The Groupthink Pandemic

“When everyone thinks the same, no one is thinking.” - Walter Lippman

I can’t get past this feeling that we’ve been hijacked. Maybe it’s not the right word, but that’s the feeling. I can’t access people in the same way. Sometimes I can’t even access myself. It’s a disconnected feeling, and when I try to try to trace it back to it’s origins, I keep finding variations of fear, uncertainty and chaos and an inability to be with these things.

One of my daughters describes a rage she’s witnessing among her generation - as they realize how often they’ve been lied to. There’s a struggle to trust anyone, and I notice that more and more people are operating from a place of distrust.

This both breaks my heart and makes perfect sense.

And then there is addiction. Lots of addiction. But not just in the ways we’re accustomed to thinking about it. Certainty addiction. Safety addiction. Addiction to all the band-aids that cover the wounds we don’t know how to heal. They cast a spell that made us believe the answers are all substances recommended by “experts”, and the faithful keep trying to make them work in higher and higher doses. So, kind of a socially engineered addiction. Our potion, our gurus and our right answers all come from the same place… outside of us.

We outsourced coping. We stopped using those parts and now they’re like our appendix or our pinky toes and we have no way to cultivate “grit”.

I get zombie apocalypse vibes when I discover that I can no longer access a human that I used to know by heart. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Stepford Wives style terror. What is happening to everyone? Where did authenticity, vulnerability and empathy go? And why are we settling for the platitudes that have replaced them?

Was it the Tylenol? The shots? Did bluetooth and 5G disrupt the flow of heart vibrations? Or is it just the looming proverbial doghouse hovering over us 24/7/365? Are we just too afraid to be ourselves, lest we be outed as thought criminals and domestic terrorists?

Maybe it’s just the whole toxic soup. Something has jammed the signals between us and it’s somehow harder for hearts to connect. Suddenly our differences have eclipsed our shared humanity and what we share instead is free floating anxiety as we all try to find a safe place to put down roots and rest our weary hearts.

Broken Parts and Lonely Hearts

I’ve been attracted to the work of Barry Brownstein, Mattias Desmet, Charles Eisenstein and others because they offer compassion and resonance as they invite me to be look inward. There’s a relief in “yes, I see it, too” - emotional resonance is a salve when you’re living in a psyop. But more than that, these people are on a spiritual growth curve, slaying internal dragons and cultivating, I don’t know, something that feels hopeful. Meaningful. True.

“We can honor the right to freedom of expression and the right to self-determination without feeling threatened by each other… But there is a point where we must stop losing ourselves in the crowd to experience meaning and connection. That is the point where the winter of totalitarianism gives way to a spring of life.” - Mattias Desmet

It’s out there. These people reignite those parts for me when they are get dampened by fear and resignation.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Meanwhile, it’s back to curiosity, which I hope makes a comeback.

Can We Make Curiosity Safe Again? Redux

I’m especially curious about the people who have been dismissed. I never heard of Christopher Booker until I saw Michael E. Hartmann’s review of Booker’s last book, Groupthink: A Study in Self Delusion.

https://capitalresearch.org/article/recognizing-symptoms-of-groupthink-in-philanthropy/

Booker died in July 2019 - another person who seemed to know what was coming and didn’t live to see it (I’m thinking of PCR technology inventor and Fauci critic, Kary Mullis). In an obituary published by The Guardian, Booker is described as “First editor of Private Eye who revelled in the perversity of taking a contrary stance.”

In his weekly columns he regularly annoyed and frustrated scientists, climatologists and doctors with his assertions that asbestos was not dangerous, speed cameras caused accidents, fossil fuels were necessary, global warming was a hoax and Darwinian evolution was not proved.

(Narrative always gets the last word.)

Back to his book, which I haven’t read yet…. From Hartmann’s review.

Booker’s first defining rule of groupthink is that “a group of people come to share a common view, opinion or belief that in some way is not based on an objective reality,” he writes. “They may be convinced intellectually, morally, politically or even scientifically that it is right. They may be convinced from all the evidence they have considered that it is so. … In essence, their collective view will always have in it an element of wishful thinking or make-believe.”

His second rule of groupthink is that, “precisely because their shared view is essentially subjective, they need to go out of their way to insist it is so self-evidently right that a ‘consensus’ of all right-minded people must agree with it,” he continues. “Their belief has made them an ‘in-group’, which accepts that any evidence which contradicts it, and the views of anyone who disagrees with it, can be disregarded.”

The third rule, which Booker considers the “most revealing consequence” of all this, is:

To reinforce their ‘in-group’ conviction that they are right, they need to treat the views of anyone who questions it as wholly unacceptable. They are incapable of engaging in any serious dialogue or debate with those who disagree with them. Those outside the bubble must be marginalized and ignored, although, if necessary, their views must be mercilessly caricatured to make them seem ridiculous. If this is not enough, they must be attacked in the most violently contemptuous terms, usually with the aid of some scornfully dismissive label, and somehow morally discredited. The thing which most characterizes any form of groupthink is that dissent cannot be tolerated. (emphasis mine)

Why have most of us never heard of this book or been invited to revisit these ideas?

Never mind. There are better questions.

Moving forward… LET’S revisit these ideas while we still can.