me: > It's a consensus that's clearly subject to the distorting effects of > group-think. As we've seen, this can lead to group madness.
Charles Brown wrote: > Isn't "group-think" as a derogatory term > part of individualist ideological error ? It implies > the problem is not thinking for oneself, individually. > But the problem is really "one-think" with the rest > following the one uncritically. If everybody in the > group actually thinks, the thought is likely to > be better than "one-think". Two heads > are better than one, when both heads are > active. The standard story these days is that group-think leads to errors like invading Iraq in the self-defeating way Bush that did. (Of course, it's not part of the standard story that wanting to invade Iraq and not caring about the Iraqi people except on an abstract level are due to militarism, petropolitics, and the like.) On the other hand, one-think can lead to errors, too, as Charles suggests. Bernie Madoff and other sociopaths seem to fit this bill. One of the interesting things about financial markets is that they glory in one-think (bourgeois individualism, "libertarianism," etc.) but in practice end up being as driven by group-think as much as screaming girls hounding the Beatles. Naturally enough, their mania has a much more negative result, for a much much larger group of people. The closest we have to a solution is for groups to think democratically, which does not just mean majority rule (rather than have some elite like the Cheney gang dictating thinking) but in addition involves being open to a lot of different perspectives. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
