Self-consciousness, the poly-ego, was a village built upon piles driven into the sands of permanent existential anxiety. It was and is a patterned and integrated architecture accommodating to the neural blockages that deter instinctive solutions. The neural blockages are stabilized by socially elaborated mechanisms that take certain forms such as rituals, theology, and logic. Further, self-awareness involved the use of symbols, first to institute an inner communication system, and then to introduce transactions with others and the outer world so as to keep the far-flung egos fully operative. Once achieved and begun, physiochemically constituted and socially founded, self-consciousness is revived post-natally in each generation.
The human poly-ego was both individual and social. Those possessed of it sensed themselves unique, and at the same time identical with their groups. It produced an anarchism at one extreme and a regimented discipline at the other that go far beyond the capabilities of the mammals. Herein lies the eternal cooperation and conflict between the individual and the group, which is the subject of so much philosophy, sociology and political science.
Source: http://www.grazian-archive.com/quantavolution/QuantaHTML/_start_here.htm
- Homo Schizo I and II