The Pandemic Of Groupthink
By CHRISTINE KRAUTMANN
Herd immunity, frequently discussed in relation to Covid-19, describes the indirect protection members of a society receive from an infectious disease when a sufficient percentage of the population has become immune, either through infection or vaccination. Once the herd immunity threshold has been reached, the disease gradually disappears from a population.
While the U.S. struggles to reach herd immunity to Covid-19, a metastasizing herd mentality is reaching critical mass in obliterating free speech and independent thought. The free and open exchange of ideas is met with fear, scorn, and retaliation by a herd that considers dissent a disease, and whose goal is domination.
Herd or mob mentality exists when people are influenced by their peers to adopt behaviors based on an emotional rather than a rational foundation. Mobs often make radically different decisions than individuals, leading to dysfunctional outcomes like the market bubbles and crashes that result from human greed and fear, or like the physical symptoms of psychogenic illnesses that result from mass hysteria.
“Groupthink,” a form of herd mentality, describes our current epidemic of cancel culture, where censoriousness, exclusion, and public shaming mimic perverted religious cult behavior. Group cohesiveness is prized over the liberty to voice beliefs, thoughts, and ideas without fear of retaliation. “Safe spaces” shelter delicate “in group” members from contamination by free thinkers. Groupthink produces uniformity of thought, intellectual conformism, and a loss of self-awareness. The “out group” is dehumanized and objectified. The mob’s collective, obsessive behavior feeds a fantasy of invulnerability and encourages a mindless faith in the morality of the group.
The crushing clutch of cancel culture stifles innovation, individual creativity, and independent thought. It diminishes personal agency, and anesthetizes feelings of individual responsibility. A prolonged social and political climate of groupthink weakens its members’ ability to reason critically and consider unintended consequences. Only “politically correct” questions are permitted, and those who oppose the group mindset are stereotyped as ignorant or prejudiced if they denounce the false narratives poisoning today’s public discourse.
Their only recourse in this new Inquisition is “virtue signaling,” which is an empty exercise in vanity that appeases the mob, assuages personal feelings of guilt, and shows others how morally upright one is, without ever taking any substantive action to fix real problems.
Self-censorship is the ubiquitous, mind-numbing result of a well-established societal herd mentality in which all ideas that deviate from the crowd become suspect. Individual integrity, judgment, and moral principles are sacrificed to the du jour social issues supported by the mob. Countercultural thinkers must choose to publish pseudonymously in order to unshackle themselves from the paralyzing fear of career-ending consequences and the scourge of social repercussions in this climate of sanctioned extortion.
Educational systems that discourage the open exchange of opposing opinions is no longer schooling, but indoctrination. Social media manipulation becomes a vehicle for disseminating the virus of “cancellation.” Hurling epithets like “racist,” “bigot,” and “fascist” have a chilling effect on the expression of opposing viewpoints. Labeling as purveyors of hate those with whom one disagrees spreads intolerance. Trying to socially obliterate anyone who does not agree with the “social justice” causes and ideological positions currently held by the increasingly vocal, illiberal, and radical fringe is becoming a new form of slavery and racism.
An illiberal herd mentality is what allows a violent, Marxist, terrorist movement like Black Lives Matter (BLM) to capitalize on the current climate of identity politics and to exploit the sympathies of the majority of well-intentioned citizens who are not racist, and who are largely unaware of the culture-destroying intentions of the BLM movement. BLM dominates the political discourse, creates havoc in cities, and makes a mockery of our laws and our system of justice.
The avowedly Marxist BLM founders and leaders are determined to destroy Western civilization and usher in socialism, which is why they are consistently silent about the countless black lives, many of them children, that are extinguished in cold blood every day in their own communities, and in abortuaries strategically located in some of the most impoverished areas of our inner cities. Truly, the single most dangerous place in the country for unarmed blacks is in the womb.
It is only in this fantasy world of identity politics propaganda that Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project could win a Pulitzer Prize and be integrated into school curricula nationwide, despite this New York Times-initiated project receiving withering critiques and being debunked by respected historians on both the political left and the political right. Only in the irrational, dreamlike state of identity politics could Robin DiAngelo’s inane theory of “white fragility” be considered rational thought on improving race relations. According to DiAngelo, whites must be constantly looking inward to explore their innate racial bias.
This divisive theory leads to paranoid, narcissistic, navel-gazing behavior by whites, and has been described by John McWhorter, a black professor at Columbia University, as “dehumanizing and condescending toward blacks.”
LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick are among many other pro-BLM athletes bent on dividing an already deeply severed nation by promoting a hapless victimhood mentality and a dependency on white liberals to solve the problems of blacks.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X championed self-reliance and rejected white liberal politics. They believed blacks capable of solving problems on their own. They encouraged personal agency, responsibility, hard work, and good parenting. They did not encourage feelings of powerlessness or preach perpetual dependence on government handouts as a key to life success for blacks. They considered that type of thinking to be “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” a phrase used by President George W. Bush in 2003 to describe the latest iteration of racial bias.
The current surrealistic atmosphere of “thought control” requires suspension of belief and abandonment of common sense in various domains of human thinking and interaction. “Woke” individuals must not only tolerate, but also accept, and indeed celebrate that men can become women and women can become men.
Frenzied property destruction and barbarous looting have morphed into legalized theft in the service of “reparations,” the latest form of retribution and redistribution in the increasingly dystopian hell of cities like Portland and Chicago, where rioting Communist groups like BLM and Antifa are allowed to dominate and dictate public policy.
Twenty-first century “wokedom” brings to mind the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Robespierrian rhetoric is giving license to those who, in frenzied violence, burn down buildings and “brick” police in their quest for an ideological purity where fanaticism prevails and there is no room for compromise, moderation, or tolerance.
A pervasive ignorance of history and human nature is afoot, and without the knowledge of past mistakes and a respect for past achievements, the miracle of our free and independent republic, which has brought some measure of prosperity to all, will be sacrificed to a utopian ideal that, like all previous utopian endeavors, ends in tyranny, anarchy, and the deaths of tens of millions of people.
The twentieth-century utopian experiments produced gulags, concentration camps, and genocides. Their supporters did not take into account the fact of human imperfection, and a human nature that thrives on autonomy and freedom of choice. Humans, by nature, have different abilities, interests, personalities, and motivations, and this inevitably leads to inequality of outcomes.
Utopian idealists like Mao, Stalin, and Hitler were willing to sacrifice individual freedom of opportunity in their quest to erase all human distinctions. This equality has never been achieved without establishing an oppressive, dystopian political regime through massive carnage and destruction. As long as there is freedom, there will be inequality.
The Absence Of Fathers
Our society is falling apart at the seams, not because of systemic racism or police shootings, but because a large segment of the population is no longer interested in the truth. Leniency and pro-criminal policies are setting the country on fire and making cities unlivable. When state and local governments refuse to protect innocent citizens and their property, Wild West vigilante justice prevails.
The rioters and their BLM supporters are mercilessly victimizing innocent business owners, and they are deflecting attention from the real work that needs to be done to identify and remove rogue police officers and establish better community relations between citizens and police. Scapegoating, demoralizing, and defunding entire police departments will only lead to the loss of more black lives as police pull back from protecting the innocent in crime-ridden black neighborhoods. Pro-active policing saves black lives.
Instead of supporting irresponsible hashtag activism that is rooted in destructive Marxist ideals, we need to support black people, whose lives all matter. Actions at the state and local level must be taken to reduce disparities in education and economic opportunity for blacks. The reasons for the disintegration of the family must also be explored and addressed. Proponents of BLM remain mute on the one factor which most-negatively influences positive outcomes for black children — the absence of fathers in the home.
Predominantly privileged members of the herd — wealthy corporations and celebrities — are pouring money into the Black Lives Matter Global Network at a stunning rate in a mainstream media-sanctioned shakedown. The influx of funds and verbal endorsements from those who wish to assuage their own guilt over inequality have only emboldened the BLM movement and encouraged rioters, who are now calling for a counter-intuitive “defunding of police” despite the outcry from those living in crime-ridden black communities suffering from widespread black-on-black crime. The radical leftist intelligentsia and their lackeys in the media practice thought control through hurling invectives at dissenters and impugning the character and reputation of those individuals, organizations, and corporations that dare to disagree with them. They refuse to proclaim, “The emperor has no clothes.”
The Democracy Of The Dead
G.K. Chesterton was a late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary critic. He espoused giving a vote to the “democracy of the dead,” by which he meant valuing the civilization and traditions we enjoy today by learning from the successes and failures of centuries past.
We cannot value what we do not know or understand, which is why so many uneducated generations today are willing to destroy and discard a republic that has stood the test of time, despite the human weaknesses of those who created it. When thought suppression pervades a society, the collective wisdom of the ages is lost.
As Americans build immunity to the deadly coronavirus pandemic plaguing our nation, we would be wise to acknowledge the coexisting, soul-ravaging malady of a herd mentality that is invading and destroying our hard-won freedom of expression and our right to openly debate and dissent. If we allow ourselves and our children to be vaccinated through educational indoctrination, or to be infected by the illiberal messages the mob is weaponizing to silence us, then no antidote can save us from the “thought police,” the only police that truly need to be abolished.
- + + (Christine Krautmann is a retired registered nurse, a former homeschooling mom, the mother of five adult children, and a longtime volunteer advocate for abused and neglected children through her work as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA). She is a voracious reader of social, cultural, political, and historical nonfiction, and she enjoys studying classical literature, psychology, philosophy, and theology.)
