Reading the Washington Post’s report “Top Secret America” through the lens of distributed cognition from a phenomenological angle — holy shit.

We are a collective distributed mind too large, too fragmented on principle and, worse — too concealed on principle — for any individual to morally assess, much less take moral responsibility for.

Let’s play with the notion that this distributed cognition is not a metaphor, but a literal truth. Let’s imagine for a minute that when we individual human beings talk to one another, we are voices in the head of a larger mind. If we get published, and become part of the national dialogue, we are an audible conscious thought. If not, we are part of the unconscious or semiconscious workings of this mind.

Most of us just follow the rules of this mind, even though we don’t know who it is, or even if it is healthy. When we oscillate wildly right, wildly left — refuse to accept the validity of who we were a decade ago or a year ago, because then the other party was in control — aren’t we suffering from akrasia? And don’t we also suffer from attacks of hubris as well? Whoever we are, we seem sketchy. We’re legion impulses, acting themselves out by their own writhing logic.

We are failing to take moral responsibility for ourselves, individually and collectively.

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The first rule of moral responsibility is to live so you can control yourself. It is this ground-level moral pragmatism that gives us the “moral universals”, which, frankly, are not morality per se, but the prelude to moral life.

In Buddhism, these grounding moral basics are called sila: “good conduct”.

Higher than sila is samaddhi and higher still is panna.

But we Puritans — we’re not practical enough about morality, yet, to get beyond the fundamentals. No. We idolize and worship the fundament and fail its purpose, transcending to authentic morality. And so, we don’t even live up to the basics, because we’ve taken the means for the end.

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Distributed cognition must go mainstream. The individualism of our worst collectivists is preventing us from taking collective control of ourselves.