NYC, 2002
What were you thinking about September 11? Akiko asks. Everyone has a story about that day.
I wrote an essay about it, I say. Not about where I was or what I felt. About what it meant. About collective consciousness.
"Can I read it?"
"It's in the manuscript. Here—"
ESSAY 6: CALIBRATING THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS
Mass Televised Live Events - Sports, Olympics, 9/11, War
Written 2004
Author's Note (2025): This essay examines collective consciousness through the lens of mass media events, including the September 11 attacks. I want to be clear from the outset: the attacks were a profound human tragedy. Nearly 3,000 people died. Families were destroyed. The suffering was immense and unjustified. Nothing in this analysis diminishes that reality or the grief of those affected. What follows is an attempt to understand how shared traumatic events shape collective awareness—not to abstract from the human cost, but to explore how we process such events together. If you lost someone on that day, or if this analysis feels distant from your experience, I understand. This is one perspective among many.
Since the earliest of times, men have sat around the campfire exchanging experiences and stories. These conversations formed communal identities, and the foundations of culture and civilization. From ancient Greece's early theatres, to Rome's Colosseum, to Shakespearean performances, humans have always been fascinated with the ability to collectively experience emotions through drama. As the stories unfold on stage we identify with the characters and plots, and allow ourselves to embark on this unpredictable emotional journey.
Today, this communal emotional odyssey occurs on a much larger scale due to advances in technology. The television concentrates the attention of billions of people around the world through televised events like sports. For example, in a soccer match, as the ball moves across the screen, fans of Team A are overwhelmed with excitement and enthusiasm when their team is on the offense, while supporters of Team B feel anxious and fearful that they may lose. However, just as the ball is kicked in the opposite direction, Team B is suddenly thrilled and Team A upset. There is an exchange of emotion amongst all who are watching the drama unfold in real time.
The collective emotional dial
If you could represent these collective feelings on a dial underneath the field—from the ecstatic release of a goal on one end, to the defeating embarrassment of receiving a goal on the other—the dial would point in the opposite direction every time the ball moves across the screen. These feelings are calibrated within the parameters of a fixed game. The rules and regulations of the match allow for a specific range of emotions to be experienced collectively... thus the simplicity of the narrative allowing a larger amount of people to participate. That is why more nuanced sports, such as cricket and baseball, are not as popular as soccer. These collective events that occur every week in every country in the modern world, escalating to final matches that will determine the champion every couple of years, is a continuous loop.
Mass televised events essentially 'program' the viewers to collectively experience certain feelings. Why is this important? Well, there is a theory that the earth is evolving from a planet that expresses itself as an aggregate of man's consciousness, into an entity of collective sentient significance. This isn't strictly scientific—I'm thinking of ideas from people like Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere as a kind of planetary mental atmosphere. A poetic framework for understanding how technology and consciousness might be co-evolving. But how can emotions like shock and awe be programmed on a collective scale? How can we altogether experience rare and traumatic unscripted events?
I want to be clear about what I'm examining here—and what I'm not. The September 11th attacks were a horrific tragedy. Three thousand people died. Families were destroyed. The suffering was immense, unjustified, and morally repugnant. Nothing I write here diminishes that human cost.
But from a purely analytical perspective, examining how collective consciousness responds to mass televised trauma, the attacks present a case study in global emotional calibration.
The world watching together
When the first tower was struck, live images of the skyscraper ablaze played on every news network around the world. People were glued to their television screens. Suddenly, we all witnessed another plane hit the second tower. Most viewers were collectively traumatized, shocked and stricken with grief and despair. Yet, in more remote parts of the world, some people cheered and celebrated at the demise of these American icons.
This demonstrates something I'm trying to understand: the same event calibrates vastly different emotional responses depending on one's position in the collective. The hijackers weren't acting alone—they represented grievances shared by others, however twisted the expression. I'm not suggesting the attacks needed to happen, or that they served some higher purpose. I'm observing that from a collective consciousness perspective, there were groups who wanted this outcome, and the polarized global response—grief here, celebration there—shows how a single event can expose and amplify opposite emotional currents across different parts of the noosphere. The event didn't arise to satisfy these currents, but it became a screen onto which they were projected.
Emotional shockwave rippling across the globe
The same images that plunged some into mourning pushed others into jubilation. One event, opposite emotions—two poles of a single, shared field of consciousness. This is the kind of binary oscillation I keep noticing: zero and one, horror and triumph, coexisting in the same global moment.
This is anthropological observation, not moral philosophy.
The emotional impact of the September 11 attacks was qualitatively different from the later, heavily packaged coverage of the Iraq invasion. The retaliatory invasion of Baghdad in March 2003 was heavily covered by American cable networks, who embedded their war correspondents on the frontlines of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom.' Every day, viewers were bombarded with footage of the American military machine unleashing vengeance on the Iraqi enemy. Who can forget the historic toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue by US troops on April 9, 2003? Or how about CNN's broadcasting of the American-led Shock & Awe campaign in Baghdad?
All powerful images.
Yet, they pale in comparison to the emotional arousal triggered by September 11, 2001.
However real the violence in Baghdad, the narrative felt scripted, framed, and mediated by political agendas. By contrast, the initial shock of 9/11—those first unfiltered live images—carried a rawness that no planned media spectacle could reproduce. In mythic terms, our deepest respect often goes to experiences that rupture our expectations and force genuine confrontation with uncertainty and mortality. That kind of authenticity is hard to simulate.
Airport gate, October 2001 - one month after
Akiko finishes reading. Looks up.
That's why you left, isn't it? You saw what was coming. The war. The fear. The simplification.
Yeah, I say. That's why I left.