If there is a collective consciousness, and depending on how you define it I think it’s clear that there is, then perhaps we ought to worry about our collective subconscious as well. The ideas of a collective conscious, subconscious, and unconscious, however, need to be applied with some cautions.
Let me clear that what I don’t mean by “collective consciousness” or “awareness” is some kind of “extra-sensory perception” or mind-to-mind communication (telepathy) between individuals or within groups. At some level these phenomena may occur, but if and when they do so, they are rarely recognized at the level of conscious awareness; and they appear to have a quite marginal impact, if any, on human affairs. Believing in what we imagine to be private messages from others, from the dead, or from spirits, does not appear to have much practical value in the world.
On the other hand, there are many ideas that are shared very widely, and that are recognized and operated on by virtually all of the members of a given society or even of the species. One of my favorite examples is money, which is an “invented reality” (as opposed to a naturally-occurring one like seashells or meatballs). Collectively we all agree that money is real, and the consequences of this socially-created reality can be every bit as tangibly felt as those of the law of gravity. Our collective consciousness actually contains everything we know and act on together in the world, from dollar bills to traffic lights. This conscious awareness is vast, and varied, and shared in varying degrees by individuals, but it is present to most, and in principle is available to everyone.
What’s in our collective subconscious is, by definition, what we’re not collectively aware of at any given moment, but that we know exists and could have access to under the right circumstances. (What’s in our collective unconscious, by contrast, is what “we don’t know that we don’t know” — until it intrudes upon our consciousness, often in a shocking or surprising way.) An example, for most of us, is the knowledge of how money is created (and destroyed), and how it sustains a sense of scarcity that is almost universally accepted in our collective awareness of reality. Most people don’t fully understand the nature of money, even though they use it every day; but they could learn about it if they chose to. The information is all there; it’s just not what we’re paying attention to when we’re using money to put food on the table or send our children to college. On the other hand, the impacts that the sense of scarcity has on our behavior are largely unconscious. Our views of fairness, of business acumen, and of personal security are largely determined by our awareness of scarcity, which appears as just “what’s so,” as opposed to what it really is, a set of taken-for-granted “beliefs.”
Arguably, what we’re unaware of even being unaware of is an even larger expanse than what we’re aware of knowing, or aware of being capable of finding out. The existence of magnetic fields, for example, or of distant galaxies, or of the properties of semi-conductors were “discoveries” in the sense that we had not known about them previously, and for the most part were not even aware of how or where to look for them. Often we do not even know what questions to ask. Some of our friends at Landmark ask, “Do we decide questions at all?” As Lewis Carroll wrote, “We decide answers, no doubt, but surely the questions decide us.”