In A Collective, Some Are More Collected Than Others

I noticed last week that every threat Remender threw out during his Secret Avengers stint involved some sort of unified mind. Father and his goal of a technological singularity. The Abyss and its desire to spread its nothingness over the world through others. That relative of Mar-Vell's who used his son's mental powers to make an entire world passively await the Phoenix' arrival*.

The last example would have led to the collective suicide of a world, against the general populace's will. The Abyss would do much the same to Earth, given the yammering its followers did about embracing the void. You could take that as simply an absence of individuality or free will, not unlike Earth after Darkseid got going in Final Crisis. Either way, it's not a good scene for the people.

Father and his plan are a slightly different matter. His claim is he'll elevate humanity, beyond sickness, frailty, blinding emotions, even death. They have physical bodies now, but in the long run, the plan seems to be to have some cloud of their collective consciousness moving about in space, unencumbered by physical limitations.

That sounds like a pretty good deal, provided you don't mind your mind linked to every other person in the world**. There's cause for suspicion, that Father, like Abyss, like Kree guy, will be in an elevated status. Certainly, the Avengers seem to think that's happening. Braddock attributes Pym and Jim Hammond's behavior to Father, and there's certainly credibility to it in Pym's case. I'm less sure about Hammond; he could have let his desire to not feel so different overwhelm any concerns he might have. Or he was being controlled.

But for Braddock, there's no doubt Father isn't on the up-and-up, hardly surprising when you consider what they'd encountered recently. In general, collective minds are presented as hostile, usually because they want everyone to be in the collective, willing or not, it's just a clever way for one person to accumulate absolute power, or just because it's different from us.

Was Father going to use it as a means to control everyone, or would it have been the great advancement he promised? Did the Avengers have good reason to be suspicious, or did they let past experiences Father wasn't responsible for color their judgment? In one interpretation, you could say Remender's point is collective consciousness doesn't work because someone is always going to try and assert themselves on another, and this can lead to extinction. The other interpretation is more about how humans tend to see patterns and correlations where there are none, and make poor decisions because of them.

Remender might not be driving at either of those, though. It might be about the importance of individuality, or how it's the struggle to achieve that makes accomplishing something worthwhile***. Hawkeye's archery and status with the Avengers are impressive because of how hard he worked to reach that level, not simply that he did.  Ultimately, it's individuals that decide things. Jim Hammond decides it's wrong to force this change on humans, and destroys the Orb. There's nothing a collective can do about it. And they're all brought low by it, save Parvez, who never seemed affected to begin with. When the Avengers arrive to rescue him, he isn't hostile, he's glad to see the Black Widow. For whatever reason, the true Descendant was never part of the Singularity at all. Which may be how he's the true success of Father's plan, by carrying their genes on to future generations, gradually integrating them into humanity in a less intrusive manner. 

* You could argue the threat in that arc was the Phoenix, but the team wasn't going to stop the Phoenix, or die against it, because they were just in an AvX tie-in. Anything like that would be saved for the main series. For the purposes of that story, certainly, the Phoenix was a MacGuffin. It might have been one for all of AvX. Something to get the team near that particular Kree world, so they could run afoul of Mar-Vell and his cousin.

** To me, that sounds like hell, and yeah, that's strange coming from a guy who's been mouthing off on the blog to whoever reads it for seven years, but I choose what I share and don't share, just as you choose whether to share or not in the comments, or on your own blog. The idea that people are privy to your thoughts constantly, and you to theirs, or that you can't even tell where the line between them lies is not appealing. If you're someone who enjoys their solitude, where do you go?

***  I don't know if I'd agree with that, but there is some research that suggests people appreciate something more if they worked to get it.