Transmission of Collective Psychology

"...Every landscape bears the traces of this continuous and cumulative labour, generation after generation contributing to the whole. So doing, humanity itself has been transformed by what the French historian Jules Michelet called 'the decisive shaping of self by self, or (as Karl Marx put it) 'the production of people by people.'" (p.9) 

"The stage on which humanity's endless dramas are played out partly determines their story-line and explains their nature. The cast will alter, but the set remains broadly the same." (p. 11) 

Regarding collective psychology: "Far more than the accidents or the historical and social circumstances of a period, it [collective psychology, awareness, mental equipment] derives from the distant past, from ancient beliefs, fears and anxieties which are almost unconscious - an immense contamination whose germs are lost to memory but transmitted from generation to generation." (p. 22) 

Ferdinand Braudel, A History of Civilizations