Some time back, a reader drew my attention to the book in which, 40 years ago,
a Yale professor of psychology, Irving Janis, analysed what, with a
conscious nod to George Orwell, he called “groupthink”. It is a term we all
casually use (which even he derived from another writer), but he identified
eight symptoms of groupthink. One is the urge of its victims to insist that
their view is held as a “consensus” by all morally right-thinking people.
Another is their ruthless desire to suppress any evidence that might lead
someone to question it. A third is their urge to stereotype and denigrate
anyone who dares hold a dissenting view. Their intolerance of “independent
critical thinking”, as Janis put it, leads them to “irrational and
dehumanised actions directed against outgroups”.
Of course, there is nothing new about this. Hostility to heretics and
dissenters has characterised the more extreme forms of religious and
political belief all down the ages. But as someone who tends often to come
to views differing from those held by many other people – what Ibsen called
that “majority” that is “always wrong” – I am quite sensitive to the power
and prevalence of groupthink in our own time. It is particularly evident in
views widely held on several subjects I regularly write about here, from
climate change and “renewable energy” to everything its acolytes like to
describe as “Europe”. It is their groupthinking intolerance that prompts
them to stereotype anyone daring to disagree with their “consensus” as
“deniers”, “flat-Earthers”, “creationists”, “xenophobes”, “homophobes”,
“bigots”, “racists” or “fascists”.
But another characteristic of groupthink that Janis doesn’t fully explore in
his book is that those caught up in these mindsets have never actually
worked out their thinking on the subject for themselves. They have taken on
their belief-system, and the reasons for supporting it, ready-made and
wholesale from others. That is why it is impossible to have any intelligent
dialogue with, say, zealots for man-made climate change or the European
Union, because they have not really examined the evidence for themselves but
have come to a set of opinions that are skin-deep and second-hand. They can
only parrot the mantras they have picked up from others."
No comments:
Post a Comment