Well I can be my own best friend and I can send myself for pizza so I say

To succeed as a mass-mind takes organization. A single mind in or around a single body can get away without it since you're mostly near wherever you happen to be. Mass-minding is different. You can't have parts of you having ideas and finding you've had it eighteen times over already and you're all trying it simultaneously, confusing the server because she can't deal with parties of nineteen ordering ice cream sundaes in unison, what with it being a pizza parlor.

The first question in estimating your mass-mind bureaucracy needs is: how many of you are there? If you answered ``one'', I'm sorry, you aren't a mass-mind. You're just a ``mind'', although your eagerness to fit in with the crowd is a hopeful sign. It's a trick question, or really, a trick answer. Acceptable answers include ``two'', ``that's not easy to say'', ``what do you mean by `many', and this `how' thing is a problem too'', ``four'', and tugging your ear lobe, insisting it's a Bluetooth call from the rest of you, and running away.

``Four'' is popular among mass-minds, since on any issue requiring sub-mind agreement a deadlock is impossible unless there are equally many votes for multiple options. It's most popular among inexperienced mass-minds.

There are some complainers saying a person who's got body parts elevated to sapience can say ``one''. Maybe that isn't fair to overlook. (It is, but we'll ignore that later, when time does not permit.) Still, organization needs solving. There are people who make even trivial life decisions without considering what their obscurest glands think when not tending their gland specialties.

Eventually the glands rebel and way too much saliva is produced. Food tastes moister and the person has some tragic licking incident, maybe getting reviewed at work. Proper organization would avoid this, unless the person is self-employed, who'd grumble extra saliva is just what one can't find on envelope-licking day (second Monday of each month, except on Tuesdays).

If some part of you has extra saliva outside envelope-licking day, a well-organized mass-mind finds more envelopes to pre-lick. Admittedly these days we need fewer envelopes, with more work gone to answering e-mail, and there's not much sense licking your computer. If you must lick your computer check if part of you is good in cooking and/or consumer electronics for better seasoning.

If the non-experts season your computer it may be sauteed in dry-erase marker cleanser or left on the counter overnight so dangerous bacteria build up. This wreaks four kinds of havoc with your intestinal bacteria, unless you're a mass-mind joined with intestinal bacteria, so it wreaks three more kinds of havoc. If you're a mass-mind made only of intestinal bacteria envelope-licking day doesn't demand your direct involvement.

Experience as a mass-mind gives you a new sense of the collective wisdom of things. You can claim it's what you thought anyway, which is the point of saying something is the collective wisdom, unless you want to claim everybody else is stupid and wrong, and then you say you're going against collective wisdom. Unfortunately mass-minds can't, as telling anyone that makes their heads catch fire from the logical paradox. You'll be forced to rebuild society from scratch, which can take literally weeks.

Decision-making is never easy. One method is to put things to a vote, but that's transparent, fair, and reasonable, so you'll want to toss that overboard. Diving into class 'A' and class 'C' body-holders is an efficient way to ensure parts of you know how less valuable they are and turning self-examination into bitter recriminations culminating in a pie fight. Make sure some part of you is good with pies (acquiring and targeting). You don't want to show up for a major internecine pie fight with nothing but candy buttons, as they take forever to get off the paper and the paper never really comes off anyway.

You know, your more efficient glands probably finish with their daily glanding in like ten minutes, so they time to think. It's probably worth listening to them, not out loud.

Trivia: There were cotton mills listed on the London Stock Exchange in the 1930s which had negative share prices, which represented un-paid-for stock subscriptions. Source: The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge.

Currently Reading: Conan Doyle: Portrait of an Artist, Julian Symons.