i'm going to return for a second to the theme of collective consciousness, which emerges as a theme together with statism, or as the argument that what one's state is doing one is oneself doing: that the state is all of us, thinking and acting together as a single agent (this is the essence of the idea of the state). now certainly this is fictional and also practically simulated by coercion, and certainly it is also the representation of some fundamental human urge to escape our loneliness etc. but what i want to focus on now is that it justifies collective responsibility, collective punishment, and collective destruction. it justifies terrorism, because there are no non-combatants in a war, and because the people getting blown up each count only as an infinitesimal slice of a larger being or consciousness. so say for example that "we" went to war in iraq. (obviously you're going to have to ignore the lies of people in power, their individual agency, the coercion at the heart of the funding procedures, the continuous manipulative propaganda about american heroes etc etc. which evidently are all techniques for compromising individual agency.) well then 'we' are collectively responsible for the deaths that ensued. and if they were not justified deaths, or if any of them was not justified, then we are all responsible for a crime and should be punished. so for example if someone, outraged by the war, smuggled a suitcase nuke into fresno and blew that shit to smithereens killing 100,000 random americans, that would be perfectly just. the idea of collective consciousness, for example, would justify putting the entire goy, straight, non-gypsy population of germany to death after world war two. and though almost all the individual german bodies that actively participated in the holocaust are gone, germany and the collective soul of the german people persists, so it is not too late to execute every single german, by which means we would kill at most one thing. that is, the idea of collective consciousness blows crime, punishment, violence, responsibility up to a montrous scale and is at the heart of the wholesale destructions we have visited upon each other since the idea came into vogue in nineteenth-century nationalism and marxism.