Groupthink.

 

I don’t know if people in the US have this thing going on today, but here it’s all about the pink shirts. It’s a viral collective action directed against “bullying.”

This leads me to the topic of the psychotic actions of groups in general, and is probably going to snowball into an anti-collectivist rant. Ah well.

I write about this a lot in my fiction, I realize. For sure Blightcross went there in a few ways–from the general insanity of an entire nation willfully living under fascism, to blind military obedience, to the extreme example of a demon-possessed horde.

I have a certain amount of hostility towards groupthink. And to me, groupthink is at the root of the social problems kids deal with right now.  The very same social issues that sparked this pink shirt thing. And, according to some, a few suicides, but I won’t touch that one right now.

The way I remember it, it was pretty rare to have a lone bully capable of chronic abuse. Often those wouldn’t survive socially for very long, because strong “good” kids will inevitably put them in their place. The real social problems come when a kid butts against the herd mentality. And the herd is comprised of normal people, not bullies. Only they don’t seem like bullies because they’re on sports teams and smoke cigars and drive Mustangs.

It sounds far-fetched, but hold on. Kids don’t know how to think. That’s why they’re in school and that’s why they can’t vote. The overemphasized importance of team sports basically cuts their “learning how to think” short before it’s had any time to develop. Why? Well, let’s see. You’re in a situation in which you’re conditioned to respond to a whistle, you repeat phrases en masse on command (where else have we seen that? hmmm), and where your individuality is dissolved under the blurry flapping banner of a sports team, because there’s no “I” in team, right?

So given that the most valued aspect of the adolescent world is that particular situation, is it a wonder that certain kids get picked on?

Now, of course nothing stays the same. In a wonderful Hegelian twist, it’s the same old story again, only now it’s “wear a pink shirt . . . or else.” Not literally. I hope not, anyway. But in reality, an “awareness campaign” and mass symbolic gesture just amount to more groupthink, more pressure to do what everyone else is doing, and probably doesn’t help anyone very much in the end. The anti-bullying campaign ends up as just the same morality-by-committee as what happens with hazing and so on, only with an ever so slight adjustment of subjective coordinates.

I’m not saying all team sports are bad. But they’re unfortunately far too important in our culture. It’s strange because back when I was a stupid ultra-leftist in my early twenties, I whined about how far too individualistic and “autistic” and selfish western society was, just like any raging leftist douche would. But it’s the opposite–the bad things in our culture happen because people simply aren’t thinking and are incapable of defining themselves regardless of what any one group around them is doing.

Let’s look at the dreaded phys-ed situation in high school. At least when I was in school, almost no emphasis was placed on becoming a strong, healthy individual. They taught nothing about actual fitness! What did they try to instill in us then? Well, one teacher had a heartfelt speech for us about how if we didn’t learn team sports, we’d be “sitting on the sidelines, missing out.” Really?

That speech made me feel extremely uncomfortable, but I did give it a try anyway. It was awful and I didn’t last long. The part that pissed me off the most was that they still pumped you up when you sucked, just because you were on “the team.” It’s so bizarre that these teams are responsible for a lot of torment outsisde their group, but within, like I mentioned, they have no identity or personal responsibility or expectations.

After that, I may have been “on the sidelines,” but I didn’t miss out on much. Those sidelines were actually the out-of-bounds markings of stuff that mattered to me.

And about that teacher who tried so hard to get misfits like myself to just join in and be part of the group? I actually ran a 16k race a year ago and happened to pass the guy on a hill. Never saw him again.

Now, I didn’t suffer any bullying, despite having failed at fitting in. I think it was because I just didn’t care about the people who might have otherwise bullied me. They weren’t on my radar at all, and if anyone said anything hurtful, it made about as much sense to me as “cheese” and “wednesday.” But other people did, and I think it might have been because they actually cared about the group.

I’m unfairly targeting sports teams, and people I know are going to hate me, for sure. Where else is this nonsense perpetuated? The corporate world. Especially this myth that Steve Jobs became a millionaire by encouraging groupthink.

This is a pretty good article that goes into how individual thought is increasingly being unfairly curtailed in favour of groupthink, and it delves into the example I just mentioned.

I could rant on and on about this subject but what I really mean to address is the real cure for a lot of problems like this. The real cure is simply for people to be taught to think independently. That’s all. And while a lot of people mistake that for precious-snowflake-syndrome, that’s not it at all. It is not an encouragement of contrived idiosyncratic personalities or being intentionally argumentative. The reality is that any kind of group activity suspends critical thinking skills, and we’re increasingly giving more and more of our lives to the group.

Group actions will degenerate, regardless of how great its original intentions are. The way to combat widespread (insert problem here) is to be an indepenent, critical thinker. And you can’t teach that in a group or with a campaign.