#309: Against Group-Think

The Dilemma

The people I identify with are behaving strangely. What should I do?

We’ve probably all been in this situation. You think you belong to a group, and a huge part of your life—if not all your life—you’ve identified that way. And suddenly, you’re seeing things that are very difficult to support, very difficult to defend even.

So what do you do? Do you double down? Do you say, “No, this is my group. I’m part of this and everything they do is okay.” Or do you say, “I’ve always been wrong all of my life. I’m not part of this group anymore and it’s all over.”

Both sound a little extreme, don’t they?

The Human Nature of Tribalism

The problem is that we as human beings—as our kind of animal—are groupish, are tribal. We can identify by name around 100 to 120 people. Maybe that’s what recent scientific findings seem to be. And beyond that, it becomes a little bit more abstract.

That’s why you see actual tribal communities being a certain size, being organized in bands, clans, or whatever. And if you look at your circle of friends, family, close relatives, close people, work buddies or so, you will probably arrive at around that number. This is how much we human beings can handle without becoming too abstract.

Now, we cannot all live in tiny societies, and we all have people in our inner circle that are a little odd. So not everybody we are associated with is necessarily who we want to be associated with.

Ancient Stories of Division

It is illustrative too that one of the oldest stories in the Bible is that of Cain and Abel. Same story kind of in Rome and Remus. You always have—and people say, “Well, but they’re brothers.” Yeah, well, Cain and Abel. Actually, the story encodes the fight between agriculturalists and nomadic sheep, goat, or whatever herders. That’s what the core of the story is.

So don’t think these are just fairy tales. These are cultural stories that tell us something.

But nevertheless, if you have reflected a little bit about the nature of your group and about the nature of groups, you know that groups aren’t perfect.

Types of Group Membership

Some groups you have to be part of, and it’s very difficult to change group membership. That’s why we have sayings like “blood is thicker than water.” It’s very difficult to disassociate from family, and that’s how it should be. These are your people. You’re related to them. Your body is programmed biologically to relate to these people in a certain way.

Even friends from school early on—you feel some connection. They’re quasi-family. Now, some connections do run deeper. If you’ve grown up in a religious community, these may be family-like associations as well.

So you could say there are stickier and less sticky ways of belonging.

Then wherever you live, you willy-nilly have neighbors, city governments, and whatever. So you have some need to relate to the place you’re in. Then you have citizenship. You’re born into a certain country; you have a certain citizenship. That doesn’t change easily. And if you want to move somewhere else, it is typically not very easy to gain legal status there. And if you don’t do it in a legal pathway, you are aware of the risk you take, as uncomfortable as it may feel and be.

Chosen Groups and Political Identity

There are all kinds of groups that we are part of. There are all kinds of groups we choose to be part of beyond those that we have to be part of. That also has to do with belief systems.

If you have certain political tendencies, you may see that you find yourself voting in a particular way more predictably than otherwise. If you do this for many years, even associate with that party, it feels natural. But these parties aren’t perfect. These parties cater to whatever political issues present themselves to whoever is a leading person within that.

And so sometimes you may come to the point where you say, “This is not my party anymore. These are not my people anymore.” And that’s okay.

A lot of people have agonized in recent years about political parties changing, both here in Europe and in all democracies, for that matter. No party ever stays the same.

What do you do with that? You don’t identify too much with it because politics is about concrete issues. It is also about ideologies. But our ideologies, our grand narratives, are not as stable as we would like them to be.

Individual Identity vs. Group Identity

Maybe the lesson here is to realize we are not groups. We are individuals. We have our own feelings. We come to the world as babies. We come to the world in a certain way as something that’s a unit itself. Yes, we have hopefully family which we grew up in. We see the world through our eyes. We see the world through our experiences. We leave the world all on our own.

Unless you’re in an unfortunate situation where a group of people has been killed, but even then, birth, life, and death are very individual experiences. They are not group experiences.

Normally, you may be part of a group, but you are not that group. There’s a difference between identification and actual identity.

And even if you’re understood by society to be part of a group because of how you look, your history, your origin—this is what is called a social construction—that still isn’t who you are. And not everybody who looks a certain way has a predictable identity.

Choosing Your Allegiances

Some identities we have; some identities are thrust upon us. Just because you are seen by others as a certain group does not mean you have to own it.

So we may choose to be part of groups, but we are not organically, indefinitely part of them. We can leave the group. We can also question that the group is a coherent entity. We could maybe think that the group in itself needs to be seen as a diverse thing, not just one thing.

Not all people belonging to group X have everything in common or should have everything in common even. How horrible a world would that be?

We are all different from each other. Even if we have outwardly similar characteristics, even though we may all have certain core belief systems, we are not identical. We are not the same.

So if there are groups that want you to be that one thing, and if you violate that thing even in the smallest degree, they’re saying you’re not one of us—then so be it.

Breaking Free from Toxic Loyalty

If the group we belong to forces us into loyalty and into support for things we cannot support, so what? We don’t have to be part of that group. And unless this group allows for a difference in thinking, a difference in being, a difference that honors our individuality, we shouldn’t feel beholden to the group.

We need to make sure that we maintain our morality and that we act in an ethical way. False allegiances create all kinds of trouble.

We feel sometimes we may need to defend the indefensible, but we don’t. And it will fall back on us. We feel sometimes we need to support the unsupportable, but we don’t. And also it will fall back on us.

Just because our assumed group believes something doesn’t mean we have to affiliate or keep affiliating.

The Rise of Group Think in the Digital Age

Group think has always been a problem. And it seems that in recent years, probably through our media usage, our society has become even more fragmented because of algorithms creating certain bubbles and because we don’t realize that it is normal to believe differently than us.

When I—sorry, I have to play the age card—when I grew up, I still saw people sitting in public transportation reading the newspaper they were reading. I saw people reading a newspaper associated maybe with the center, maybe with the conservatives, maybe with the moderate left, the left-wing extremists, maybe even with the communists. Some people reading the intelligent papers, others reading the stupid papers.

And there are many stupid papers—I mean the yellow press, so-called, with the big pictures and the little text and whatever. But then you look at the people, and the people don’t seem to be so different from you, and you’re wondering: maybe the person reads the stupid paper because they have a stressful day and they just want to have some fun while going to work. Maybe the person reading the conservative paper will later read a liberal paper. Who knows? Some people read more than one newspaper.

But you could see people having other media consumption than you. You would see the headlines. You would be exposed to a different spectrum of opinion.

Now everybody has their phone. You don’t know what they’re doing. They’re probably not reading the news anymore. They’re probably going through some algorithmically assaulted selection, and they’re probably too—well, I don’t know—lazy, tired, whatever, to actually click on anything and read long-form articles.

I make it a practice to read widely from different sets of opinion, but that’s maybe a different topic.

But if you are solidly giving in to what the algorithm lets you see, you’ll be in trouble. Your perception of the world will become even more groupish. And I think that’s part of why group thinking has been rising.

The Cost of Independence

So the other big problem: if you leave your group even partially, you will be ostracized more likely than not from that group. That’s a big problem. People like to belong, and they may not like their own group or their old group, but they may certainly not like the new one or whatever else is out there.

That’s okay.

Fighting for Diversity of Thought

We should always fight for what we need. And what all of us need is a diversity of thought, a diversity of opinion. We must reject this group think, and we must criticize most of all our own, in order to give all of us space to be in there.

If things are too complicated, if groups become too constricting, too one-sided, that’s a problem.

Ideally, the groups we are in are open enough to allow everybody to have a different opinion within the broadest of possible ideological spectrums.

Well, one can dream.

That’s it for now. I’ll probably come back to this.