EU Referendum


Booker: the sinister world of groupthink


25/05/2014



000a Booker-025 Group.jpg

All around us these days, writes Booker in today's column, we see illustrations of what he has come to think of as one of the more illuminating insights into much of what goes on in our modern world.

Consider, he says, one or two random examples. Some time back, under the heading "Thought police on patrol", a well-known US journalist, Charles Krauthammer, reported how his newspaper had received a petition signed by more than 110,000 people calling on it not to carry any more articles questioning the fact of man-made global warming.

Krauthammer went on to recall how the new CEO of a leading media company, Mozilla, was recently forced to resign by the furore that erupted when it was revealed that, six years earlier, he had made a modest donation to a campaign in California to amend the state's constitution, defining marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Nearer home, we have lately seen the extraordinary and unprecedented campaign by so much of the media to demonise and smear UKIP in general and Nigel Farage in particular.

Some time back, a reader drew Booker's 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" – Booker is quite sensitive to the power and prevalence of groupthink in our own time. It is particularly evident in views widely held on several subjects he regularly writes about, 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.

That is why, as we see illustrated on every side (not least in much of the output of the BBC, or, for that matter, the online comments below this column), they cannot tolerate or offer rational arguments, or explore the three-dimensional truth of a subject. They quickly resort just to dismissing anyone who disagrees with their beliefs as an "idiot", "hopelessly ignorant", "wildly inaccurate" or "anti-science".

Or they appeal to what Gustave Le Bon called "prestige", citing supposedly respected authorities, such as the reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which are only voicing the "consensus" views of other adherents of the same groupthink.

When Ed Davey, our Energy and Climate Change Secretary, recently called on climate-change sceptics to "shut it", he was merely reflecting the fact that absolutely nothing of all the nonsense he talks on this subject derives from his own independent thinking. He is merely repeating the nonsense he has been told by other people.

But on this, as on so many other subjects these days, people like Mr Davey are just classic victims of groupthink.

Because they don't have any proper understanding of what they are talking about, they merely lash out with intolerant smears and ad hominem insults at anyone who does not inhabit the same "irrational and dehumanised" bubble in which they themselves have become, albeit quite unwittingly, trapped.

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