This is the first post in a new series applying my work on the Strong Group Mind (SGM) thesis to political life. The series will cover ideology, polarization, legitimacy crises, political violence, and the neuroscience of collective belief. When complete, the posts will be collected into a short ebook, along with non-posted unique material and offered free to all new paid subscribers. Subscribe below to follow along.
In my book (“From groups to gods: Evolutionary and neuroscience studies of the collective mind” to be published by Cambridge University Press next month in June 2026) I argue that there are entities I call “strong group minds”. I further develop the idea in and “The Anarch as Katechon”. By group mind I mean (roughly speaking) the personality and cognitive capacities that are associated with a collection of individuals assembled for some purpose in a group.
The SGM thesis claims that there exist living entities that are best characterized as abstract, information-theoretic, entities. They can be identified and accurately measured using rigorous formal criteria. What makes them living entities with real agency and causal effects in the world is that they exhibit higher order cognitive states that structures the attitudes of individual members of the group (i.e. downward causation). The empirical evidence for SGMs derives from multiple sources and disciplines. On the evolutionary side, several distinct mid-level theories independently predict that group-level cognitive entities must emerge under natural selection (McNamara, 2026, Table 1.1): multi-level selection (MLS) theory (Smaldino, 2014), which holds that selection can operate on emergent group-level traits, including cognitive and informational capacities, that are irreducible to individual phenotypes and heritable through cultural transmission; group phenotypic composition (GPC) theory (Farine et al., 2015), which demonstrates that an ideal or virtual phenotype in a population functions as an invisible selective template, shaping individual fitness across generations even after the founding members who instantiated it are gone, behaving precisely as a group mind would; lineage fitness theory (LFT) (Nichols, 2023), which posits a “lineage manipulation mechanism” biasing co-descendants and cultural traditions toward reverence for idealized ancestors and totemic symbols, thereby generating persistent trans-generational group-mind content; inclusive fitness theory (Hamilton’s rule: rB > C), which explains the emergence of ultra-cooperative, self-sacrificing behavior in genetically related collectives as a precondition for the kind of division of labor that constitutes a functioning group mind; sexual selection and conflict theory (Haig, 1997, 2000; Crespi & Badcock, 2008), which identifies divergent interests of maternal and paternal lineage genes as a driver of differing coalitional psychologies and group-mind architectures; cumulative cultural evolution (Richerson & Boyd, 1999), under which social learning of cognitive toolkits makes group identity fitness-critical and generates the collective information stores that constitute a group mind’s content; and major evolutionary transition (MET) theory (Maynard Smith & Szathmáry, 1995; Davison & Michod, 2021), which models the recurrent macroevolutionary pattern, independently instantiated at least twelve times in the evolution of eusociality across radically different phylogenetic lineages, by which formerly independent organisms undergo fitness decoupling and transfer, taking on specialized roles within a new superorganism that then exerts downward causation on its components. These are not merely consistent with SGMs: they structurally predict the emergence of informational entities with higher-order causal efficacy over their constituent parts. The psychophysical evidence from insect superorganisms is especially striking because it establishes that cognitive properties exist at the colony level that are entirely absent in individual members. Reina, Bose, Trianni, and Marshall (2018) demonstrated that honeybee colonies as wholes obey three canonical human psychophysical laws, Piéron’s Law (decisions are faster with higher-quality information), the Hick-Hyman Law (decision difficulty scales with the number of options), and Weber’s Law (discrimination difficulty scales with the similarity of alternatives), while individual bees satisfy none of them; the colony, synthesizing vibratory stop signals, waggle-dance tempo encoding of distance and direction, and quorum-threshold dynamics across tens of thousands of individual brains, implements decision-making algorithms of a qualitatively different order than any of its components (Sasaki & Pratt, 2018). Wright et al. (2019), reviewing laboratory and field studies across dozens of eusocial species including bees, ants, and spiders, found that colony-level personalities, defined as temporally consistent between-group behavioral differences across ten dimensions including division of labor, foraging strategy, exploration, boldness, defensive behavior, aggressiveness, decision-making, cognition, learning, and nest construction — are ubiquitous, measurable, heritable, and directly predictive of colony fitness; and that colony personality determines intergroup interaction patterns in ways that precisely parallel the predictions of group mind theory applied to human organizations. At the psychological and cognitive level, the evidentiary base is equally deep. Riedl, Kim, Gupta, Malone, and Woolley (2021), in a meta-analysis of 22 studies comprising 5,279 individuals in 1,356 groups, identified a robust collective intelligence (CI) factor, irreducible to the aggregated abilities of individual members, predicting task performance with an 18% gain per unit increase, with group collaboration process outweighing individual skill in determining outcomes. Halfhill, Sundstrom, Lahner, Calderone, and Nielsen (2005), in an integrative review of the group personality literature, demonstrated that Big Five personality profiles measured at the group level, including characteristic distributions of conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness, correlate significantly with diverse group performance measures across small teams, business firms, and organizations, with specific trait configurations predicting gatekeeper, cooperative, aggressive, and exploratory functional roles in the group mind’s division of labor. De Dreu, Nijstad, and Van Knippenberg (2008), in their motivated information-processing in groups (MIP-G) model synthesizing the experimental literature on group decision-making, established that the combination of epistemic motivation and pro-social orientation predicts superior group-level information integration and judgment quality, with individual member indispensability and decision urgency as modulating variables, a set of findings demonstrating that group-level processing is governed by dynamics irreducible to individual-level cognition. Greeley, Chan, Choi, and Rajaram (2024) showed that the organization of collective memory in recall tasks belongs to the collective rather than to any individual member: participants attempting to organize word lists into logical categories converged on the same categorical structure regardless of individual group composition, demonstrating that logical organization is a group-level emergent property. The transactive memory architecture constituting a key SGM cognitive subsystem involves encoding, storage, and retrieval distributed across members such that each member knows the expertise domains of others, making group retrieval more reliable than individual recall and generating meta-cognitive content, the group knowing what it knows, that no individual member possesses in full (Wegner, 1987; elaborated in McNamara, 2026). Collective emotions constitute a further dimension of SGM cognition: Van Kleef and Fischer (2016) established that groups shape emotions and emotions shape groups through bidirectional collective processes; Sanchez-Burks, Bartel, Rees, and Huy (2015) demonstrated via the Emotional Aperture Measure (EAM) that perception of group-level affect requires a qualitatively more holistic processing style than individual emotion recognition and constitutes a distinct cognitive capacity; Veltmeijer, Gerritsen, and Hindriks (2021) showed that AI systems can classify crowd-level emotions that are measurably distinct from the emotions of individual members; and Thonhauser (2022) established that genuine group emotions possess four irreducible structural features — collective evaluative perspective, collective appraisal, first-person plural awareness (”our emotion”), and co-subject awareness, that together imply a form of phenomenal experience at the collective level. At the information-theoretic level, Engel and Malone (2018) demonstrated that Tononi’s integrated information measure Phi, quantifying information generated by a system as a whole that cannot be decomposed into its parts — correlates with collective intelligence in four-person work groups, providing direct operationalization of the Walker-Davies top-down causal closure criterion in human collectives; and Luppi, Rosas, Mediano, Menon, and Stamatakis (2024), deploying partial information decomposition (PID) across multivariate neural time series, showed that synergistic information content present only in the joint state of multiple sources, unrecoverable from any proper subset, grows superlinearly with source number and predominates in the frontal-parietal networks mediating fluid intelligence, establishing both the mathematical tools and the neural substrate for the synergistic information that constitutes group mind content. Game-theoretic Shapley value analyses independently confirm the reality of irreducible group-level contributions by calculating each member’s marginal addition across all possible coalition combinations, yielding a residual whole-group gain that cannot be attributed to any individual or subset. Finally, List and Pettit (2011) demonstrated from the philosophical side that groups satisfying conditions of universal domain, collective rationality, and anonymity in their judgment aggregation functions satisfy all three criteria for genuine rational agency, representational states, motivational states, and computational processing of affordances, while Shteynberg, Hirsh, Wolf, and colleagues (2023) showed empirically that “we” representations broadcast common knowledge, calibrate attention and emotions toward group-level intentions, assign collective responsibility, and synchronize cognition across members in ways that are strategically sensitive to group-level information rather than merely individual-level information, constituting a theory of collective mind with direct empirical traction.
Now that I have laid out some of the evidence for SGMs (see my book for a more complete explication), I next want to apply some of these ideas to the political realm. In this post I will sketch some of the philosophical background to the SGM idea. I want to argue that some SGMs are political ideologies. If some political ideologies function as SGMS then we have another very powerful tool to strengthen, destroy or change those ideologies.
SGM is a descriptive and explanatory thesis, not a normative one. It describes how group minds actually work, including how they dominate, capture, and exploit individuals. It does not say this is good. In fact the political implication runs in the opposite direction: because SGM identifies precisely how group minds capture, restructure, and exploit individual cognition, it gives us the tools to recognize that capture and resist it. The totalitarian danger is not SGM. The totalitarian danger is a group mind operating without internal checks, without the kind of cognitive independence in some members that allows the group to perceive its own pathologies and correct them.
Precursors to SGM: from Plato to Morton
Plato in his Republic relied heavily on the city-soul analogy. For Plato the city genuinely has psychic properties: it can be just or unjust, healthy or sick, wise or intemperate, in the same sense that an individual can. It has a characteristic form of desire, a characteristic relationship between its rational, spirited, and appetitive parts, and when these fall out of proper relation the city becomes pathological in specific, predictable ways. Plato’s analysis of democratic and tyrannical regimes as specific forms of collective psychic disorder, each with its characteristic symptomology and its characteristic trajectory of degeneration, is a surprisingly precise description of what SGM calls group-mind phase transitions. The philosopher-king’s task is the maintenance of the group mind’s internal governance structure, ensuring that its rational functions remain sovereign over its appetitive ones. The oldest political philosophy in the Western tradition is, at its core, a theory of collective mental health.
Many philosophers who wrote in the middle ages between Plato (Augustine most particularly) and the moderns sharpened Plato’s original insights into the polis as a living entity but, for reasons of space here, I will skip to the moderns.
Hegel is perhaps the most important modern philosophical precursor to SGM. His concept of Geist, particularly as it operates through collective historical formations, nations, states, world-historical peoples, is the most philosophically developed precursor to SGM in the tradition. Hegel explicitly argues that the state is not an aggregation of individuals but an organic whole with its own rational self-consciousness, that individuals are what they are only in virtue of their participation in this larger whole, and that the whole exerts genuine causal power over its components through the medium of shared ethical life, Sittlichkeit. The ethical life of a community is not a set of rules that individuals follow. It is the medium in which individual identity is constituted, the group mind’s representational system installed in individual cognition as the very structure of moral perception.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Critique of Dialectical Reason” (1960) is perhaps the most rigorous attempt in the existentialist tradition to think collective life as something ontologically real rather than merely aggregative, and it converges on SGM from a direction that will surprise readers who know Sartre only as the philosopher of radical individual freedom. The key distinction is between the series and the groupe en fusion. A series is a collection of individuals related only by their common situation and mutual separateness, Sartre’s example is people waiting for a bus, each defined by their isolation from the others, their shared condition producing no genuine collectivity and no shared agency. The fused group emerges at a specific moment, typically under threat, when this seriality dissolves and individuals constitute themselves as a genuine collective subject with shared being and shared causal power. This is not a metaphor for Sartre. The fused group has real ontological status irreducible to its members, because the members are partly what they are in virtue of belonging to it. What Sartre could not explain was why this happens, what mechanisms produce the phase transition from series to fused group, or why the fused group has the specific properties it does. SGM provides exactly that explanation: the fused group is a strong group mind achieving organizational closure, and the mechanisms of that closure are cognitive capture, identity fusion, and sacred value formation operating on individual nervous systems. Sartre was also acutely aware of the group’s tendency toward what he called the practico-inert, the petrification of living collective praxis into institutional structures that then confront members as alien external force, and of the terror the group deploys against potential defectors when its internal cohesion begins to fail.
Elias Canetti’s “Crowds and Power” (1960) is the most sustained phenomenological analysis of collective behavior ever written, and it is directly proto-SGM in ways that deserve far more attention than the book currently receives in political theory. Canetti’s central insight is that the crowd is a distinct kind of entity with its own internal logic, its own discharge, its own relationship to individual members that cannot be reduced to the psychology of those members. The discharge, the moment when the crowd abolishes individual separateness and individuals surrender their distinctness to the collective, is a phenomenological description of what SGM calls identity fusion, the collapse of the boundary between self-representation and group representation at the neural level. Canetti’s analysis of crowd symbols, the flags, anthems, sacred narratives, and territorial spaces that maintain the crowd’s representational integrity between moments of actual assembly, maps precisely onto SGM’s account of homeostatic mechanisms, the devices by which a group mind sustains its organizational closure when its members are dispersed. Most strikingly, his concept of the crowd crystal, the small, rigid, fanatical group whose internal cohesion triggers larger crowd formations around it, anticipates almost exactly the keystone individual research in the insect colony literature: the small number of highly activated members who catalyze collective response far exceeding any individual’s independent capacity. Canetti saw the mechanism. He did not have the biology or information theory to explain it.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari arrive at the problem from a different angle but converge on similar territory. Their concept of the desiring-machine, developed in “Anti-Oedipus” (1972) and “A Thousand Plateaus” (1980), is an attempt to describe productive assemblages that are neither individuals nor organizations but something in between: functional systems that produce effects through the coupling of heterogeneous components, none of which contains the system’s productive capacity on its own. Their war machine is particularly relevant: a social machine that exists outside and in opposition to the state apparatus, that produces its own forms of collective subjectivity, its own sacred values, its own logic of sacrifice, and that the state must either capture and domesticate or destroy. The Body without Organs is their attempt to describe the plane of immanence on which these assemblages operate, the distributed substrate that the group mind colonizes without being identical to any of its components. Deleuze and Guattari were resisting the individualism of orthodox psychoanalysis and the mechanistic determinism of orthodox Marxism simultaneously. They wanted to describe collective life as productive and creative, not merely as the aggregation of individual drives or the reflex of economic structures. SGM vindicates this intuition and grounds it biologically and in information theoretic terms. The assemblage is real. The desiring-machine produces real effects. What Deleuze and Guattari could not provide was an account of why assemblages with these properties arise, how they maintain themselves, and what the mechanisms of their causal power over individuals actually are. SGM provides exactly that account.
Slavoj Zizek approaches the problem of the political through Lacan’s concept of the big Other, the symbolic order that structures desire and organizes social reality. For Zizek, ideology is not a set of false beliefs held by individuals, not a screen or distortion, but a real social substance, a set of material practices and symbolic forms that constitutes the subject rather than merely misleading it. His repeated insistence that ideology works not by fooling people but by structuring what they can experience as real, what can appear as a possible thought, what registers as thinkable and what as unthinkable, is precisely the SGM mechanism of cognitive capture restated in Lacanian vocabulary. Zizek’s big Other is the group mind’s representational system operating (via downward causation) on the individual’s cognitive architecture from below the level of explicit belief. His insight that the cynical subject who disavows ideology while performing its rituals is still fully captured by it is the SGM observation that cognitive capture does not require sincere propositional belief. It requires only that the individual’s behavior and perceptual framing remain organized around the group mind’s representations, which they do, even for the cynic, because the group mind’s representations have been installed in the cognitive architecture below the level of conscious endorsement. Zizek saw the mechanism clearly. He did not have the neuroscience to ground it or the evolutionary biology to explain why it exists.
Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject, (2013), adds an important ontological dimension. Hyperobjects are things so massively distributed in time and space that they transcend any local manifestation: climate, capitalism, the biosphere. Morton’s key insight is that hyperobjects are real but cannot be directly observed from within. You encounter their local manifestations, their symptoms, their effects on specific places and specific bodies, but the hyperobject itself is always elsewhere, always exceeding any attempt to grasp it whole from any single vantage point. Political ideologies and the group minds that generate them have exactly this character. You encounter the ideology’s local effects, in your own cognitive framing, in the institutional structures around you, in the social penalties for deviation, but the group mind itself is always distributed across more nodes than any individual can observe from within. It is, in Morton’s sense, a hyperobject: real, causally powerful, and systematically resistant to the kind of direct observation that would allow you to grasp it as a totality. Morton does not have a theory of how hyperobjects maintain themselves or exercise causal power over their components. SGM does. The combination of Morton’s ontology of distributed real entities with SGM’s account of the biological mechanisms of collective minds is more powerful than either framework alone.
So far I have only looked at philosophers on the left. What about philosophers on the right? It turns out that they too were moving toward the SGM thesis.
Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power is frequently misread as a theory of individual domination, but Nietzsche was explicit that the will to power operates at the level of drives, forces, and configurations that are fundamentally collective and pre-individual in character. His analysis of slave morality and master morality in the Genealogy of Morals is, on the SGM reading, a theory of how two rival group minds, each with its own sacred value structure, its own cognitive capture mechanisms, and its own boundary-enforcement strategies, compete for dominance over individual nervous systems. The ressentiment that generates slave morality is not an individual psychological state. It is a group-level representational strategy, a way of reorganizing the collective’s relationship to power by revaluing the terms in which power is perceived and desired. Nietzsche saw that ideological systems do not merely describe the world. They restructure the nervous systems of the people who inhabit them, making certain perceptions available and others impossible. He did not have the neuroscience to specify the mechanisms. SGM does.
Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West” (1918-1922) developed what Spengler called a morphological theory of civilizations, in which each great culture is conceptualized as an organic superorganism with its own Seele, its own soul-form that expresses itself through every domain of collective life from mathematics to architecture to political organization. In short, the polis from the local village up to the civilizational level is literally a superorganism—just as SGM claims. These entities grow, mature, and decline as organisms do, according to an internal logic that no individual fully understands and no political will can ultimately override. The Faustian soul of Western civilization, the Apollonian soul of classical antiquity, the Magian soul of the Arabian world, these are, in SGM terms, group-mind architectures so pervasive and so deeply installed in individual cognition that they constitute the priors” or basic operating principles of the relevant group minds.
Alain de Benoist’s concept of ethnopluralism, the idea that distinct peoples constitute irreducibly different cultural organisms that have a right to self-preservation against homogenizing globalism, is an attempt to ground group-mind ontology in a political program. More useful for SGM purposes is his explicitly Gramscian strategy of metapolitics: the argument that political power is always downstream of cultural hegemony, that the real battle is not for electoral majorities but for the representational frameworks within which political possibility is defined. This is, in the language of SGM, a practitioner’s theory of how group minds capture institutions and install their representational systems as the default cognitive architecture of a society. De Benoist understood that you win politically by first winning the group mind, by making your sacred values the unquestioned background assumptions of an entire culture.
Alexander Dugin’s “ Fourth Political Theory” represents the most explicit contemporary attempt to theorize a superorganic political subject. His concept of the narod, the people as a Heideggerian Dasein operating at the collective level, is a direct intuition of the group mind as ontological reality. For Dugin, the people is not a collection of individuals who share certain characteristics. It is a being-in-the-world that has its own mode of existence, its own relationship to time and space, its own forms of truth and meaning, that cannot be reduced to the individuals who instantiate it.
Leo Strauss performed the heroic task of the recovery of the classical teaching that the political regime (politeia) is not primarily a set of institutions but the living ethos and character of a polis that shapes the desires, opinions, and aspirations of its members from the top down (The City and Man, 1964; Natural Right and History, 1953). This is structurally identical to what the SGM framework calls downward causation: the group-level entity reaching into individual cognitive and motivational states and restructuring them. Strauss makes this explicit in his reading of Plato’s Laws, where he states that the so-called Nocturnal Council is to be for the city what the mind is for the human individual. This claim of course explicitly identifies a specialized collective organ whose integrated knowledge of virtue, cosmology, and law constitutes the rational faculty of the political community as a whole, precisely what SGM theory would call the city’s transactive memory hub and executive control network. Yet Strauss could only describe these phenomena; he had no theory of what group minds actually are or how they exert their causal force. The SGM framework provides that theory, and in doing so it also corrects the most common misreading of Strauss’s take, as I understand it, on Socrates. Some readings of Strauss’ treatment of Socrates sees him as the figure who stands “above it all” surveying political opinion from the altitude of reason or what Strauss called natural right. But in my view what distinguishes Socrates is not epistemic altitude/grandiosity but epistemic humility, he knows that he does not know. This is precisely the operative principle of the Anarch as I have developed him in my book “The Anarch as Katechon”. Philosopher’s cannot stand aside the political fray…they cannot obtain a God’s-eye view of the political scene…Their hands are just as dirty as anyone elses…What a philosopher can do however is use reason to approach (but never exhaust the understanding of) the Real, the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Reason on this view is not a pristine, unsullied transcendent tool, but it can help one to resist to the premature closure that every group mind inevitably demands. The philosopher’s (and The Anarch’s) katechonic function is therefore not exile from the superorganism but a specific mode of engagement with it, one that preserves both individual sovereignty and the group mind’s capacity for genuine revision, functioning as the immune system of the collective against its own pathological closure.
I have now very briefly sketched some of the philosophical background to the SGM thesis. In future posts in this series I will get into implications for political praxis assuming that SGMs are what we grapple with in political struggles.
The framework I am developing in these posts draws on my books “From Groups to Gods: Neuroscience and Evolution of the Collective Mind” (Cambridge University Press, 2026), and “The Anarch as Katechon” both available at Amazon. Subscribe to follow the series. New paid subscribers will receive the completed ebook when the series is done.