This chapter considers a number of aspects of Berlin’s celebrated essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’. These include a consideration of the origins and evolution of Berlin’s famous essay; the connections between the metaphor derived from an ancient Greek poet and his more philosophically explicit visions of monism and pluralism; Tolstoy’s conflictual view of history and Berlin’s assessment of both; and finally, Tolstoy’s identity as a child of the Enlightenment and his accompanying inability to accept the foxy nature of historical contingency (even if his artistic talent expressed this peerlessly) but also his failure to discuss man’s inhumanity to man, namely evil, in the profound way we might expect of such a major writer as him.

Chapter 3 focuses on writing about the stage in essays, periodical fiction, and “moveable” books to explore the truism that no eighteenth-century theatrical form was more hyperactive than pantomime. Harlequin’s antics are the epitome of wantonness in that they are reckless and racy and flout the narration of a causal sequence. In response to debates about Garrick’s new hyperkinetic acting style, writers such as Denis Diderot and Arthur Murphy theorized new ways to understand the complex relationships between playwrights, actors, audiences, and at-home readers. Beginning in the 1770s, Sayer’s turn-up harlequinade flipbooks offered a new way to represent Harlequin’s motions on paper. Turn-up books allow the reader to control the plot: they oversee that special sense of wantonness and play that arises from capricious and irreverent action. Harlequin’s hyperactivity becomes in the turn-up book a form of hyper-interactivity, one in which the reader is the prime mover.

I trace the development of group mind phenomena into the Neolithic with the rise of agricultural and large settlements. Here, ancestor worship came into its own. I use Nichols’ lineage fitness theory to help understand ancestor worship. Its putative “lineage manipulation mechanism” is basically a recipe for creating the cultural software for the generation of a group mind within the co-descendants of the familial lineage in question. Rituals (discussed in these and other chapters), too, can be said to be a source of construction of group minds. I use Whitehouse’s classification of religious rituals into two broad cultural subgroups: high-arousal, intensely imagistic, but low-frequency rituals versus high-frequency, more verbal-centric, doctrinal rituals. The former are characterized by dysphoric experiences (e.g. via painful or terrifying initiation experiences), while the latter doctrinal rituals, by contrast, are very frequent, less emotionally intense, and may even be quite tedious. I argue that these two broad families of rituals are driven by evolutionary sexual conflict and ritualization. Men and women typically build different kinds of group alliances and therefore differing types of group minds rooted in ancient ancestral ritual practices.

Chapter 1 argues that two major changes in the long eighteenth century brought questions about literary sensorimotor imagery to the fore: first, the blending of classical models of rhetoric with modern philosophical theories about how the mind moves; and second, the proliferation of reproducible printed illustrations. In the first case, because the passions were explained by the flow of humours and animal spirits or the vibration of nerves, emotion was motion in essays on criticism. Dennis, Kames, and Johnson promoted sensorimotor models of reading and writing that, even as pamphlets and periodicals increasingly satirized mind-in-motion models, continued to wield enormous explanatory power in theories about human agency and creativity. In the second case, serpentine line illustrations in works by Cavendish, Hogarth, and Sterne demonstrate how printed images were not only visual cues but also embodied proprioceptive prompts inviting readers to imagine their bodies in motion.

Berlin sees the history of philosophy as a history not just of the struggle to find answers to certain questions, but (because of the distinctive nature of these questions) to find the right means of framing them in the first place, as well as of determining the answers’ viability. He concentrates on how Enlightenment philosophers, thrilled by the success of science, sought to apply scientific procedures to ‘all that related to the social life of men’, and he focusses on the variously implemented theory of ‘ideas’, in which ‘the mind was treated as if it were a box containing mental equivalents of the Newtonian particles’. This chapter will argue that the Enlightenment philosophers not only envisaged the mind as a container for ideas, but ideas themselves as containers of ‘ideas’ in the other sense. Hume especially seems to assume that we can use empirical observation (by means of ‘the inner eye’) to discover how the mind functions – that we introspect the idea-particles moved by a Newton-like force of attraction while simultaneously observing the sensory impressions and concepts that they represent.

.I study what is known about the extent to which group minds shape the content of dreams and suggest we can interact consciously with some group minds during the lucid dreaming state. Typical dreams are thoroughly social, typically depicting dreamer interactions with characters that represent the group minds he/she is a member of.

Chapter 1 grounds this study in larger policy and theoretical debates, including literature on US-China competition, China’s authoritarian diffusion, South–South communication flows, and China–Africa relations. It further introduces the analytical and conceptual framework of this study: China’s uneven image-making in Africa, which includes its ambitious image promotion mechanisms, as well as disjointed implementation and reception on the ground. The chapter also explains the methodological choices, including the focus on Ethiopia and Global China ethnographic approach.

I examine more closely the question of whether and how we can voluntarily access and benefit from accessing group mind content. I argue that some of the experiences on serotonergic psychedelics can be seen in terms of unstructured access to a variety of group minds. The ego dissolution experience on psychedelics can be viwed in terms of fusion between the individual and some salient group mind.

I study charismatic leadership and use costly signaling theory to understand “charismatic” individuals and their ability to intuit the group mind of their followers.