Group Dynamics
Orwell covered the concept of doublethink fairly well in his novel 1984, where a person suffers a form of undiagnosed, all-too-common schizophrenia: the ability to hold two conflicting beliefs simultaneously. Later, Yale psychologist Irving Janis coined the term groupthink, which is essentially the observation that groups of people tend to develop “a pattern of concurrence-seeking…when a ‘we’ feeling of solidarity is running high.”
What I want to discuss is capital-gee Groupthink — a kind of intensified, Orwellian interpretation of Janis’ concept: not just concurrence-seeking, but the conscious self-sacrifice of individual reason to a collective Orthodoxy.
You don’t need to look very hard to see Groupthink in the wild: politics, your local PTA, social movements, the internal dynamics of basically every private and public institution, etc. In fact, you could go so far as to say Groupthink is one of the core requirements to Group Dynamics.
The purpose of nearly every Group1 is to amass power and use it toward some common cause. This is the impetus for the “we” feeling Janis described. And because groups are assembled around common causes and are incapable of amassing power without consensus among members, it becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain consensus and thus the assembly without each member needing to compromise some form of individual reason in order to stay in the Group. Thus, the larger a group gets, the more likely the existence of Groupthink.
Now, you might be sitting there thinking to yourself, “Drake, this is overly academic and boring; I should go take a walk” or something similar. If that’s you, hang in there just a few paragraphs more.
The implications of the mathematical relationship between Groupthink and Group Dynamics should be extremely concerning — they suggest that in almost all cases, the cost of entry to a Group is your Individuality, the more popular contemporary term for which is Identity. And it’s not just that it costs a portion of your Identity, it actually replaces whatever portion of it you give up: When you join a Group, whatever individual expressions of reason - your thoughts and beliefs - that conflict with Group Orthodoxy must be suppressed or sacrificed in order to maintain membership.
Challenge #1: name a Group in which this is not the case.2
Of course all of this would be fine if Groups were trustworthy. But because Groups exist to amass Power, and Power is inherently untrustworthy, Groups are themselves untrustworthy and become moreso the larger they become per the mathematical relationship between Group size and the sacrifice of Individuality necessary to maintain membership.
Challenge #2: name a manmade historical atrocity where Groupthink was not present.
These challenges are rigged, of course, because unlike 1984, human reason has always and still exists, and that allows for dissent and the presence of dissent tends to lead to the discovery of Groupthink either in realtime, as in American politics, or after the fact, as in repentant Gestapo or guilt-ridden former KKK members etc.
I would ask you to complete another challenge, but instead I will simply say this: it is possible to be an Individual in this world, but it is extremely difficult and lonely. Thoreau was an individual. Most great artists tend to be. Politicians are almost never Individuals, and historically the ones who have been were tyrants.
Anyway, that is why I am suspicious of Groups.