XV. The Herd MentalityThe social nature of communication and its product self-consciousness has a crucial consequence for self-understanding. Despite our attempts to understand or know ourselves, we can only be self-conscious on terms that are products of society at large. So in attempting to become self-conscious, we become conscious instead of our “averageness.” In this way, our perspective on ourselves is the perspective of the herd. While our actions re in fact individual and unique, when we “translate them into consciousness,” they do not appear to be so. “Everything which becomes consciousness becomes just thereby shallow, meager, relatively stupid.” In fact, highly developed self-consciousness has become a disease in modern Europe.
