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.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems with currently available information. Consciousness is the ability to be self aware which enables far more complex problem solving that intelligence. Individual consciousness and collective intelligence are in conflict. There is always a delay between individual ability to understand and the collective ability to create.

Individual humans have the capacity for consciousness, but they can only create real change when as a collective. Also our consciousness – wisdom and abstract thinking – depend greatly on the collective education, exchange, and culture. Culture being a collection of wisdom, often simplified, over hundreds of generations.

In simple words – an individual is smarter than a collective, but the collective is more able than an individual. Also the collective makes the individual smart, hoping that in return the individual slightly increases the collective smart. The main difference being that individual has consciousness while the collective never had and never will have consciousness.

As automation in a system – a collective – increases it should strive towards automating intelligence while it uses more of individual consciousness. Openness is a tool to achieve this. Openness allows individual consciousness to influence the collective intelligence. The more open a system, a collective, is, the more it will use individual consciousness to increase its own intelligence.