Groupthink Minus Thought: The Groupthink Psychodemic, Part II
The acquired capacity to manipulate the deep psychology of humans has handed wannabe tyrants a master key to enchaining the rest of humanity and have us think this our natural state.
It is only by obtaining some sort of insight into the psychology of crowds that it can be understood how powerless they are to hold any opinions other than those which are imposed upon them.
— Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd
Perhaps the most intriguing-looking publication to appear on the topic of groupthink in recent times was Christopher Booker’s 2020 book, Groupthink — a Study in Self Delusion. The book was disappointing, however, though for a somewhat understandable reason: The author died in 2019 before finishing it. Unavoidably incomplete, the book was subsequently assembled by a partnership of Booker’s son, Nicholas, and friend and sometime writing partner, Richard North, with whom Booker had co-written a number of books, including Scared to Death, a 2007 work about the escalating tendency of global authorities to use fabricated emergencies to scare the world’s populations.
Until quite recently, groupthink had been a phenomenon identified retroactively, a ‘found object’ of cultural digs. The skeleton sketch provided in Booker’s 2020 book takes things a little further, and in a timely fashion, identifying and scrutinising the phenomenon’s growth into a mechanism for generating mass delusion in a wider socio-cultural context. Across the fractured text of the book can be detected a series of clues that Booker was working towards a theory of groupthink as an emerging instrument of mass manipulation by powerful interests.
Thus, although he was already into his eighties, his death (of cancer) in 2019 was a great tragedy in more than the usual ways. Booker was the ideal person to write this book, having long ago published a remarkable account of the ‘Freedom Revolution’ of the mid-twentieth century — his 1969 book The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties — a period he depicts in his final book as an experiment in collective groupthink. It would have been fascinating to see how he might reconcile — or not — the libertine thinking that emanated from that decade with the bizarre clinging to Covid-related authoritarianism of many of the baby boomer generation in old age, a defining trope of the past 18 months.
But this and many other intoxicating possibilities are now lost to us. Frankly, the book does not work and may queer the pitch for imminent future incursions into the subject at a time when groupthink has become pervasive.
Booker uses the Irving Janis analysis as his starting point, and proceeds in what appears to be the beginnings of an attempt to extend the analysis into the area of popular bewitchings through manipulation, examining various relevant phenomena such as the insidious growth of political correctness, the myth of manmade climate change, the delusion of the European ‘project’, the quasi-religious reach of Darwinism, and several others. Some of these subjects are revisitations of themes of his journalism (he was a columnist for many years with the Sunday Telegraph, and a brave and brilliant one at that) but much of the material comprises merely reheated sketches or chronologies of events under the various headings, still to be adapted to what seems implicitly to be the central theme of the book: groupthink as cultivated phenomenon. Nevertheless, scattered throughout the book are gems of insight into what we have been calling the ‘enspelled’ form of groupthink, where Booker’s primary concern appeared to reside.
To begin with, he identifies what is important in the work of Irving Janis, by comparison with predecessors like Charles Mackay and Gustave Le Bon, in considering the baneful tendencies of crowds. Booker condenses Janis’s ‘consistent and identifiable rules’ of groupthink into three sentences:
‘A group of people comes to be fixated on some belief or view of the world which seems hugely important to them. They are convinced that their opinion is so self-evidently right that no sensible person could disagree with it. Most telling of all, this leads them to treat all those who differ from their beliefs with a peculiar kind of contemptuous hostility.’
These are the essential elements of the problematic, fiasco-creating kind of groupthink that arises from unhealthy group dynamics — groupthink as ‘possession’ (of the collective mind of a group). Booker also describes what is emerging as a familiar symptom of the ‘enspelled’ form of groupthink: a mindless clinging to received thinking, combined with a negative solidarity consolidated by the limited awareness of the group’s members: ‘We are never more aware of groupthink at work than when we are up against people who hold an emphatic opinion on some controversial subject, but who, when questioned on it, turn out not really to have thought it through. They have not looked seriously at the facts or the evidence. They have simply taken their opinions or beliefs on trust, ready-made from others. But the very fact that their opinions are not based on any real understanding of why they believe what they do only allows them to believe even more insistently and intolerantly that their views are right.’
Bypassing the rational circuitry of the human mind, this form of groupthink makes its appeal to the ‘feeling’ mechanisms of human apprehension — in several senses of that word: understanding, capturing, terror. This can be achieved under the protection of air cover provided by emotional manipulation, in particular the fomenting of an intense, cultivated hostility to outsiders. Fear is by far the most ‘reliable’ ally of this kind of endeavour.
Booker was on to something new and significant in pursuing the concept of cultivated groupthink as an extrapolation of the ‘found’ kind, the weaponisation of the principles divined by Irving Janis to entrance and brainwash whole populations. Exploring with this insight the events of the past 18 months provides us with a kind of excavated secret blueprint for the totality of the Covid strategy. For that is essentially what has been achieved in the Covid cult: the incorporation of the majorities of a multiplicity of countries into a singular fashion of seeing a constructed, globalised phenomenon. Among the dizzying implications is the possibility that the lessons learned by the governing authorities in this matter have caused them to comprehend a profound, previously undreamt of and possibly fatal weakness in collectives of human beings: that, possessed by a desire for consensus and harmony, they may be prepared to believe anything, do virtually anything they are instructed to by an apparent competent authority, adhere to such prescriptions in the face of all facts and arguments, and turn against their fellows if prompted to.
In setting out his stall, Booker lists among the worst forms of historical groupthink the phenomenon of religious groups purveying belief systems which have often tended to become ruthlessly intolerant of anyone who does not share the approved outlooks. ‘Such outsiders,’ he writes, ‘are labelled as “heretics”, “infidels” or “unbelievers”. To protect the established orthodoxy, they must be marginalized, excluded from society, persecuted, punished or even in countless examples put to death. None of the world's great religions has been immune to this tendency, even where it appears to contradict their core beliefs: the followers of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism have all at different times exhibited this tendency, as have different sects within those religions. . . . And of course, there is no more extreme example in our world today than the rise of Islamic terrorist movements such as Isis or al-Qaeda, which are possessed by a form of groupthink so extreme that it turns those carried away by it into merciless killers, prepared not only to murder at random anyone they can see as “infidels” (chiefly other Muslims), but even to commit suicide themselves in furthering their cause.’
‘Another obvious instance,’ he notes elsewhere, ‘has been those totalitarian political ideologies, such as communism or Nazism, that likewise showed ruthless intolerance towards “subversives”, “dissidents” or anyone not following “the party line” (in the Soviet Union it was termed “correct thinking”). Again, such people had to be excluded from established society, imprisoned or physically “eliminated”.’
Booker is ‘over the target’ on a number of key counts, though the unfortunate circumstances of his final book mean that many of his implicit points, being largely unstated or at best sketched out, are left to be inferred in their fuller implications.
He is absolutely right about the role played in rendering the world susceptible to groupthink of the creeping grip of political correctness (PC), to which he devotes several early chapters of the unfinished book, and which he identifies as ‘a manifestation of groupthink as infectious and all-pervasive as any in our time.’ What he under-emphasises is that PC is really not so much a form of thought as a form of mindless entrancement, the transporting of millions of people to a single hive of received beliefs, which subsequently control their thoughts even when they are not engaging with anything remotely classifiable as ‘ideas’. As a systematic and schematic undermining of the right and capacity to say what you think, and think what you like, PC might be called the unwritten Constitution of latter-day forms of imposed, enspelled groupthink.
Perhaps the most awesome achievement of what is called Cultural Marxism is that, while it can provoke in mainstream society wholesale minor impatience and amusement concerning some of its abundance of 'eccentric' or ridiculous proposals, the PC force-field ensures that it rarely prompts a mainstream voice into support or sympathy for whoever becomes its latest target. This is in part because most people have been conditioned to fear being tarred with a brush that, by advertising its target as a purveyor of backwardness, bigotry or 'hating', is capable of drawing down mass odium, scorn and derision on anyone speaking against it.
PC is essentially an ideology of victimhood that classifies certain groups of people as in need of protection from criticism, and makes believers feel that no dissent should be tolerated. It amounts to a form of censorship that exempts particular listed categories of human being from the normal attrition of democratic society, and, under a series of headings, charges some usually unspecified ‘majority’ with exercising a mandatory sensitivity towards these categories. The victims — the alleged casualties of, for example, Christian and patriarchal oppression: women, blacks, gays etc — thus became the ‘clients’ of a pervasive but undeclared Marxist revolution. As Christopher Booker points out, PC fits neatly with the neo-Marxist view of the world that seemed to follow as though spontaneously in its wake as the world moved through the second half of the twentieth century. Together, these elements represented a new politics of power. ‘It was,’ writes Booker, ‘the fundamental mind-set which ultimately reduced all social questions down to the perennial power struggle reflected in Lenin's famous question: “Who, Whom?” Who, with all their power and privilege, are doing what to those without them?’
PC is a form of violence, because it imposes an undemocratic censorship from which the use of words offers no escape, and therefore ultimately becomes amenable only to violence. So, far from being harmless or slightly comic, as many continue to believe, PC is a system of enforced cultural omertà with a view to undermining freedom of expression and imposing an unchallengeable form of thought control — this directed at the inversion of the traditional social order and the creation of what would amount in effect to a totalitarian state.
PC has its roots not, as we long thought, in some post-feminist prissiness, but in a hard leftist sect known as the Frankfurt School, which gained serious traction for its ideas in post-WWII American academia, and later on in French postmodernist philosophy. It was created specifically to ride shotgun on the ideology of Cultural Marxism, which emanated initially from those circles, latterly from an informal group of French intellectuals, notably Jacques Derrida and Paul-Michel Foucault.
From the 1990s, with the ascent to power across Europe of left-leaning parties, the Cultural Marxist programme, propelled and camouflaged by PC, became the driving force of mainstream politics in many Western countries. By means of political lobbying and infiltration of education systems, by shifting the weight of public policy from parliament to court, and — above all — by relentless censorship and cultural prohibition of contrary ideas, Western society was persuaded to, in effect, turn its value system inside out. Increasingly, deviation from PC principles resulted in instant vilification and censure, with the increasing risk of loss of position and income, nowadays known as the rule of ‘cancel culture’. As the basket of ideologies under the heading ‘Cultural Marxism’ infected the legal systems of many countries, instances of people being investigated by the police and courts for such 'breaches' became more and more common. Thus, public debate no longer described objectively verifiable reality, but depicted an ideologically constructed pseudo-reality in which certain matters become unmentionable and others utterly unchallengeable.
PC, then, divides the world — spuriously, for the most part — between oppressors and victims, and offers a code by which these spuriously described conditions might be ‘reversed’. The PC-generated idea that one group is responsible for the dispossession or suffering of the other is the mainspring of the resultant groupthink known as Woke, tapping into the craving for moral superiority described by Booker:
‘[A]nd this is what adds that other crucial charge of emotional gratification inseparable from groupthink: the need to express morally superior contempt for all those unfeeling, self-centred others who simply don’t understand, and can therefore be dismissively labelled as “sexists”, “racists”, “bigots”, “homophobes”, “trans-phobes”, “fascists” or whatever scornful term seems appropriate, to the point where this is no longer connected to the reality or whatever genuine injustice may originally have lain behind it, but has become an end in itself.’ Such ‘charges’ are frequently sufficient to have someone de-platformed or cancelled without intervention of process. Membership of the accusatory group sanctions the indulgence of ego and extreme prejudice, facilitating the exhibition of PC virtue as well as ritualised outrage ‘at all those contemptibly unvirtuous outsiders who do not conform.’
One of the characteristics of this culture, unsurprisingly, is incoherence. As Theodore Dalrymple describes in his book, The Wilder Shores of Marx, one of the objectives of PC is to impose on society an incoherent programme of behaviour that, by imposing senselessness, ensures confusion and chaos will reign wherever it rules. Dalrymple notes that, within an established totalitarian regime the purpose of propaganda is not to persuade or inform, but to humiliate: ‘From this point of view, propaganda should not approximate to the truth as closely as possible: on the contrary, it should do as much violence to it as possible. For by endlessly asserting what is patently untrue, by making such untruth ubiquitous and unavoidable, and finally by insisting that everyone publicly acquiesce in it, the regime displays its power and reduces individuals to nullities.’ Among the core purposes of PC is to force people to say and repeat, or to fall silent before, things they do not believe, hence to turn them into unwitting liars. ‘In this sense,’ Dalrymple elaborates, ‘the less true it was, the less it corresponded in any way to reality, the better; the more it contradicted the experience of the persons to whom it was directed, the more docile, self-despising for their failure to protest, and impotent they became.’
You might say that PC has turned the whole world into a meeting — defined by the symptoms of groupthink distilled by Irving Lester Janis: power plays, hierarchies, hidden censorship and a barely detectable constant impulse to scapegoat.
Cancellation is the unwritten penal provision at the bottom of the PC charter, providing for the cultural, psychological, moral, existential and even metaphysical annulling of the ‘offender’. Cancellation is at once the penalty for breaches of the unwritten PC code and also, not coincidentally, the realisation of the ultimate fear underlying the human desire for consensus and agreement. And here we glimpse the profound connection between PC and groupthink: the supposed code of ideological civility that has actually become the new statute of imposed human interaction and ‘belonging’, its tenets acting, without benefit of judge or jury, to try, convict and sentence the ‘offender’ by means of ostracisation, de-personing and banishment to a state of permanent Coventry. In this process, fear is the engine that propels whole peoples into a pathological likemindedness as the sole alternative to facing the loneliness that is anyway inevitable by virtue of the path on to which these machinations are now forcing the former human family.
Booker also correctly identifies the role in the unleashing of groupthink society of the Internet, which, especially in its social media incarnations, has done much to construct the emerging ‘culture’ of Balkanised thought in the mainstream of culture, pushing each individual into groups, and each group to the furthest possible extreme. It has decimated the protocols and conventions of public debate, installing anonymity and invective as the ascendant motifs of societal discussion, with the objective of polarising position-options, and bringing public discussion as near to war as is possible without use of physical weapons.
In many ways, a diagnosis of what has gone wrong with democracy, politics, communications and the collective sense of the meaning of freedom might centrally include the idea that a culture of hostility, incubated on the Internet has started to leach out into reality, poisoning everything in a way that could be pleasing to radical revolutionaries and no one else. We live in a virtual world, hiding from the real one. This still feels ‘free’, but only because we have increasingly unreliable models with which to compare it. Reality begins to fade from our memories, and gradually we are enslaved to the will of those seeking to exploit us more effectively in a new world they are preparing us to inhabit.
Many of the technologies we use, which we fondly imagine are increasing our freedoms, are doing the precise opposite. Many Internet users, for example, imagine that the worldwide web remains unchanged from the way it was described in its early days, as an unrestricted and diversity-fostering information highway. In fact, over the past dozen years or so, ostensibly due to the pressure to 'monetise' — i.e. to make bigger and bigger profits from advertising revenues — the web has become involuted and convergent, narrowing the horizons of its users rather than broadening them. The main cause of the change was the 'personalisation' of Google searches, which caused each search to be tailored to a user’s known ‘likes’ and interests, a process which remains invisible, even from the user, who may well believe that his searches are throwing up the same things as everyone else's. Until December 2009, all searches were governed by Google's Page Rank algorithm, which delivered the same results to everyone entering the same words. Starting on December 4th 2009, Google began using information such as log-in details and data concerning what the user had searched for previously to decide what he or she would throw up in this latest search. This customisation has eliminated all possibility of serendipity and encroachingly isolated users in cultural and ideological bubbles. The invisibility of this process is even more worrying: Google doesn't tell you how it reads your profile or why it's giving you the results it is. You may not even know that it's making any kinds of assumptions about you. Google's then CEO Eric Schmidt expressed his delight at this development by declaring that what its users wanted was for Google to ‘tell them what they should be doing next’.
The implications of this trend were explored by Eli Pariser in his 2011 book The Filter Bubble – What the Internet is Hiding from You, which describes the now pervasive ‘algorithm society’, in which everyone will hear about only those things they are already known to agree with. Pariser feared a drying up of democratic exchange, obviously long since in train. ‘Democracy,’ he observed, ‘requires citizens to see things from one another’s point of view, but instead we're more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we're being offered parallel but separate universes.’
Information about web-users has become one of the world’s most lucrative resources, and is used to precision-target increasingly customised advertising. The use of cookies and tracking beacons means that every clue dropped — even unwittingly — by every user can become a commodity. Even while they remain anonymous to the Great Outdoors, users’ personal details can still be harvested by Internet operators and sold off to the highest bidder — usually corporates with stuff to sell. The implications of this go beyond isolating each person in his individual bubble, from which he communicates only with those of like-mind. The result, inevitably, is a reduction of the variety and vibrancy of public discussion — and the sorting of humanity into various preliminary groupthinks.
Groupthink: A Study in Self Delusion, Christopher Booker seems to move across the same territory with a different mind, delving into the conditions that have arisen at our — at the time of his writing — half-century remove from the end of the ‘decade of freedom’. In some ways, he says, life has greatly improved. Old divisions, based on race or social position, have largely dissolved or become less polarising. Yet, in other respects, life as we advance into the 21st century has become ‘edgier, more strained and certainly a great deal more confusing.’ Much of this has arisen from the machinations of the Woke culture which grew out of the PC revolution.
Why, asks Booker, do we hate and despise each other so much these days? The answer, he says, lies in the all-pervading presence of divisive groupthink. ‘Nowhere did this become more evident than on the Internet, that miracle of technology which in many ways was so useful. But in the age of the “selfie”, Facebook and Twitter, it had given new opportunities of expression to the human ego.’
In this new climate, political leadership and the public’s responses to hot-button political issues have less to do with the nature or needs of society, and more to do with the weaponisation of aspiration in the personal zone: how the individual would like to be seen by her peers. Opinions about public matters in our ‘liberal’ cultures have somehow become unmoored from convictions or reflection, becoming badges of identity, like T-shirts or hairstyles. People affect philosophies or positions in order to look good, to complement their clothes and cars. The complacency bestowed by six decades of comparative peace and prosperity has rendered most of our populations incapable of imagining anything terrible happening in the world they inhabited; therefore, there was no need to be aware of the content of issues, which simply provide the threadbare fabric of ideological raiment. These conditions have delivered us into the sway of the archest of arch-manipulators.
I knew Christopher Booker slightly, we having been in intermittent contact for a number of years up to about a decade ago, in the period when he became interested in family law and wrote regularly about it in his Sunday Telegraph column. We would speak on and off on the telephone, discussing various cases, comparing notes and, where possible, digging out evidence to assist families in trouble with social workers and the like. He was, in my estimation, a brilliant and kindhearted man, whose instincts were fundamentally focused on a mistrust of power. He was far too aware of the persistent insinuations of tyrannical forces nibbling at the edges of politics to miss what was happening in the Covid operation.
And yet, there is an odd circumstance relating to the manner and timing of the publication of his groupthink reflection. Bizarrely, in light of the then-prevailing circumstances, it was published in mid-2020, more or less in tandem with the re-issuing of an earlier book, containing remarkable resonances with the topics treated and touched on in its pages. This, book, co-written with Richard North and originally published in 2007, was titled Scared to Death: From BSE to Coronavirus: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth. It was re-released six months into the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’ — ‘Newly revised and updated in the light of COVID-19’ — more or less coinciding with the publication of Booker’s groupthink book.
Scared to Death examines a series of panics afflicting Britain and the world over recent decades, from the Millennium Bug to bird flu, via AIDS, global warming and mad cow disease. In other words it’s a book highly germane to the content of Groupthink: A Study in Self Delusion. Bizarrely, the blurb for Scared to Death — presumably written by someone other than Christopher Booker — reads:
‘These scares have become one of the most conspicuous and damaging features of our modern world, so much so that as we entered the third decade of the new century, our senses had become so blunted that we scarcely recognised the real thing for what it was, until it arrived — COVID-19, for which we were almost completely unprepared.’
This is bizarre: Christopher Booker died approximately six months before Covid became news, yet this reissued, revised book bears his name as co-author. I cannot conceive of any manner in which anyone might have gleaned his response to a ‘pandemic’ announced months after his death.
Teasingly, the spiel continues, without as much as the verbal equivalent of a raised eyebrow: ‘The authors analyse the crucial roles of the different factions who perpetrated the scares: from the scientists who misread or manipulated the evidence to the media and lobbyists who eagerly promoted scares without regard to the consequences, and the politicians and officials who came up with absurdly disproportionate responses, leaving us to pay a colossal price.’
The book also promises to assess — by way of contrast with the ‘scares’ that represent the meat of the book — ‘why this [Covid] is the real thing, as opposed to the succession of scares that we have experienced.’
The Introduction, undertaking to expose innumerable ‘scares’ including ‘nitrate in water; vitamin B6; Satanic child abuse; lead in petrol and computers; passive smoking; asbestos; SARS’ and much, much more, declares:
‘Each was based on what appeared at the time to be scientific evidence that was widely accepted. Each has inspired obsessive coverage by the media. Eạch has then provoked a massive response from politicians and officials, imposing new laws that inflicted enormous economic and social damage. But eventually the scientific reasoning on which the panic was based has been found to be fundamentally flawed. Either the scare originated in some genuine threat that had then become wildly exaggerated, or the danger was found never to have existed at all.’ The Introduction then goes on to list four recurring factors to be noted in such scares: a universal ‘danger’; a ‘novel’ dimension; an element of uncertainty allowing for alarmist speculation; a capacity for disproportionate response.
‘What,’ it is rhetorically asked in conclusion, ‘does it tell us about the state of mind of our modern society that it should so continually fall victim to these bouts of collective hysteria? Is there any way we can learn to protect ourselves better from the horrifying damage they bring in their wake? Certainly a precondition of that must be that we should learn to recognize the scare phenomenon for what it is: a form of human irrationality which almost invariably takes on the same recognizable pattern. We must learn to understand that the scare dynamic obeys certain identifiable rules, and is, therefore, itself susceptible to scientific study.’
It need hardly be pointed out that this amounts to a succinct though unknowing indictment of the Covid scam — yet the book expressly seeks to eliminate this latest and most comprehensive example of a ‘scare’ from the scope of its inquiry. Even more oddly, Scared to Death and Groupthink: A Study in Self Delusion, have the same publisher: Bloomsbury-Continuum, who released these books, more or less simultaneously, seemingly without connecting their remarkably convergent subject matter. The best you can say is that Booker’s executors/publishers do not appear to have comprehended the thesis he was outlining in his final book, nor taken the obvious inferences from it.
It is doubtful indeed that, had he lived another couple of years, Christopher Booker would have allowed these two books to be published as they were, but would have combined their themes and written a book directed primarily at the Covid scam. It is certainly doubtful that he would have concluded, as have his literary executors and publisher, by avoiding or dismissing the glaringly obvious thought that Covid represents the very culmination of the phenomenon he was beginning to sketch out when he died. It might be postulated that the manner of the publication of these two books in 2020 betrays a capitulation to the very syndrome Christopher Booker was describing. Nailing his colours to the mast, Booker references in Groupthink: A Study in Self Delusion, those now legendary works of Orwell and Huxley featuring two imaginary states of the future that brainwash their citizens ‘into a rigidly intolerant state of groupthink which obeyed all the familiar rules’. It can hardly be in doubt that he would have noted in the Covid scam the full-blown eruption into reality of these precise tendencies, as well as the arresting correspondences with the definitions and diagnoses of such as Irving Janis and Gustave Le Bon. It is self-evident that, at the very least, the Covid episode, no matter what your stance or how you choose to depict it, throws up at least three distinct categories in which the groupthink phenomenon becomes manifest: not perhaps in the orchestration of the plan, but certainly in the machinations of bodies and authorities charged, undemocratically and unlawfully, with administering the unfolding narrative; in the media treatment of it; and in the responses of the public who, under the influence of imposed techniques of manipulation, decided that their governments knew best.
It was no accident, Booker notes, that Irving Janis coined the term 'groupthink’ under inspiration from Orwell's thinly disguised picture of life in Stalin's Soviet Union, ‘where the sense of a group mind, personified in Big Brother, was ruthlessly reinforced by means of endlessly repeated slogans, and ritualized hate sessions directed at anyone daring to dissent in any way from the Party's line.’
Whereas Janis was concerned mainly with the decision-making (‘possession’) forms of groupthink, Booker leans much more towards exploring the ‘enspelled’ kind — that which afflicts the crowd in ways that transcend or bypass thought processes. Yet, although his book invites such inferences, Booker does not explicitly distinguish between forms of groupthink appearing to erupt spontaneously from organic group dynamics, and those imposed from above by coercion and/or manipulation. This is a key distinction, because, whereas both may occur at the same time, they have differing dynamics, and can each acquire a life independently of the other. A group of decision-makers under the sway of an internal groupthink may consciously set out to control the thought processes of a larger group or population, but the processes are so different as to qualify as two separate phenomena, though linked by the symptoms listed by Irving Janis. The first type, as we have seen, is an organic internal contagion of the group, rendering its thought processes sclerotic or tunnel-visioned; the second is a way of deliberately suppressing virtually all independent thought-forms, requiring the exercise of explicit authority over a submissive population, usually involving the deployment of licensed state coercion.
Booker also contributes at least one important novel emphasis that adds to our understanding of groupthink as mass manipulation: the prestige-power of second-hand thinking. Deference is the phenomenon he identifies as lying at the root of this form of groupthink imposition. The authority and prestige of the elite leader(s) — politicians, scientists, doctors — cause the crowd, as though one individual, to accept unquestioningly what the authority figure says.
‘Great power,’ he writes, ‘is given to ideas propagated by affirmation, repetition and contagion by the circumstances that they acquire in time, that mysterious force known as prestige.’
Groupthink of this kind may only remotely be regarded as a category of thought. ‘The vast majority of [the affected] only get carried along by groupthink because they have taken it on ready-made from others. They accept as true what they have been told or read without ever seriously questioning it, which means that they don't really know why they think as they do.’
A common thread linking the various forms of imposed groupthink is an observable ‘revolutonary’ process that begins in ideas but soon switches to intense feeling. Whether religious, cultural or ideological, the revolutionary ideas create a sense of an in-group, which soon moves to oppose or denounce the out-group(s), but ultimately to dissolve all sense of reality. This can become especially pronounced when the driving ideas are presented as ‘progressive’, as offering some new state of enlightened or moral superiority which leaves the past for dead.
‘It is,’ write Booker, ‘an archetypal pattern in collective human behaviour. First there is an “anticipation stage”, where pressure builds up in a society to make a decisive break with the past. When this new energy finds a focus and the break is made, this leads on to a dream stage, where for a while it seems the liberating new make-believe is carrying all before it. But precisely because this make-believe knows no limits, it leads to a “frustration stage” where it is driven to push on even further in pursuit of that elusive goal, in ways even more detached from the real world. By now, uncomfortable contradictions are beginning to intrude, until the ever more extreme groupthink brings about a “nightmare stage”, where the supposedly idealistic vision which originally inspired it has been turned completely on its head. This eventually leads to some sort of “collision with reality” where the groupthink is brought face-to-face with the unforeseen consequences of where it has all been leading.’
Booker cites the American sociologist David Riesman, who in his 1950 book The Lonely Crowd, described three ways in which people may be categorised according to the primary sources of their values and beliefs. These include the — self-explaining — ‘tradition-directed’, i.e. most of humanity until relatively recently, a category which persists though as a much smaller phenomenon. Riesman also identified two more ‘modern’ categories, one of which he called the 'other-directed’, which refers to those ‘dedicated followers of fashion’ who take on the up-to-the-minute values, beliefs and dispositions of those around them, and, as Booker outlines, thus become more amenable to different types of groupthink, forming various categories of ‘groupescules’, which converge under certain conditions. The third category — by far the smallest — comprises those Riesman described as 'inner-directed': living by values they have worked out each one for himself, largely impervious either to the diktats of tradition or the insinuations of the conventional fads or groupthink. The latter two categories have become highly visible as representing the two ‘sides’ of the Covid cult.
‘One reason why our time has become so prey to groupthink,’ writes Booker, ‘is unquestionably that in the past 60 years the world has been going through the most intense period of change ever. On the back of astonishing technological advances which in the early post-war years would have seemed unimaginable, long-established certainties, assumptions and values have melted away like snow. So many familiar old reference points were disappearing. In such a bewilderingly new and unfamiliar world, people were removed from the old mental and moral framework which could have helped them make sense of it, and recognize what they accepted as reality. People became increasingly inclined to take on board what they were told to think and believe by others: by the media and above all by the intoxicating new spirit of the age.’
In his Conclusion to Booker’s book, Richard North notes: People in the Internet age increasingly procure opinions off the peg. Confronted with a veritable infinite number of sources and choices, users select those positions with which they are most comfortable, ‘essentially those which tell them what they want to know and confirm their pre-existing prejudices. . . The body politic has fragmented into a staggering array of sub-groups, each with their own unique and identifiable characteristics and beliefs. Booker's “groupescules” have multiplied beyond all recognition.’ And yet, as in the Covid episode, these multitudinous fragments can be brought together in a common frame of illogic. Elaborating on Booker’s sketched hypothesis, North describes how, through the communications revolution, groupthink has become a mass phenomenon pervading almost every part of our lives, ‘exercising a pernicious form of control over our language and thinking.’ Yet, he gives no hint of having tumbled to the glaring immediate context of this rumination, while at the same time displaying remarkable insight into the groupthink phenomenon:
‘With so many different groupings that lack uniforms, badges or trades to distinguish them, groupthink becomes the “glue” that binds individuals to deliver the cohesive whole, giving them their identity. At the same time, acceptance of the groupthink mores peculiar to the group serves as a rite of passage, while its free, uncritical use is a very tangible expression of loyalty. Groupthink, therefore, is not about knowledge or information, but a property, and the very foundation of the modern, otherwise amorphous groupings facilitated by the emergence of the electronic “information society”.’
The world we have fetched up in, then, holds within its structures, its walls of consensus and mass-produced sloganised ideas, an enormous and growing risk of groupthink. And this involves not just the courting of ‘fiascos’, but also groupthink of a kind that threatens the very independence of the individual, inviting the aggregate of such a consequence for entire populations. We live in an era of conformity that is psychologically conceived, technologically delivered and enforced using the appropriated legal power of the people being corralled. It is largely invisible, or at least, as Jung said, detectable only by those who remain immune to it, and designed to attack the human being in areas of his mind and being that most people are only dimly aware of carrying about their persons. The effect, therefore, is of something naturalistic, organic and readily normalisable, throwing open the possibility that we are on the verge of a form of human society that may hold no resemblance to the ways we understood our species, collectively or individually, hitherto. It is not impossible — indeed it becomes encroachingly probable — that, if we fail to grasp the groupthink nettle, we or our descendants will cease in time even to question a model of human society that is centrally controlled by unelected elites exercising godlike forms of power over their ‘fellows’, and that this will accordingly become the natural and everyday understanding of how the human species is actually constituted.
Perhaps, then, the most shocking unspoken thing we have faced in the past 18 months is an idea that has to do not with Covid, but with something far more fundamental and potentially unstoppable once it starts: the idea that there is nothing ‘they’ cannot do to us, or make us do to ourselves, unless we find ways of articulating coherently our situation and conveying this understanding to at least a significant majority of our fellows before it grows too late. For if the moment is allowed to slip by, and ‘they’ are allowed to succeed in what appears to be their mission, then the idea of an autonomous human being will afterwards — into the quasi-eternal future – make no more sense than the idea of a talking donkey does to us now. Perhaps there will be stories about such beings, but they will read as fantasies and fables. In this sense, then, those who have set themselves in opposition to the concept ‘groupthink’ are opposing not merely an odd passing ideological quirk but the very core threat to the future of our species. And when we oppose it, we do so not merely on our own behalf but moreso on behalf of those humans yet unborn, who if we fail will not know what they are missing, and if we succeed will take themselves as much for granted in their time as we have been blessed to do in ours.
Groupthink Case Study
The Witch Trials of Salem (1692)
This episode is an example of the second fundamental form of groupthink — ‘enspelling’ — the entrancement of a whole population with dangerous and mistaken ideas. It has many resonances with our present predicament, though of course it precedes the advent of mass media communications, and therefore presents the idea of ‘spell’ in undiluted and unmagnified form. It should be cautionary for us to consider what became possible even back then, long before television, the Internet and other hypnoidal instruments of modern culture.
It is also indicative of a minor kink in the somewhat artificial division we have created in this series between ‘possession’ and ‘enspelled’ forms of groupthink, for clearly the enspelled form is, in a quite literal sense, an example of the spiritual possession of a community by deranged emotions and ideas. This underlines a need for clarification, notwithstanding the usefulness of delineating various strands of groupthink: the two categories can leach into one another, as in the Covid cult.
In some respects, the Covid episode appears to have been timed to coincide with a moment in the culture of Western society that might be characterised as the speed-bump on the outer frontier of the spurt of freedom that had been in train since the 1960s. Among the symptoms is that this seemed deliberately to invoke some of the psycho-spiritual control mechanisms of religion, to tap into the residual religious imagination of humanity, in order to persuade people to ‘willingly’ incarcerate themselves and give up their claims to being truly free persons.
Act One of the published script of Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible, based on the witch trials of Salem, is punctuated with occasional notes by the author about the social and spiritual context in which those events occurred. ‘When one rises above the individual villainy displayed,’ Miller wrote in one of these notes, ‘one can only pity them all, just as we will be pitied one day.’
The witch hunts were a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn to greater individual freedom. The community of pilgrims in which the witch trials unfolded in the dying days of the seventeenth century had changed from the people who had arrived on the Mayflower, seven decades before. In the interim, Miller noted, they had developed a theocracy of their own, which had evolved from the necessary autocracy that had characterised their earlier existence in New England. This had been, however, an autocracy by consent, held together by a common ideology. Religious sentiment — a strong sense of the danger of evil forces — suffused this belief system. The earlier royal government had been replaced by a junta, which despite its denotation, amounted to a relaxation of control. These conditions led both to a loosening and a fear of loosening — a sense that freedom might sweep away the security that had been established. ‘Evidently.’ Miller wrote, ‘the time came in New England when the repressions of order were heavier than seemed warranted by the dangers against which the order was organised.’
Central to this process was the weaponisation of the Christian idea of Original Sin. As I have written elsewhere, the Covid manipulation programme sought to supplant the dying sense of that idea with an analogous one: that each human being is by dint of biological nature a danger to others, and that this defines our relationships in ways that, until March 2020, we had carelessly overlooked. The Covid cult reinvented the structure of this Christian concept, conjuring up a kind of pathogenic leper, stumbling about, a festering mess of microbes and viruses, spreading disease among his fellows and threatening them with imminent and miserable death.
A similar notion of contagion was a critical element of the witch hysteria of Salem, more than four centuries before. The Pilgrims who had landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts in 1620 and founded the first permanent settlement in New England, were all Puritans, and none was permitted to exist outside their cult. Personal rights to, for example, property and ‘freedom’, were few and could be suspended at any time, being in particular contingent on continued membership and adherence to the religious rules. Pleasure of virtually any kind was regarded with suspicion. One description of the life of the Puritans related: ‘There were no celebrations or holidays, no theaters or novels and no children’s games or entertainments. Dancing was considered a serious sin.’
Not everyone is happy with increasing freedom. Some fear it, preferring the security blanket of — possibly — muted authoritarianism. Some are prepared to place any form of moral order, including medicine-based ‘morality’, above the call of freedom, welcoming the ‘prohibitions’ on themselves because these place even greater constraints on their more adventurous fellows. This may in particular be true of the old, who are fearful of the exuberance and excesses of the young. But it may also be true of the emerging young of Ireland 2020/21. There are signs, as I outlined in this article — https://johnwaters.substack.com/p/no-future-for-youth — that the millennial generation, raised in the debris left behind by 1960s hedonism — broken families, McDonalds parenting, crèche existence, general dysfunctionality — had grown with an unarticulated and perhaps mostly unconscious rage for order.
The Puritans of New England believed in the literal truth of every word in the Bible, which was their guide, their truth, their ‘science’. Their obsession with Original Sin, their belief that every human person is at birth already evil and at risk of eternal damnation — and that these congenital sins are incapable of being washed away — these were the mechanisms that stoked the frenzy that, in the end, turned spouse against spouse and had neighbour hunting down neighbour to purge sinfulness from the earth. Even if this sinfulness could never be purged, it was possible to stay its power sufficiently to enable the person to rejoin human society as a repentant sinner, to return, in conditional fashion, to the path of righteousness. This was done by public acts of confession, whereby the sinner admitted his or her sins to the community, and carried out some ritualistic public act of penance.
The ‘vaccine’ is the instrument of the equivalent process in the Covid cult. As with the Puritans and conventional sin, the congenitally infectious nature of the human is impervious to investigation — due to the elusive nature of the ‘virus’, its invisibility and mutability, and the concept of ‘asymptomatic infection’, et cetera. Thus, only the public acceptance of the vaccine is sufficient to return the individual to the path of rightousness. In New England in 1692, those who declined to confess their sins publicly were banished from society and some were hunted down and hanged. This, essentially, is the condition of culture the Covid cult is aiming for.
The witch-hunt was not, in Miller’s words, ‘a mere repression. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims. . . Long held hatreds of neighbors could now be openly expressed, and vengeance taken, despite the Bible’s charitable injunctions. Land-lust, which had been expressed before by constant bickering over boundaries and deeds, could now be elevated to the arena of morality: one could cry witch against one’s neighbor and feel perfectly justified in the bargain. Old scores could be settled on a place of heavenly combat between Lucifer and the Lord; suspicions and the general envy of the miserable towards the happy could and did burst out in the general revenge.’
For the people of Salem in 1692, just as for the population of Ireland 2021, there was much beneath the surface sanctity, and much that emerged from this, that was other than it seemed. The fear of witches was emblematic of an ingrained, conditioned fear of Evil, the personified essence of the non-religious lifestyle. Satan was prowling the frontiers of their colony, waiting for a way in. Once the colony was perfected, they would be safe, acquiring conditional immunity to Evil, but in the meantime it behoved them to be constantly vigilant and ruthless with those who remained casual about the danger. Witches were the handmaidens of Satan, having entered into pacts to infect their fellows with the spirit of Evil.
In the 1692 episode, the courts of Salem, Massachusetts, were in effect handed over to the witch-hunt hysteria, also called ‘the delusion’. Between March and September 1692, at least 20 accused people, and two dogs, were put to death as witches, following extra-legal procedures. Many others were excommunicated, losing all their rights and property. It was well into the next century before the community came to its senses and began to realise what had occurred, belatedly awarding restitution to those who had survived their indictments.