Groupthink is just another synonym for the way animals conform to their own kind. Humans have found security and compass in adapting themselves to the herd instinct since the beginning. Deliberately acting weird or maverick would have threatened the whole group.
Leaving primitivism behind, we now find that modernism may have gone too far, however. Parallel groups now coexist today, though as little known to each other as animal species seem to be. No wonder that we can’t agree on a common core.
Two days ago, columnist Bernard Goldberg said that the blatantly unfair reporting of President Trump by national news media should not be confused with deliberate conspiracy: “Journalists don’t go to work in the morning, meet in a dark room, give the secret handshake, and then map out a strategy to bash conservatives.”
Instead, Goldberg believes that “bias is the product of groupthink, of too many like-minded people working in the newsroom who have similar views on what’s good and what’s bad, on what’s right and what’s wrong. The result is that they see anything to the right of center as conservative (not especially good), but anything to the left of center as middle of the road, as moderate — as reasonable (very good).”
Our society seems polarized to the max, so Goldberg is giving us a way to treat ourselves all as innocents rather than conspirators. A way to find common ground beyond animosity. We all practice group identity by storing up arguments that support our groupthink understanding. The political left does it one way, the right another. Christians do it, but so do various ethnic and racial groups.
Such groupthink serves a positive purpose and is a way of concentrating values and ideas, but it can also get us into trouble. According to Wikipedia, “Groupthink requires individuals to avoid raising controversial issues or alternative solutions, and there is loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking.”
Shallow slogans and campaigns for diversity on television should be resisted since they are the products of one particular groupthink block, along with most other media options, however limited. But reading books still has several centuries of diverse viewpoints that should be encouraged in schools and universities and individual minds.
If groupthink is built right into the design of animal life on earth, then it is God-given, isn’t it? But we’ve also been given the ability to put groupthink into perspective, as appropriate and needed.
