Groupthink

It’s always been hard for individuals to become...individuals! Finding our own voice and way is what the great psychiatrist Carl Jung calls Individuation. The idea is, I’m me, not you.

Seems easy enough.

It’s not.

Establishing ourselves as individuals in the world sounds like something that should happen right after puberty, when we start new levels of either secret or boldly announced family rebellion. I remember a friend of mine who’d always had a terrific relationship with her daughter ‘til suddenly the girl hit about 15 and all mother-rejection hell broke loose. “Love that blouse she’s wearing!” I said to her mom one day, who laughingly responded: “Yeah I agree, but I sure can’t say that ‘cause she’ll immediately take it off! Now YOU can tell her it’s great and she’ll be thrilled.”

Thing is, all the way to the end of our lives most of us cling to early implanted ideas, myths and family mandates. This goes on well after the parents have passed.

Does that mean most never individuate?

Kinda.

Because both clinging ferociously, if unconsciously, to family rules, or continuing to rebel against those rules as if that rejection means we’ve found something of our own, doesn’t let us access our truest voice.

Doing something we must, or not doing something just because we’ve been asked to, is the opposite side of the same coin. Both mean we’re in reaction to family structure.

To make matters worse there’s something every one of us at some point bumps up against called “groupthink”, which ranges from the benign like following fads, to the usual as in ‘behaving like sheep’, to the truly terrible, as in following along blindly as if brainwashed. In high school I had this elderly German-born teacher who, as a young jewish man, once found himself in a crowd hearing Hitler speak. Even as a kid he’d already formed the idea that Hitler wasn’t so great, but still, he told us, he felt and saw how the charismatic Hitler entranced the gathered mass. And when every single person raised their hands high at the end shouting Heil Hitler, much to his own surprise our teacher reported, so did he!  Out of context it turns my stomach to imagine it. But I understand groupthink -- the idea that we all fall under the spell of notions, promising invitations, assurances that override our fears, and seductions that appeal to our egos.

We all know how this works. Politicians around the world use groupthink to rile us up into resentment based anger, while convincing us they’ve got our best interests at heart. And getting ignited together against the ‘other guy’ feels empowering! I becomes WE, which means we’re in a tribe, a gang, a community. Our flicker becomes a flame.

Truth is, we yearn towards the comfort of group “connection”. If everyone believes it, maybe its true. If we join the many, we feel not so alone. So we tag along with those who shout loudest, make the best promises, or sound most like our parents, or sound least like our parents, or somehow make us feel like we matter.

Can we tolerate being with people who disagree with what we believe and think?

I’m a fan of that procedure. One of the things that grown and challenged me most in the last thirty years is my marriage because my husband and I are on opposite sides of many questions and conversations. It makes me fight for what I believe. It requires me to clarify my position. And from time to time it shows me the error of my ways.

How then do we figure out the difference between ‘following the crowd’ and finding support within a group of like-minded people?

How do we know if we’re just screaming a four-year old’s “NO!” to our folks or have come to a well-considered, simply expressed “No”?

How do we become the individual we hope we are and can be?

These are no small questions, however as the great Rainer Maria Rilke says:

“Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”