Quotes about Groupthink

Think for yourself.  Unplug yourself from follow-the-follower groupthink, and virtually ignore what everyone else in your industry is saying (except the ones everyone agrees is crazy).  Do your own research, draw your own conclusions, set your own course, and stick to your guns.  When you’re just starting out, people will tell you you’re wrong.  After you’ve blown past them, they’ll tell you you’re crazy.  A few years after that, they’ll (privately) ask you to mentor them.

We're all afloat in a boundless sea, and the way we cope is by massing together in groups and pretending in unison that the situation is other than it is.  We reinforce the illusion for each other.  That's what a society really is, a little band of humanity huddled together against the specter of a pitch black sea.  Everyone is treading water to keep their heads above the surface even though they have no reason to believe that the life they're preserving is better than the alternative they're avoiding.  It's just that one is known and one is not.  Fear of the unknown is what keeps everyone busily treading water.  All fear is fear of the unknown.  If someone in such a group of water-treaders betrays the group lie by speaking the truth of their situation, that person is called a heretic, and society reserves its most awful punishments for heretics.  If someone decides to stop struggling and just sink or float away, every possible effort is made to stop him, not for the benefit of the individual, but for the benefit of the group.  To deny at all costs the truth of the situation.

From a shamanic perspective, the psychic blockade that prevents otherwise intelligent adults from considering the future of our world – our obvious lack of future, if we continue on our present path – reveals an occult dimension.  It is like a programming error written into the software designed for the modern mind, which has endless energy to expend on the trivial and treacly, sports statistic or shoe sale, but no time to spare for the torments of the Third World, for the mass extinction of species to perpetuate a way of life without a future, for the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, or for the fine print of the Patriot Act.  This psychic blockade is reinforced by a vast propaganda machine spewing out crude as well as sophisticated distractions, encouraging individuals to see themselves as alienated spectators of their culture, rather than active participants in a planetary ecology.

“What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain.  But it is a terrible, terrible thing,” lamented Arundhati Roy, the Indian novelist – turned – activist, who documented and protested the enormous dam projects in India, orchestrated by the World Bank, displacing 30 million people from their homes, with little tangible result beyond the enrichment of multinational corporations and an increase in India’s debts.  “To contemplate its girth and circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible.  The only way to combat it is by fighting specific wars in specific ways.”   But among the people I knew in New York, there was little contemplation of the situation, and no courage, anger, desire, or will to fight against it.

Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964) remains a surgical analysis  of the fundamental “irrational rationality” of our system.  He argued that industrialization and mechanization could – and logically should – have led to a reduction in labor time and the institution of a post-work and post-scarcity global society after World War II.  The alternative to a conscripted social reality would be one that gave us new freedom – freedom from work, freedom from propagandizing media, freedom to create and explore our own realities.  The response to this deep threat to the controlling apparatus was the creation of “false needs” in the consumer, the perpetuating fear of nuclear war and terrorism, and the use of the mass media to enforce consensus consciousness. ….

Marcuse wrote:  “Perhaps an accident may alter the situation, but unless the recognition of what is being done and what is being prevented subverts the consciousness and the behavior of man, not even a catastrophe will bring about the change.” …

As a German philosopher writing in the aftermath of the Nazi regime, Marcuse understood the sleep inducing force of indoctrination, its power to make people forget and forfeit their own real interests.  “The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible,” he wrote.  “The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful.”

The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.