Groupthink

From The Rampart
Junious Ricardo Stanton
  Groupthink

“An adolescent enlists, never having heard of Ruritania, which is perhaps on the other side of the earth. A year later, having learned to manage the Gatlings on a helicopter gunship, he is told that Ruritania is A Grave Threat. Never having seen a Ruritanian, being unable to spell the place, not knowing where it is (you would be amazed how many veterans of Viet Nam do not know where it is) he is soon killing Ruritanians. He will shortly hate them intensely as vermin, scuttling cockroaches, rice-propelled paddy maggots, gooks, or sand niggers. The military calls the pack instinct “unit cohesion,” and fosters it to the point that soldiers often have more loyalty to the military than to the national pack. Thus it is easy to get them to fire on their own citizens. It has not happened in the United States since perhaps Kent State, but in the past the soldiery were often used to kill striking workers. All you have to do is to get the troops to think of the murderees as another group” On Patriotism Examining The Firmware of War- Fred Reed .
www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28197.htm

Humans can be manipulated to do almost any and everything by appealing to and/or exploiting basic needs we all have. One of the most fundamental needs we all have is the need to belong, to feel attached to and an integral part of a social setting or system. Another important need we all have is to be and feel validated and appreciated, to feel we count, that we are OK in the eyes of our group. Our parents, authority figures and peers exploit these essential and natural needs. This is done even more so in the West because alienation, the sense of separation with an inherent sense of dread and anxiety is the psychological norm of Europeans. Unlike aboriginal First World people, Westerners (and their cultural and social prisoners) have been conditioned to believe we are all separate from everything including their ruling elites distorted notions about the Supreme Reality they call God. In their warped minds God is a giant white man in the sky who is capricious, jealous and hard to please. Thinking we are separate entities, we are always striving for something, anything outside of ourselves for the elusive ubiquitous senses of belonging and validation especially this distorted idea about God. This coupled with the fact humans of necessity are naturally social beings who instinctively know some form of role and order are needed to function effectively within whatever social milieu we find ourselves. This allows people to manipulate us often in ways not in our best interests.

Unfortunately we have not discerned self-esteem is really an inside job that is not dependent upon what others say or think about us. Not knowing this, we go through all kinds of changes just to fit in, to feel we are part of the group even if that particular group doesn’t give a hoot about our health our well being or is psychologically unable to. This is the psychological motivation that prompts someone in an abusive or extremely toxic relationship to try to please the abuser in the hope the abuse will stop or they will be accepted and treated better. This is why the one being abused is so reluctant to leave or escape the relationship or situation as dysfunctional as it is, because he or she has a place within this dysfunctional setting and this is all they know.

Humans are creatures of habit who will stay in a negative environment because that environment is the norm for us and it is all we know. Our perceptions, attitudes and beliefs most of which have been imposed upon us by others become our psychological norm because they are the same as what we see around us. This explains why we are reluctant to change our attitudes, beliefs and values even when they are to causes of so much misery and disease in our lives. This is because either the people around us who count in our estimation (for good or bad) think and feel the same way or; this is the way it is in our particular social setting and we are unwilling to beak out of that mold and differentiate ourselves from the group.

Change is difficult. Attitudinal change is more difficult because most people rarely think about their own thoughts, beliefs, values and attitudes in a critical way. If we do at all, it is to compare our personal and by extension our group’s beliefs to someone else’s or another group’s usually in a condescending or dismissive manner. This is called groupthink. The Dictionary of Psychology defines groupthink as: “thinking so dominated by the desire to maintain unanimity of thought in a group that critical thinking is suspended or rendered ineffective.” We see this every day in the US in the bogus left-right, liberal-conservative dichotomies that are exploited and promoted by the corporatist mind control apparatus to diminish critical thinking. This exploitation and promotion short circuits critical thinking and as a result we see the dumbing down of America, with its concomitant blind conformity. The way we fall for the lamest flim-flam and okey-doke is pitiful.
Patriotism and religious fanaticism are the greatest examples of groupthink that come to my mind. In the US a patriot is defined in most circles as one who uncritically goes along with the government’s program, the person who says “My country right or wrong”. It is this kind of non critical thinking that allowed the US government to slaughter the Native Americans, sanction the Atlantic Slave Trade and commit countless other atrocities since its inception. Nowadays the USA is the land of the brain dead and somnolent.

In America today, the term religious fanatic calls to mind Arabs, or Muslims, which shows you just how effective the brainwashing and mind control processes have been. It’s always the “other” never us. Arabs and Muslims are being set up and demonized so we can go to war to steal their resources and destroy their way of life in the name of Democracy and freedom. Somehow the radical right wing Lukid Party in Israel is not thought of as fanatical despite its warmongering land stealing policies. Nor are the Christian Zionists who openly call for nuclear Armageddon in their delusional hope this will bring the return of Yeshua Ben-Joseph (there never was anyone who lived in Palestine named Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Roman Catholic Latinized form of Yeshua or Joshua). This would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerously psychotic.
War, pillage plunder and conquest are part of undeveloped humans’ DNA especially so in the West . We have the power to evolve beyond this mindset. Unfortunately fewer and fewer of us are challenging this groupthink. As a result more wars are breaking out every day. The psychopaths in the positions of power will continue exploiting this groupthink until either they succeed in bringing about World War IV ( WW III was all the proxy wars/police actions fought from the end of WW II til now.) or THE ONE CREATOR SPIRIT intervenes (like in James Camerons’ film Avatar where Eywa actively stepped in through nature to restore Balance, Harmony and Peace.) Could the floods, storms and tsunamis we are experiencing in the US and around the world be THE CREATOR’s way of getting our attention? Even if this is so, in all epic hero tales all over the world, the hero or shero actively opposed the psychopaths and evil ones to pass the great test; so too with us. Our first big challenge is to disconnect ourselves from the groupthink Martix that calls for alienation, war and predation; then by our actions we must free others.

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