The Group Think of Lemmings

The Head of Sales was vehement in his repeated assertion that the abrogation of Article 370 was the right thing to do, and a few of his team members didn't fully agree with him. The discussions were getting personal, attributing motives to the PM, the Home Minister, the ex-CMs of Kashmir and other invisible players.

 The Head of Sales continued to be loud and vociferous in supporting the annulment of Article 370. However, it was evident that his only point, repeated ad nauseam, was that the PM is a visionary who knows what he is doing. We should simply place our faith in him, and not question any of his moves.

Here was a classic victim of Group Think, a phrase coined by George Orwell (in the picture above) in '1984'.

 Politicians have always encouraged groupthink. The Home Minister in 2010 asked for the same faith to be placed in his actions (against stone pelting in Kashmir), and not questioning the PM was the predominant sentiment favouring Nehru in 1947 when Kashmir joined the Indian Union. Here, whether or not the government action on article 370 is right, is not the issue. The Head of Sales was not aware of any of the events, facts or personalities preceding this decision by the present government. Worse, he did not think it was necessary to know any of that. How can you have a reasonable discussion on anything if where you stand cannot be explained by where you come from?

 Having an opinion on any topic, as a responsible citizen, is good, important and commendable. Does that opinion have an underlying logic that we believe in because we worked it out for ourselves? It is also not wrong to hitch all your faith to a person, a group or a basic belief. Like in this case with the Head of Sales, it is an emotional response. Between logic and emotion, one is not necessarily inferior to the other. Group Think, where the pride and safety of belonging to a group predominates, is all emotion.

When you recognise that your opinion is fired by emotion, just make sure it is not groupthink.

However, an argument dictated by logic and not by emotion will contribute to informed debate. Informed debates are something we need very badly in our fractured society, misguided polity and even in our people-stressed organisations. The pre-requisite for an informed debate is being well informed.

 An example of Group Think is the as yet inexplicable behaviour of lemmings. They get together, sometimes in thousands, and simply jump off cliffs or into raging rivers as part of an unwritten suicide pact. Following something blindly because it is ‘trendy’ is a behaviour common to human nature. This happens when the popularity of an opinion (being part of a large crowd) is a greater draw than the logic behind (investing intelligence to understand) the opinion.

We have all been fooled, some time or the other, by misinformation masquerading as truth. When people stick to their strong opinions about events and personalities, without any desire/regard for evidence and logic, they begin to resemble lemmings. While such shallowness in opinions and debates is expected of the cowardly anonymous trolls on social media, it is occurring distressingly often at even friendly get-togethers at offices, cafes, homes and on our TV news channels. 

A lot about who we are can be explained by a little bit about where we are from.

India has always benefited by arguments, public debates, generosity and intellectual pluralism, as Amartya Sen points out in The Argumentative Indian, a superb collection of essays on these hoary Indian traditions. Talking of Satyajit Ray as a world-famous filmmaker who learnt from many cultures, and yet rooted all his storytelling in the Bengali ethos, Sen points out: “'In our heterogeneity and in our openness lies our pride, not our disgrace. Satyajit Ray taught us this, and that lesson is profoundly important for India. And for Asia, and for the world.'

“The history of every galactic civilisation tends to pass through three distinct phases”, says Douglas Adams in his much-loved book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, “How, Why and Where.” This corresponds, he says, to the three maturing phases of any civilised society – Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication.

If we have regressed from being sensibly argumentative to Group Think, we are, as a country, yet mired in the Survival phase.