Of conscious purpose and unconscious polities.

How is the conscious purpose of society expressed in its policies? Does a society even know what its doing? Is it even conscious?
The only thing that I can think of that resembles a conscious purpose is expressed in our economic policies. Our conscious description is called the Gross National Product and it is invisable, and pollution is most visable, the abstraction is taken for concrete reality while the sensuous experience dismissed to the margins of society. Another way of saying this is our political interpritation of life is less than its full existance in an ecology. Our conscious purpose is nothing more than illusory abstractions. The industrial nation state with its GNP is the conscious polity, but the unconscious polity with its noise and pollution is the gaseous and nebular shape of things to come.
Why? Is there some form of membrane between the mind and the environment that we must transend?

No.

– of which there is no universal agreement.
Even if there was a universal agreement, it would not be generated by one entity. Only individuals have a consciousness.

You are talking about something else.

Society is conscious. It is not, however, as SELF-conscious as the average individual. Society has all sorts of semi-conscious purposes: peace, war, prosperity, integration, expansion, economy, preservation, education etc - these purposes, like individual purposes, often conflict, but they are there and they influence our behaviors on an individual as well as collective level.

Are there any holdouts in American society that have sucessfully resisted economic growth?
Im talking about two things.

This may be true, but equally true is that where one individual ends and another begins is a matter of conscious perspective - Consciousness is always bigger than the individual.

social consciousness resides as the aggregate of human individual wills; taken as such, they at first appear benevolent and retrogressive. however, the relationship is not one-way; forms compete for dominance, and such competition necessarily implies inequality of distribution. when the forms fail, consciousness entails deliberation of dead-end ideas, the lost forgotten components of social apparatus. negative and abstract change moves foremost to the front of extraneous discourse. without a solid, meaningful window of genericism, how can change be quantified so as to evaluate relations at all? why even bother? society itself exists as quantitative clinging, machine de-facto interrogate, and as such conceptual and or voltional interrelations tend necessarily to superceed willful manifestations. in terms of the soul, humanity as social apparatus deems adequate the entailment or sufficiency of illustrious and core resiliance to and against cornerstones of drastic or transitive changes. without such a verb of transition, hope for meaningful realisation of economic sublinguality cannot help but be permanently lost…

You lost me here:

can you clarify?

would take too long to deconceptualize down to the concrete level of colloquial discourse and thought, sorry…

Of unconscious polities.
If a political policy is unsound one discovers it through noise. Noise is the expression of the ignored. As the noise builds up it reaches a point in which it overwhelms the signal and then gets a reversal in which the noise begins to be heard as information. Polution is a form of noise in the transmission of human conscious purpose into the wild. As pollution builds up it will reach the point when when it will overwhelm the signal and the industrial rhetoric will become a noise mechanically recited by people still invoking a historical envelopment that is no longer the actual historical environment. Noise represents a form of echo or shadow to the unrecognized civilazational system. A civilizational unconscious.
Naturally all nation states are part of a larger biome, the single planetary biosphere of the Earth. This is the politics of life on Earth.

Simplifying in the extreme, I think TTG means that society is an automaton that stifles individual self-expression, which can only be achieved through movement (transition).

I wonder how individualism would fare without the conscious support of social structures …

individualist and socializing forces are mutually exclusive-- a degree of one precludes an equal degree of the other.

I don’t think it’s that cut and dry - the dichotomy belies the ways in which society fosters individualism and the ways in which societies themselves function as individuals … the whole concept of an “individual” occurs against the backdrop of social realities - there is no finite singularity without multiplicity, after all

Like freedom and order, growth and decay, they’re mutually opposing forces.
Its the difference that makes the difference and drives the system.

your half right; individualism and collectivism, as natural forces, ARE opposite and exclusive processes. the process of individualization reflects the limiting of overall relations, as well as the centralizing of the causal power over relations. collectivization reflects the delimiting of overall relations, and the decentralizing of causal power over them.

you are correct that society acts individually; this is because individualism as a force applies to all dynamic entities or organizations, and society itself is no exeption. because of the disconnected and individualistic nature of the components making up society (i.e. human individuals) individualism tends to remain on a low level for the overall society; however, with the multiplication of connections and relations between individuals, and the growing influence of social forces such as comformity pressure, via technology, individualism is now rising up the chain of being, to incorporate larger and more abstract structures. individualism is just the restricting of causal influence and control over the various relations affecting the entity itself, so in this sense individualism as a force or tendency DOES apply to society itself, in increasing amounts. however, this should not be confused with human intelligence or awareness: just because society is individualizing and centralizing its control and powers of action, does not mean it is “conscious”, “aware” or “intelligent”; individualization and collectivization (the opposing process) are just simple natural forces (like natural selection) which determine the tendencies of behavior of entities composed of multiple and mutually-causal aggregates of singularities.

individuals always learn faster than institutions. I fact institutions often rigidify. resisting change, others stagnate and decay. Destructuring is a natural process like composting, creating a rich new soil for regeneration. You may have noticed our society has been destructuring lately and is restructuring to the post industrial phase. There is a new global economic commons that is the global economy.

actually, the rigitity and resistance to change we see happening in institutions is a result of their becoming more centralized, i.e. more individualized. as individualization begins to have greater sway over collective entities such as institutions and society, those institutions and societies lose their ability to extract information from a wide spectrum of sources and relations. individualism entails the limiting of relations, and this restricts the totality of information aquired.

the individual is far, far less able to extract raw quantities of information than the collective. the misunderstanding here i think stems from the fact that, despite this, individuals exhibit control or direction over behavior, whereas collectives are moved by impersonal and non-self-caused forces… this may lead us to assume that individuals “learn faster” but this is in fact incorrect. ability to intake information is not equivolent to ability to use information in varying ways.

Actually I was refering to traditional positions that resist deviations from entrenched mentalities. Supressing the new individual ideas within the institution itself for change.

This is why I strongly believe that science is not greater than the individual scientist. Science should not rule over us by supressing individual thought from within the system.

Instututions are not aware, individuals are, indivduals are able to shift attention and inform the instutution. Thats what I mean by individuals learn faster. Enforcing out dated policies and styles of industrialism on an unwilling society will result in revolt and insurection by individuals. Usually for the institution it means giving up something, and thats whats causing the resistance. When the old way of doing things starts failing you need individuals to asses options, scan for opportunity and and inform the system. Individuals are the attractors that pull the system into the new state. Doing nothing is a most dangerous action.