The individual and the group are locked in an eternally conflicting dialectic. The individual has an inherent urge to create, to be conscious and to choose at the expense of the group.
The two are also in a complimentary dialectic in that the individual consciousness can very effectively aggregate into group consciousness, and that for the overwhelming majority of individuals, their consciousnesses are but a microcosm of the group consciousness --- at least this is true in a "particularistic" society with an organically conscious "folk culture" which is by definition "not cosmopolitan".
However, to think that group consciousness is the original consciousness, or that group and individual consciousnesses exist in a "chicken and egg" dialectic, fundamentally contradicts the notion that individual consciousness is the original.
It is out of the hope that certain individual continue to generate unique consciousnesses defying the group environments surrounding them, that an elitist position comes into being, stating that "it is not the norm of the group that counts, but the one or two maverick innovators that do."
Cosmopolitan society, formed of individuals whose consciousnesses are mutually incompatible, abolishes the legitimacy of the "folk culture", and along with it the particularism of group consciousness. This creates another problem: individual consciousnesses detached from traditional group consciousness, thus from the original consciousness, are most likely to develop in a cosmopolitan society that is mechanical, artificial, ignorant of nature, materialistic, cruel and unhealthy.
Modern "progressivism" makes "folk culture" generational, that is: a generation can have a strong identity of its own, but it has to give way to the next generation when its time is up.
Racial consciousness is beyond individual control. To reject an individual because he/she has a "rotten personality" is fair, but to reject an individual because he/she has a "rotten race" is quite the schizophrenia.
Individual consciousness is spontaneous, capable fo self-determination, animate and is truly conscious. Group consciousness is but a "reservoir" or a "circuit of relays" of individual consciousness. The ultimate manifestations of a group consciousness comes out in its specific individual constituents.
