One of the great scourges of the age is groupthink. Understanding its origins, manifestations and outcomes is key to understanding the imponderable policies that we have thrust upon us today without majority support.
Everywhere you look, we are confronted by ideological zealots and useful idiots proclaiming received “truths” that somehow come to be adopted as public policy, and which are never seriously challenged. The three great lies of the twenty-first century – that we face a climate “emergency”, that a middling virus should cause us to shut down everything, and that self-proclaimed victim groups get to run the world – rely on absorbed ideology, endlessly repeated and easily taken on board by large groups who seem not to notice that they have been conned.
The man who coined the term “groupthink” was not, as it might be supposed, George Orwell, but rather Irwin Janis, in 1971. Clearly, Janis drew heavily upon Orwell’s classic, 1984. His original article appeared in the journal Psychology Today, his book, Victims of Groupthink, a year later.
Janis’s work has been raised in recent times, with obvious good reason. One was in a book published posthumously in 2020 by the late, great Booker, aka Christopher Booker, a British commentator and warrior with his colleague Richard North in the climate wars (Groupthink: A Study in Self delusion). More recently, Robert Malone (co-inventor of mRNA vaccine technology and now a trenchant critic of Covid policies) has written on groupthink at The Brownstone Institute. Drawing on Janis, Malone notes:
The group develops an illusion of invulnerability that causes them to be excessively optimistic about the potential outcomes of their actions.
Group members believe in the inherent accuracy of the group’s beliefs or the inherent goodness of the group itself. Such an example can be seen when people make decisions based on patriotism. The group tends to develop negative or stereotyped views of people not in the group.
The group exerts pressure on people who disagree with the group’s decisions.
The group creates the illusion that everyone agrees with the group by censoring dissenting beliefs. Some members of the group take it upon themselves to become “mindguards” and correct dissenting beliefs.
Malone seeks an explanation for the Covid policy fiasco, and with Janis’s understanding of groupthink, it is easy to see the connection between Covid policies and groupthink.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-madness-of-groupthink/
What is groupthink? As one definition has it:
… mode of thinking in which individual members of small cohesive groups tend to accept a viewpoint or conclusion that represents a perceived group consensus, whether or not the group members believe it to be valid, correct, or optimal.
Janis based his work on a series of case studies related to US foreign policy decisions. Others have seen far wider application.
Not all victims of groupthink are mad. But their decisions and behaviour as a group might suggest otherwise. Hence groupthink is central to the “madness of crowds” literature. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that:
Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.
Douglas Murray’s much lauded book, The Madness of Crowds, owes its core message to Orwell as well as to Charles McKay’s 1840s book of the same title. The famous McKay quote goes like this:
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
There is also the compelling “mass formation” work undertaken by the Belgian academic, Mattias Desmet, specifically in the context of Covid. Desmet has advanced a persuasive argument as to how the masses can be duped into following harmful, indeed, catastrophic, orders from on high. Suddenly, we realise that the 1930s Germans were not alone in succumbing to crazy, evil ideology. It is another piece of the explanatory jigsaw.
Laura Dodsworth (A State of Fear) has added the critical role of nudging and fear-creation in the achievement of popular compliance with Covid totalitarianism. The role of scaring the hell out of under-informed citizens has been critical in sustaining the Covid state of fear.
The relationship of high-level groupthink to the “rational ignorance” of the low information voter has been explored by the late American economist, Anthony Downs. Downs suggested that it is not in the interest of the average voter to inform himself of the full story in relation to complex policy decisions. True enough. This suggests a glorious and convenient partnership between elites and outsiders that delivers the ideological outcomes favoured by elites. Aided by the elites’ rigging of information flows and the censorship of contrary narratives. Hence the Covid narratives of the political class persist on the back of under-informed voters.
So, how does the groupthink story fit into the Covid catastrophe?
In particular, if we accept that the Covid State consists of multiple actors playing different roles – the international actors conspiring to subjugate the deplorables, the national leaders that I would call useful, panicking idiots, the managerial class committed to rule by them and screw everyone else, the compliant media, mostly bought up and bought out by Big Pharma and/or Gates, the academics on the take and totally unmoored from their scholarly roots, and, finally, the low-information voters who go along to get along – then which of these myriad actors can be said to be victims of groupthink? Does groupthink explain all of it, or just some of it?
Well, Janis’s original research was all about political decision-making. So, it is likely that groupthink on Covid was mostly likely to explain the actions of politicians. Totally. Once the Chinese “solution” to the virus they themselves invented and exported was accepted by Italy, then all bets were off. Half a century of pandemic science went down the toilet. Boris Johnson led the race to the cliff. Idiotically, the idiot politician ScoMo leapt onto Team Covid. And all the rest. Now, some of the decision-makers were also part of the international conspirator class. With Macron, Trudeau and Ardern, there was no groupthink. It was pure ideology. Quite deliberate. Direct line to Davos. But mostly, the decision-makers were groupthinkers and useful idiots.
There have been a number of right-of-centre explanations of the Covid catastrophe.
There are the conspiracy theorists who suggest that “they” planned it. There are the rational sceptics (think Toby Young) who decry conspiracy theories and prefer the “stuff-up” theory. It was all a mistake, an unfortunate confluence of unrelated factors and political incompetence and naivete. Then there are the “convergent opportunism” folks, who suggest that disparate actors have swooped in on Covid opportunities to advance their own global agendas. They have much evidence to commend their thinking. Finally, there are the political theorists. Like me. Who dig into the theory and practice of political decision-making in an attempt to explain policy outcomes. And here we come back to Janis. Groupthink doesn’t really explain the mass submission by the public to Covid fascism. A diverse population cannot be thought to be a tight “ingroup”. More lemmings with low information and self-interest driven to “go along”. Pathetic, but that is life. Nor does groupthink explain the ideology of the globalists. They mostly, actually believe it. With massive self-interest built in.
So, we conclude, the groupthink theory of Covid decision-making is spot on, but only in relation to the politicians. Well, they did the deed. With upstream ideological connivance from their puppeteers, and downstream acceptance by the clueless, distracted plebs.
With Irving Janis, we progress in our understanding of a world gone mad. The question remains, will Charles McKay’s hope that we will recover our sanity, individual by individual, come to pass? We all hope so. The green shoots are there, all about. Making common sense, rationally based inroads into the political class, a currently lethal combination of useful idiots and determined ideologues, will take some doing.
Paul Collits
8 August 2022
In trouble shooting serious equipment malfunction, many maintenace teams fall into the groupthink mode. The most vocal in the group develop a pet theory. Sceptics are often afraid to speak up and the problem remains unsolved.
There is a process to counteract this, developed in WWII by the Rand Corporation and labled Kepner-Tregoe.
Originally it was called "Analytical Trouble Shooting" and later morphed into "K-T Problem Solving and Decision Making". Had we elected a real leader, he or she might have brought together a few folks familiar with different facets of the problem, and formed some logical decions as to how to deal with it. K-T is a very powerful process in solving problems with machinery. It could well be successfully used in a situation such as the one that existed in early 2020.
“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims … but accomplices.”............Eric Blair