns to surf the paranoia. Maybe the only way forward is not integration (the fantasy of a unified rational world-ego) but proliferation—accepting multiple reality tunnels, embracing the unconscious as creativity rather than pathology.

Conclusion: The Brain that Dreams

So, is humanity conscious? Or is it a dreaming brain, with the US media as the dream-ego narrating coherence, while the unconscious erupts in nightmares from Yemen to Donetsk? The answer, in true dialectical fashion, is both. Consciousness itself is a dream, a narrative that organizes trauma. The unconscious is the forgotten remainder that insists, returns, explodes.

The world-brain is, therefore, hysterical. Its consciousness (international community) is a fragile narrative trying to cover up the enjoyment of power, money, war. Its unconscious (terror, cults, repressed nations) is the obscene underside. To analyze it in Lacanian-Žižekian fashion is to see that the very distinction between consciousness and unconscious is itself unstable, a Möbius strip where the inside becomes the outside.

Or, as Robert Anton Wilson might quip: the collective mind of humanity has checked into Chapel Perilous and forgotten the checkout date. Every news headline is a Rorschach blot. Every missile strike is a Freudian slip. Every humanitarian appeal is a symptom. The only cure is to laugh hysterically, analyze ruthlessly, and maybe—just maybe—learn to rewire the brain before it burns itself out in the compulsive enjoyment of its own death drive.

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