Group Think and Self Annihilation
Consequences of the Group Misconception
Groupthink(noun)-the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility.
“Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences.”
At a time when social tensions are high and aggression wins over reason, and propaganda is a social currency, and the multitudes have shown great eagerness for the deconstruction and radical alteration of the hitherto sacred rules of universal ethics, it is in our best interest to preserve the infrastructure of our individuality, because it is the basis for all that which is sacred to human life.
We must protect the very concept of self, if we wish to spare our actual selves. It is only the individual human whose misery can be felt, and the oppression he fears is greatest at the hands of the group. When the group turns against the self it is the individual who must suffer and die, and we are all individuals, so we must all suffer and die in the name of the collective “good”.
This death is the death of the unique perspective, and with it goes all that we as individuals can desire or relate to. The group mind does not exist. Only singular consciousness exists. But the group can act when there is consensus, and if by some inevitable turn of fate it turns its aggression toward the self, as we see in cult behavior, it must act to stamp out the vehicles of selfhood, namely all of us.
Selfhood is the enemy of collectivism, and so collectivism is the enemy of oneself. All ideologies that promote the collective interest at the expense of individual good carry this aspect of self hatred, where hatred is the impetus to destroy, and destruction is prerequisite to the ends of collectivist pursuits.
This somewhat significant contradiction almost always goes unnoticed by the adherents of such faiths, because we have a knack for suppression of ideas that undermine our beliefs, and cognitive dissonance can largely be attributed to the human condition — the better for it to go unnoticed.
Life is painful, and we seek at all cost to eliminate that pain, even when that means the denial of its origins and consequently the denial of life. This self-erasure lives as a default state in drug addicts, the clinically depressed, and all those configurations of disfunctional tendencies that bring about what I refer to as the self-annihilating motive.
I should note here that it is necessary to throw out all conceptions of moralistic evaluation. It does not matter whether such dysfunction originates as the result of an inadequate childhood experience, bad choices, or chemical imbalance, etc. It is the result of any negative circumstance that damages the process of individuation. It isn’t that all dysfunctional people are drawn to group think, but that ideas inherent to such belief systems offer a solution to a conflict-of-self inherent to such individuals. The problem is that this path leads to the opposite of recovery though its implicit irrationality.
Other pathways taken by the self anihilating motive, often simultaneously with the belief in collectivist doctrines, but at other times taken exclusively, are more nihilistic in nature. Nihilism is a withdrawal from what is meaningful, and is often quite helpful in allowing for the adoption of group based belief systems, if only because it can facilitate the denial of the true meaning of individuality.
I am not necessarily speaking of philosophical nihilism, but rather nihilism as an aversion to meaning, and an irrational destruction of value, which can be observed in all people who hate standards, due to a hatred of society or a fear of inadequacy that results in a turning away from the outer world.
We must preserve the meaning of our individuality if want to continue to be respected as the people we are, rather than by generalizations that dehumanize us, either by an implicit negation of personal responsibility, or outright demonization, which are always results of collectivism.
Collectivism by its subversion of individualism as its antithesis negates everything that makes us what we are, and inevitably forces us into pathways that cause us to subjugate ourselves to dehumanization, by placing us in opposition to what we are.
We must take responsibility for our own wellbeing and resist the impulse to place ourselves in these categories and participate in the divisions that others impose on us. This is essential to the welfare of civilization, because when the evils of collectivism accumulate the mobs inevitably rise, and that wrath does not end until by immense suffering we realize the error we’ve made.
By then it will be too late, so in the mean time, reject “the good of humanity” and start fighting for your self.
Image attribution:
By Dupondt (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
