The Idea and the Collective Consciousness

The fertilizing power and function of the idea in/on the collective mind.
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A rational mind do often have not the possibility to grasp into the function of the idea and of the thinker, the writer, which normally results to be a  box of resonance for actual changes, or even a kind of visionary of the future direction of the cultural development of the society, and we have to refer here to the -main- cultural stream and not that deep less parody of it in later post-industrial  so called "culture", which, meaningless in itself, is quite a revealing factor  of psychological order that we cant afford here to analyze.

The main stream we refer to was that represented by the ideas of existentialism and the new humanism appearing in Europe during 1700 which was the base for the cultural and social revolutions.

At the same time that people started to be critically conscious of its dependence on governing powers heavily discriminative, the writer and the thinker were attracted by the same subject, and literature become mainly related with that, by the pen of writers of the caliber of F. Dostoyevsky in Russia, or later in France with Sartre, whose works where proscribed and condemned to the "Index Librorum Prohibitorum" by the catholic Church...
This social and literary effervescence bent the cultural stream from an idealistic and romantic view towards a more realistic one, sensible to the social  and human problem, which was in itself the very ground of modern realism, either social, political or literary and artistic, which shacked the very foundation of the previous social order promoting all the revolutions which followed.

An important point here is to consider that "history is wrote by the winner", and evidently those remarks are not necessarily shared by the opinion and general view of history of the later cultural-political stream which only superficially grasped in the whole value and unpreventable consequence  of the appearance of that new vision into society, and else, even if they understood it, they would rather keep it silenced in their own interest.
Because the  undisputed fact is, that it continued and  continues even now to manifest itself in the society with alternate consequences, but as the whirls of an ever expanding spiral of awareness of the general consciousness.

Even the pacifist and beatnik social phenomenon of early´60thies which later had a deep cultural influence all over the planet in certain aspects of its values as in the case of music, was the actual ferment into society of  a less evident sensibility to social, environmental, and spiritual aspects of human existence, of which the beatnik was the forerunner; the existentialism and humanitarianism was its base, and though invisible, it penetrated in the thought of even larger segments of the population becoming now a first clear result of that subliminal growth, which is represented in the citizen´s movements all over the world  and such wide spreading interest in a more balanced life when not a true search for a spiritual meaning to life.