The role played by the collective in the human culture is decisive.
The individual fate of the hero-and the creative Great Individual is indeed a hero-may be the exception, but he is also the exemplar of a process which subsequently affects all individuals in varying degree.
The average ego, the average individual, remains fixed in the group, although in the course of development he is compelled to give up the original security of the unconscious, to evolve a conscious system, and to take upon himself all the complications and sufferings which such development entails.
For the primary security of the unconscious he exchanges the secondary security of the group.
He becomes a group member, and the average man spends at least half his life-the essential part of his development- adapting to the group and allowing himself to be molded by collective trends.
The role played by the collective in the human culture is decisive.
Society, with its conscious postulates, sets up an authority, a spiritual tradition which, spoken or unspoken, forms the background of education,
The individual is molded by the collective through its ethos, its customs, laws, morality, its ritual and religion, its institutions and collective undertakings.
When one considers the original submergence of the individual in the collective, one sees why all collective orientations are so binding and are accepted without question. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 426-427
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