Collective consciousness and its pathologies: Understanding the failure of AIDS control and treatment in the United States

Small, disciplined groups of humans are the most fearsome predators on Earth. In large-scale organization, we have recast even the topography and ecological dynamics of the planet. Our institutions, at all scales, are cognitive, taking the perspectives of Baars [1] and of Atlan and Cohen [2], in that they perceive patterns of threat or opportunity, compare those patterns with some internal, learned or inherited, picture of the world, and then choose one or a small number of responses from a much larger repertory of possibilities.Both individuals and institutions operate within the constraints and affordances of culture, which, to take the perspective of the evolutionary anthropologist Robert Boyd, at the individual level, "...is as much a part of human biology as the enamel on our teeth..." (e.g. [3]).One starting point for understanding the necessity of including culture in the study of cognition or consciousness at any scale lies in the observations of Nisbett et al. [4], and others, following the tradition of Markus and Kitayama [5], regarding fundamental differences in perception between test subjects of Southeast Asian and Western cultural heritage across an broad realm of experiments. East Asian perspectives are characterized as holistic and Western as analytic. Nisbett et al. [4] find:(1) Social organization directs attention to some aspects of the perceptual field at the expense of others.(2) What is attended to influences metaphysics.(3) Metaphysics guides tacit epistemology, that is, beliefs about the nature of the world and causality.(4) Epistemology dictates the development and application of some cognitive processes at the expense of others.(5) Social organization can directly affect the plausibility of metaphysical assumptions, such as whether causality should be regarded as residing in the field vs. in the object.(6) Social organization and social practice can directly influence the development and use of cognitive processes such as dialectical vs. lo