Collective can not be treated as an individual because individuals do not below to a single collective, and collective is an abstract generalization of their knowledge.

Therefore collective guilt, a concept often used in journalism and politics, is false and its application is an error.

It is possible that when high level of pressure is applied on many individuals that they align their goals more and more with collective goals. However, this situation is often manufactured by centralized power using mass media and economic sanctions. The same individuals, when pressure is released, quickly give a lower priority to collective goals and focus on individual goals.

For individuals, collective is a source of intelligence and knowledge. They outsource some of their cognitive tasks to a collective and evaluate only results. Individuals have a very high capacity in evaluation of collective intelligence results, however their decisions appear poor to those who do not share their resources, pressures, and overall situation.

Knowledge can be defined as an ontology. Language is the dominant ontology management method in contemporary systems. It is more effective than imagery and other methods because contemporary systems depend highly on abstract yet precise ontologies. Therefore ontology, knowledge, and language are one in this article and will be presented by the “ontology”.

If a goal of a system is to increase collective intelligence and consciousness, system changes should be observed through ontology changes. Ontology changes between traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism show what kind of language is needed for metamodernism and openness to increase collective intelligence and consciousness.

Traditionalism had a stable ontology. Modernism rapidly expanded the traditional ontology by adding to it and rarely changing it. Postmodernism is mostly focused on changing traditional and modern ontology, adding little to both. Postmodernism depends on closed centralized power to create these ontology changes.

Metamodernism and openness should direct ontology development towards following goals:
– Postmodernism expands instead of changes traditional and modern ontologies,
– Ontology changes are more open and less centralized,
– Adoption of non-binary (oscillating) ontologies.

If ontology development is directed towards these goals a system will experience increase collective intelligence and consciousness growth, and will avoid reductive conflict caused by closed and centralized ontology changes.