National Defense

Is there a shared consciousness in humans or animals? Is it based on mutual self-defense?

Certainly birds flying in syncronized flocks seem to share one mind. If not, they'd all crash into each other. Fish swim in schools to confuse predators. Even the spawning 'habits' of animals require some sort of shared awareness. I've never seen a salmon swimming all alone upstream to mate. There must be some connection of the individual to the group, unconscious if not conscious.

Those natural behaviors do mirror the natural behavior of man in my opinion.
We mostly choose to live in a society, choosing a society most like ourselves from among all human diversity. We give up true, natural freedom for the protections of government and laws.
And, governments provide national defense. Our government more so than any other government on the planet. In fact, our government spends more on national defense than all the other governments combined.

In our shared consciousness or unconsciousness, we fear. We cower behind the military ability to kill every one on the planet. No nation could ever defeat us in battle or even dare try.
Do we, with our ability to destroy every living creature on this planet via nuclear war, fear something far greater than the sum of all our human enemies?

We have no reason to fear any enemy on this planet.

We fear a stronger someone or something that doesn't exist on this planet, a planet we could destroy in a series of atomic blasts. We fear retribution.

No national defense can ever stop that.