Social Evolution and Collective Consciousness: From Individual to Perfect Society

The passage from replicating molecules to populations within a cellular membrane with precise selective properties and actions that assist cellular functioning. Similarly, the first step in social evolution is marked by the transition of the individual into an organically functional subdivision, whose original prototypical cell is clearly the family structure, but which then with settlement expands to the dimensions of a community or village until reaching that of a State. Between these realities there is indicatively the same difference in complexity that exists between a prokaryotic cell, a eukaryotic cell and an animal: in the family cell we have an elementary functional specialization of the individuals that make up the family; this specialization becomes much more evident in a community where each family specializes in its social action; finally, this specialization becomes evident and necessary in the social organism of a State.

In the transition from individual to community a very important discontinuity occurs: the individual gives up and sacrifices an immediate freedom or supremacy in view of security, protection or hypothetical future gain. In synthesis, it manifests the capacity for programming and individual sacrifice in view of an ideal objective. In this case the membrane of the social cell is represented by that selection necessary to allow access to entry into the family or community. If such selection in the family is originally given by the natural bond of biological inheritance and by the social bond of marriage - in whatever form of promise, agreement or pact it occurs - in the case of the community such selection occurred with a form of initiation.

The initiation ritual marks entry into being part of the community or family of initiates and emancipation from the world of the profane. In this sense it is the foundation of the social cell and therefore also of the birth of the idea of people. A people indicates a vast set of persons who have a common sense of belonging. This can be due to biological inheritance, or to cultural, historical, linguistic, geographical as well as religious or spiritual unity. Whatever the origin of this belonging, a people is a collectivity that forms a single super-organism and it is therefore natural to ask whether such a super-organism possesses consciousness and even self-consciousness.

It is not irrelevant in this discussion to note that religious traditions all answer this question positively and in many of these the consciousness of the people is inspired and sometimes personified by angelic intelligences. For example, in the book of Daniel, Dan. 10:13, reference is made to "Michael" as "first of the Princes" and "Prince who stands before the children of your people", identifying with this Name the intelligence or inspiring guide of the Hebrew people.

Analogies between personal development and society! A society develops and evolves very much at the beginning and little after, human evolution moves from physical plane to emotional plane and then mental. Necessary historical phases. The historical life of Man starts from the confusion of Babel and ends with the harmonious unity of Celestial Jerusalem.

The end of human social evolution can be identified in the realization of the perfect Society, that is, of that society that allows the full affirmation of Man's potentialities, the complete terrestrial realization of the archetype or ideal of Man. For the constitution of such a society to be possible, two opposed and simultaneously active phases are necessary: 1. the formation, full development and regeneration of individual human consciousness; 2. the free constitution of regenerated individuals in an ideal society conforming to the archetypal model.

It is clear that a perfect society requires the free adherence of individual persons. However, for individual persons to be able to make a free choice they must first of all be free individuals, not only physically but also emotionally, culturally, socially, psychically and spiritually. They must have reached that purity and inner freedom such as to allow them to make a choice that is not the result of some conditioning or more or less underground coercion. The choice to be made in this case is that towards a complete regeneration of the individual in the absence of which it is impossible to think of being able to constitute or participate in a perfect Society. What in our opinion is the ideal of perfect society, we will explain later, but even if we take as the first and naive model of such society Morelly's model that wants a contribution that is from each according to their own possibilities, to each according to their own needs; even in this case, we said, such society finds its real...