Blinded by Groupthink

Blinded by

Groupthink

By: David Deschesne

Editor/Publisher,

Fort Fairfield Journal

September 27, 2017

In a democratic society, majority rules. But, just because the majority sees things a particular way, doesn’t necessarily make those things correct, factual or even right.

Man has been succumbing to the pressures of groupthink ever since he was able to communicate with his neighbors. Groupthink is the basis of all religions throughout history. In the secular world, it caused the rise of the communists in the former Soviet Union and the National Socialist party (NAZI) in post-World War I Germany. (Yes, NAZIs were socialists, exactly like today’s Democrats in the U.S. I’m sorry if true history disturbs you socialists.)

In 1940 a study of groupthink by S.E. Asch was published in the Journal of Social Psychological Review (1940, 12, 433-465). That study used a group of college students who were to ascertain which line matched best with a series of other lines of varying length. Out of a group of ten people, nine were told to hold an erroneous view on the observations with one person, not aware of the charade, being singled out to espouse what he believed to be true. When the group got together, they were to explain their perception of the lines out loud to one another. The one person who held the correct view was then unwittingly subjected to group pressure from the others who did not agree with him (on purpose, as part of the experiment).

Asch found after studying many groups in this type of scenario that two types of individuals were noted; the independent—who maintained his view of the facts despite what the group said; and the yielding subject—who at first verbalized their beliefs but soon changed them when confronted with the group’s beliefs even when he knew those beliefs to be wrong.

Of those subjects who yielded to the group mindset three subtypes were identified; 1.) those with “distortion of perception” - they changed what they thought they saw to conform to the group’s idea; 2.) those with “distortion of judgment” - these subjects suffered from primary doubt and lack of confidence, on this basis they felt a strong tendency to join the majority; and 3.) those with “distortion of action” - people who chose to yield to the group because of an “overmastering need not to appear different from or inferior to others, because of an inability to tolerate the appearance of defectiveness in the eyes of the group. These subjects suppress their observations, and voice the majority position with awareness of what they are doing.”

It was also discovered that when a person wrote his perception down anonymously, or when there was at least one other person in the group who agreed with him, he tended to maintain his view without submitting to the group mind.¹

When this study was conducted in the early 1940s, the results showed that a majority of those in conflict with the group mindset retained their independence and held to their position despite the group’s majority erroneous view. After seventy years of pro-conformist public school and college education, it is highly likely the conflict group members will fall into the submissive yielding group today; falling in line with the group’s mindset in order to not be ostracized, made fun of, or worse—physically harmed—which is happening today with the various Black Lives Matters (BLM), and Anti-Fascism (ANTIFA) groups marauding through society.

Religion

Most Christians don’t know that in the early decades of the formation of their religion’s beliefs there were two competing ideas about the Jesus narrative. There were the “literalists” who believed the scriptures to be a true and factual account of historical events and thus the exclusive “word of God”; and there were those who looked at the Jesus narrative as one of symbolism and allegory describing a person’s personal journey to God with the Christ power actually within them and all of the imagery in the scriptures merely symbolic of the path they walk in their quest to reconnect with God. This group, the Gnostics, was also divided into various sub-groups each with their own ideas on how that symbolism was to be interpreted.

These various camps of Christians competed for adherents for at least the first three centuries of the Christian era until the Roman Emperor, Constantine adopted Christianity as a state religion and convened the council of Nicea to settle the matter once and for all. Leaders of all Christian groups were in attendance and ultimately the literalist’s historical view was voted by the majority to be “fact.” What followed was a violent purge of all competing religious ideas. The Gnostic literature was obliterated, along with Mithraism and much of Zoroastrianism which both had attributes and stories adopted into Christianity. Libraries were burned, pagan temples destroyed and great inquisitions were held for anyone who opposed the established church’s orthodoxy.

Tom Harper, a former Anglican Priest and a professor of Greek and New Testament at the University of Toronto has studied early Christian history and noted, “Obviously you have to regard with deep suspicion any group or movement, however noble its declarations, that proceeds to win its ‘case’ by silencing, excommunicating, or murdering its assumed opponents. Yet most Christians today are totally unaware that Church history conceals a horrendous, lengthy record of precisely these kinds of tactics by the proponents of what eventually became ‘orthodox,’ creedal belief.”²

The Earth Moves

Up until the 1600s the Catholic Church set itself up as the final arbiter of both religion and science. Using scripture in the Old Testament, they concluded the Earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around it—the sun, the moon, the planets, the stars, etc.

Copernicus was the first to challenge this idea and Galileo—with his invention of the telescope—then confirmed Copernicus was right. Galileo was tried and convicted of heresy by the Roman Inquisition. Galileo’s ‘crime’ was suggesting the Earth and all other planets in the solar system revolved around the sun.

According to historian, Dan Hofstadter, the church wasn’t so much concerned with the truth of the matter as they were with obedience. The Pope had issued an edict against Copernicanism in 1616 and Galileo had defied it.³

It wasn’t until over 400 years later that the Catholic Church finally admitted the Earth revolves around the sun in an edict issued in 1993.⁴

Plato’s Cave

Religious beliefs aside, in many cases it’s skewed perceptions or entrenched political beliefs that rules the group mind. In his book on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Garrett Serviss notes, “...nature surrounds us on all sides with deceptions. These are not deceptive in their real character, of course, but deceptive to our senses, partly because of the imperfection of the senses and partly because of our lack of thoughtful attention to what we imagine we see, hear or feel.”⁵

This brings to mind the allegory of Plato’s Cave.

In Plato’s Parable of the Cave, the group mind was symbolized by people who were born in a cave and from birth to death were chained up in such a fashion that their heads could only face in one direction. Behind them was a huge campfire with cave guards dancing wood and stone figures in front of the fire like a puppet show so they cast shadows of animals on the walls.

Since the chained-up slaves could only see the shadows, and never saw the guards or the puppets, they grew up believing the shadows to be real animals - they had no other frame of reference otherwise. Finally, one of the slaves breaks free and is able to turn his head and see the fraud. He then goes above ground to see the sunlight and the realities of the world outside of the cave. In his excitement he rushes back to his contemporaries to share the great news. Unfortunately, most don’t believe him and consider him as “crazy,” even though he has more information than they do.

Our society behaves much like the slaves in that timeless parable. A particular perception of reality is established by our cave controllers - the government, media and academia - and is perpetuated through the decades by our teachers in public and private schools. Since our teachers and mainstream media occupy the same position and status as we do - chained up slaves facing a wall of shadows - they merely re-teach the false perception of reality they learned from their misled teachers.

An Expanding Universe

In the early part of the 20th century the overwhelming viewpoint by the established scientific community was the universe was static and unchanging. This so-called “steady state” theory of the universe was so entrenched in the group mind that after Einstein developed his highly successful theory of Relativity that predicted an expanding universe, he arbitrarily created a “cosmological constant” - a mathematical variable that could be plugged into his equations to make the expanding universe still appear to conform to the “steady state” model. He would later describe that as the “biggest blunder of his life.”⁶

Atoms

With Quantum Physics in its infancy in the first half of the 20th century, physicists were struggling to define the foundational building blocks of matter and reality. The theory of atoms was being developed but was met with resistance from some who refused to believe they existed because they couldn’t see them. For example, Ernst Mach—a philosopher/physicist maintained that all physical theory must come only from direct experimental experience and all ideas that cannot be tested experimentally must be abandoned. He did not believe in atoms because he had never seen one.⁷ This “seeing is believing” approach to reality is what atheists currently use today to buttress their religious faith that there is no God, or Intelligent Designer who conceived and designed the universe and all of physical reality.

Atoms were initially believed to be solid particles. Then, electrons, protons and neutrons were discovered to be constituents of atoms. The double-slit experiment confirmed electrons, protons and neutrons behaved both as solid particles and as waves, depending on how you observed and measured them. It has since been found that protons are comprised of wave energies called “quarks” and that most of what we perceive as “solid” is made up primarily of empty space, anyway.

Theories on the nature of reality still abound, but the only ones that get published in the peer-reviewed scientific journals are those that comply with the belief systems of those judges who select the articles for publication—again, more groupthink at work to force the group mind to conform to the majority view.

Sharks

The Discovery Channel recently aired a series on sharks called, “Shark Week.” In its opening documentary, they described the first Great White shark attack on a human off the New Jersey Shore in July, 1916. After several shark attacks that summer that claimed human lives, a leading marine biologist, Dr. Frederick Lucas at the Museum of Natural History was consulted. Dr. Lucas, who claimed he had been at sea for 20 years and never saw a shark attack a human, concluded the deaths to be “misunderstood drownings.” He didn’t believe a fish could kill a human simply because there was no record of it at the time.

Most people in the U.S. at the time had never seen a shark, much less a Great White. Great Whites were known of, but they were believed to only be in warm, tropical waters. Scientists didn’t know at the time that the Great White has the ability to raise its own body temperature by a few degrees in order to survive in cooler waters so they didn’t want to conclude the people getting killed off the Jersey shore were getting attacked by sharks. After several mutilated bodies, that groupthink mindset began to change, however.

Greenhouse Effect

Environmental extremists will point to the planet Venus and its extremely high heat as evidence of excessive carbon dioxide producing some sort of “Greenhouse Effect.” They then use this concocted model to support their theory of “global warming” (now “Climate Change” and “Weather Extremes”) in order to garner support for a financially profitable carbon credit trading scheme.

However, as late as 1959, Venus’ ground temperature was calculated to be only 17 degrees Celsius, three degrees above the mean annual temperature of the Earth before being updated to 800 degrees F. Also, in a report from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1962 on the Mariner II spacecraft that orbited Venus, JPL scientists noted that “light does not even penetrate the cloud cover,” and “very little greenhouse effect could realize itself under such conditions.”⁸

With Venus being the planet with the most reflective atmosphere of all those in the solar system, we really don’t know why it is as hot as it appears to be. Immanuel Velikovsky theorized it may be petroleum fires burning on the planet, but there is currently no way to prove that theory.⁹

It’s clear to see that in matters of science, religion and the nature of reality the majority mindset has always ruled and demanded submission to it. Merely because the majority deems something to be true doesn’t make it true.

With our finite and clumsy five human senses, perception can be elusive. Coupled with biases, beliefs, doctrines and dogmas psychopolitical managers can easily sway the masses using public education and the news and entertainment media to believe pretty much anything (9/11 for example). It’s not necessary to get everyone believing a certain way, only a majority of the society. They will then take care of the rest with belittlement, ostracizing and coercion while the controllers sit back and reap the profits of their malevolent and devious efforts.

Notes

9. ibid, p. 370