In 1952, a striking article entitled ‘Groupthink’ was published in a US business magazine. Accounts of dangerous crowds running riot, making a mockery of reason and logic, can be traced back through millennia; but this article and others that followed soon after identified something new and dangerous afoot in the post-war United States. Here is how that essay began: ‘A very curious thing has been taking place in this country – and almost without our knowing it. In a country where “individualism” – independence and self-reliance – was the watchword for three centuries, the view is now coming to be accepted that the individual himself has no meaning – except, that is, as a member of a group.’ This was not a meditation on the human condition, nor a study of totalitarian brainwashing, but an essay on contemporary trends in Western society, and a warning about unintended consequences of business organisations.
Post-war literature on groupthink merits scrutiny here, alongside the fear of brainwashing. Group dynamics became a notable topic of research in management theory, a foil for popular films, a premise in history, and an object of inquiry in experimental psychology and psychoanalysis too. Evidence derived from surveys, tests and polls built up; such results then informed broader discussions about the perils of conformity, convergence and obedience. This chapter sets out a number of those most arresting findings and diagnoses, along with putative remedies for groupthink. I want to revisit that vocabulary, consider diverse post-war experiments in and speculations about group psychology, suggest how writings on this topic connected to the representations of human captivity and conversion we’ve already considered, and finally to indicate some of the political projects that capitalised upon these ideas much later in the twentieth century.
The first thing to note is how this term, groupthink, was proposed in the early years of the Cold War, around the same time as reports about brainwashing, menticide, thought reform, re-education, the captive mind, the hidden persuaders, etc. The second is how the word was deployed in arguments about the relative risks faced by two competing economic systems in a polarised, political world. Commentaries on groupthink mulled over the prospects of future stagnation and prompted discussion about how to encourage renewal to strengthen the West in its global struggle with the Soviet Union. Some suggested Western decline, if not impending disaster, and foresaw the death of innovation in a modern capitalist society where droves of businessmen in their identical business suits were commuting from the suburbs to impersonal enterprises, and all supposedly behaving and thinking alike; others pushed back at this alarmist story.
The writer who set some of these hares running, and first introduced the phrases ‘groupthink’ and (in a 1956 book) ‘the organization man’, was William H. Whyte.1 He was an East Coast journalist who had previously been a corporate man himself, an executive at the Vicks chemical company. Whyte retained a niche for some years in the business world (via the magazine Fortune) and was in the employ of a large media organisation (Time Inc.). Once his book sales permitted, however, he became a freelance writer. Whyte was aware his generalised diagnoses of groupthink did not cover everybody. But his critical interventions were substantial and heartfelt. He offered extensive illustrations of what he assumed to be the mindsets and habits of many of his compatriots – people who found their way, as had he, into the executive ranks. Many men, like Whyte, would thus steadily move up the ladder, going from school to university, preceded or followed by military service in the Second World War, into the corporate world. Whyte’s work sold well and became a catalyst for other debates about conformist pressures to be found in the academy, the armed forces, corporations and the media.
Whyte feared that corporations were creating a new kind of secular priesthood; he pointed to a collection of rituals, devotions and habits. A basic ethos was inculcated across disparate careers and professions; and the name of the game, he lamented, was just fitting in. Thus, there was much in common, he thought, between the mentality of a dutiful doctor, working in a clinic or hospital, a novice scientist at a government laboratory, an apprentice engineer in the huge drafting room at a company like Lockheed, and a young attorney in what he called a Wall Street law factory. Each had their niche job and technical know-how, but at a deeper level they were like peas from the same pod. A kind of unconscious and strangely comfortable synchronisation in values and lifestyles was taking place, he suggested, with schools and then the university sector churning out more and more affable, complacent, technically minded people; a generation who wanted to work for a corporate body and fold themselves into the communal effort of their firm or business. The United States, seen through this lens, was fast becoming a standardised realm of business graduates, engineers and technocrats, who shared in the same anodyne, middle-of-the road unargued assumptions. And ultimately, he warned, this insipid era of groupthink might constrain the West’s capacity to win the Cold War.
Whyte had every reason to note the prevalence and growing power of large corporations. In his light-touch 1952 article and his more substantial book, he developed a striking analysis. What Whyte dreaded was the possibility that homogenous beliefs could ultimately spread through much of the population, ironing out wrinkles of character and personality in individuals. He was concerned, moreover, that company employees, who were in theory free to withdraw their labour and head off in search of new frontiers, were subtly regimented to stay in a single office, firm or bureaucracy for life; they might well find the financial rewards and security irresistible, and the level of corporate remuneration, and all the associated benefits and care, too tempting.
Many executives and their families, said Whyte, as he sketched out these trends, might opt to stay put in one place forever; or else move around the country only at the behest of their organisation or industry. Loyalty, greatly prized, and largely uncontested, he feared, was becoming a governing managerial principle. As a result, young graduates were effectively conditioned to assume that their future was really to be dependable cogs within colossal machines, such as, say, Ford or General Electric, or some branch of federal government, rather than encouraged to break the mould, set off on their own and hatch small businesses, or what later came to be called ‘start-ups’. Whyte wanted an economy that rewarded the workforce for sticking their necks out, fighting consensus, travelling to unknown pastures and braving failure, as well as courting unusual success; in short, fulfilling a version of the American dream. The phrase ‘thinking outside of the box’ was not yet part of the vernacular of the 1950s, but it spoke to the same kind of aspiration as Whyte’s.
Such portrayals of groupthink were partly novel but also drew on older tropes. We might recall earlier, intense discussions about the soul-destroying effects of the mass assembly production line on workers, or how, in Europe as well as the United States, fifty or a hundred years before Whyte’s account, there had been no shortage of ruminations on the anonymous ‘man in the crowd’, bourgeois ennui, and the intolerance of the consensual majority population for maverick people, geniuses and eccentric artists. One forerunner of those discussions about American people’s compliant attitudes was the French diplomat, traveller and writer Alexis de Tocqueville, whose half-admiring, half-trepidatious account of life in the New World, Democracy in America (1835–40), offered sharp observations on the tyranny of the majority and the dangers of bland convergence and unthinking, mass agreement. The great Victorian liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill also anticipated some of Whyte’s fears about the risks of conformity, a society where public opinion could be reduced to unthinking assumptions, with critical scrutiny of commonplaces treated as though an optional extra. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert provided his own ‘Dictionary of Received Ideas’, compiled in the 1870s; a collection of examples of groupthink, long before that particular word had been introduced.
So, one antecedent of post-war debates on groupthink concerned the risks of people latching onto the views of some ‘herd’ or ‘tribe’, becoming alike, mutually absorbing fads and fashions, and regurgitating society’s mores without any real individual judgement at all. Another concerned the power of corporations to dominate states and peoples. The architects of the US Constitution had sought to create a system that ensured no tyrannical power (such as the monarchy) or monster corporation (such as the East India Company) ever held sway again. Americans were taught how the Boston Tea Party in 1773 was a response to the Tea Act, which had protected the interests of the East India Company at the expense of American patriots. As John Dickinson, an important influence on the American Revolution, had warned, soldiers of the East India Company, having already pillaged vast wealth in India, were now ‘casting their eyes on America as a new theater whereon to exercise their talents of rapine, oppression and cruelty’.2
Such polemics anticipated something of the complaints that became familiar in the twentieth century, targeted at unaccountable corporations and rapacious multinationals whose power might ultimately threaten nations. The East India Company, complained its bitter opponents in the eighteenth century, had far-reaching tentacles; it could finance armies of lawyers and lobbyists; and, if it required, could bend the political state to its will and buy the votes of British parliamentarians, as needed.3 Whyte thought that in his own time US corporations might become simply too big, and assume the power to shape the thinking and even the feelings of the people who staffed them. These entities generated, he complained, a pervasive requirement of ‘belongingness’. The Organization Man, which became a best-seller, noted the irony that the anti-communist global alliance, led by the United States, might undermine the liberty and creativity that it extolled. The West may have pitted itself resolutely in favour of individual rights, against the kind of psychological uniformity supposedly to be found in those eastern communist countries; and yet through its businesses, Whyte claimed, it might also be conditioning its own workforce and the younger generation.
Advice manuals, magazine quizzes and features in that era often seemed to steer the public towards certain implicit values, cementing conformity, spelling out clearly appropriate ideals of citizenship and family life. For example, the conservative physician and psychologist Dr George Crane provided obvious moralistic advice. Crane’s questionnaires were disseminated across the country in high-circulation magazines; they invited readers to test the state of their careers, courtships, marriages, etc.; to help them understand where they fell short, or were succeeding, according to his criteria. He introduced tests in the late 1930s and then extended them after the war. According to his questionnaires, American men were doing well if they could confirm their steadiness, reliable job prospects, courtesy, chivalry, dress sense and praise of their wives’ cooking and housework. Women could gain a high score by confirming that they went to bed promptly when their husbands did, avoided slang and profanity, darned socks, sewed buttons and laughed at their spouses’ jokes. ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ would be graded with ‘merit’ and ‘demerit’ scores according to their answers.4 Crane spoke for a particular strand of conservative, God-fearing opinion. He provided syndicated columns and even set up a supposedly scientific marriage bureau in the 1950s to introduce eligible partners. Whyte, by contrast, challenged the very idea of a safe, predictable pathway for Americans as the necessary basis for a successful managerial career. The Organization Man illustrated how much had gone awry and how people were treated as part of some spurious, harmonious whole. However, Whyte’s book was short on any systematic analysis of how glass ceilings (to borrow a later phrase, coined by the management consultant Marilyn Loden in 1978)5 constrained women, and how racism shaped the prospects of people of colour.
As his title suggests, Whyte assumed a world where all senior positions within business were men’s preserve. Many women worked in paid employment, as he was aware, and not all, evidently, were suburban housewives, even if he paid that stratum of society a good deal of attention. High-ranking jobs in the corporate sector in the United States, as in the UK, were, indeed, boys’ clubs. It helped hugely (or might even be deemed essential, depending on the club or organisation) for the applicant to be a ‘WASP’ (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant).6
Whyte recognised how a company man might well be expected, or even required, to have a wife who would fit in well with the codes of the company, host dinner parties, be an agreeable companion at social functions. A well-rewarded raft of managers, he observed, would tend to promote people who were like themselves; it was a self-perpetuating system, in which they would feel no need and be offered no incentive to question.
Whyte also implied that victory over Nazism, while obviously crucial and rightly a source of jubilation, had played into a climate of anti-authoritarianism in his country that could, in extremis, have unintended negative consequences; for instance leading to a situation where men were excessively worried that they would be immediately typecast as loud-mouthed, bullying and overbearing if they stepped out of line. Instead, they might become docile, team-spirited, unchallenging company staff. Reading his book, you could be forgiven for imagining that an entire generation were succumbing to groupthink, meeting and bonding with one another, affably agreeing, all to be seen chatting on the front lawns of their faux ranch houses when they got home in the evenings, grumbling superficially about the treadmill or rat race, which (as Whyte also caustically noted) mostly they had no intention of quitting. They had given themselves over, he said, to an ideology of collectivisation. And yet this was all so at odds with the Protestant ethic that had been crucial for the rise of capitalism. Indeed, he thought a major shift was occurring away from all that past emphasis on individual salvation and personal toil. For the key thing now demanded of all such employees was ‘fealty’.
A further problem worried Whyte. Not only were large companies treating the group, not the individual, as the key unit of worth; they were also naively reverential of science, or rather of pseudo-scientific formulae, at the expense of flair, and thus were not cultivating the best prospects for future dynamism. So, Whyte’s ‘organization man’ had to confine himself inside the company’s ontological and epistemological grid, and to accept the same managerial so-called scientific problem-solving toolkit as one another. Whyte called therefore for a change of direction in teaching, business and government, and urged that US culture should portray and celebrate unconventional people; he wanted greater recognition of human differences, less reference to the supposedly typical, like-minded citizen.
His aim was to reform and perhaps even turbocharge corporations in future (although, he might also have endorsed the phrase ‘small is beautiful’, which would later become part of an influential critique of capitalism and the corporation). His argument did not align directly with the outlook of either of the mainstream political parties in the 1950s United States, and some of his polemics seemed to take issue with much of the dominant political rhetoric of his own time, where, in congratulatory fashion, a totalitarian enemy was pitted against a picture of a right-minded, united people – an imaginary ‘us’ who belong, get on, live similar lives and all think broadly alike. An ideal of freedom was offered, but, thought Whyte, the reality so often was in fact unthinking compliance.
President Truman had strongly conveyed the message that Americans enjoyed the togetherness of being a land of individuals, a people who genuinely celebrated freedom and fairness and sought to defend it to the hilt. He urged people to bury their differences and unite behind what he called ‘100 per cent Americanism’; the trouble was, of course, that in reality there were so many versions of that.7 In the 1950s, Eisenhower, his successor, also often seasoned his speeches with rhetorical calls to unity, stressing this shared purpose and allegiance, as much providing exhortations as descriptions of how and what the entire nation had in common and truly believed. He would sometimes urge directly that his fellow Americans look beyond political differences to see they were in conflict not with each other but with a deadly totalitarian foe; and he appealed to their deeper sense of a singular American community. Painters such as Norman Rockwell played into the narrative, depicting in sentimental terms a firmly rooted world of typical, fellow Americans. These depictions led in turn to pejorative labels such as ‘Rockwellian’ or ‘Rockwellesque’.
In his critique of national groupthink, Whyte was documenting, at most, the mores of a particular segment of a social class in selected sites of the United States, but his ideas were influential, and remain interesting still. I want to set his account alongside other explorations of conformity that drew very different conclusions; and to note some of the remedies proposed at that time in order to deal with it, including the abolition rather than revival of capitalism. I dwell upon ‘groupthink’ and ‘the organization man’ at some length because they are further pieces of our historical jigsaw; elements of that larger vocabulary about mental adjustment, thought control and behavioural conditioning that crystallised in the post-war period and continued to inform political and managerial discourse long thereafter.
Whyte offered an eye-catching depiction of traits and types that were recognisable back then to many of his readers. His work was part of a genre of books that sought to help corporate workforces become more innovative, distinct and ultimately profitable. Whyte and other such critics identified something that was certainly real – the way people might be affected psychologically as well as socially by the workplace, and required to make constant minor modifications in order to fit. Candidates for posts who were otherwise qualified but somehow deemed to be ‘not quite our type’ might be weeded out; others chosen in job interviews because they were already seen as a naturally good match, according to pre-set assumptions, thus reducing or even negating an open society or true meritocracy.8
Whyte recognised that each business, large or small, was more varied than his vision implied, but did not want his readers to get so focused on details as to lose the overall picture. He made a clear argument about where society and the economy could be heading if corrective action was not urgently taken. But he was also concerned with delving beyond this, to consider, for instance, different subcultures in organisations, or even within departments of a corporation: e.g. ‘accounts’ compared with the ‘creative’ or ‘design’ offices. What he could not be sure about was whether the organisational cultures he sketched might ultimately adapt, rather than simply expect their workers to adapt. Indeed, many in the business world sought to respond to the challenges such critics had posed, seeking to reverse the bland and stodgy working arrangements or incentives to groupthink that Whyte had made famous in his account of ‘the organization man’.
Many attempts were made to counter the risks that Whyte identified. Indeed, if we fast forward half a century after such 1950s warnings about convergent and consensual corporate cultures, we can see the most innovative companies at the forefront of the digital revolution, such as Pixar, or later Apple, led by Steve Jobs, striving to design working environments to encourage at least some of their own more privileged staff to break conventions and to constantly innovate. While many of the workforce in big tech are, of course, required to do standard, homogenous jobs, others are supposed to free their own thinking, taking advantage of campus-like environments.
In some cases, indeed, the office architecture of the new high-tech giants was designed intentionally to prevent the risk of staff isolation and to counter employee conformity. Behemoths of Silicon Valley varied in ethos and style but many would radically extend the concept of ‘open-plan’ office design that had begun already in the 1960s as means to help staff interact and to think creatively together more regularly. The ‘campuses’ of these computer giants enable employees to hang out, go roller skating or play ping-pong, and see the in-house doctor, while still at work. It seems to be about care, freedom, the valorisation of the unconventional and original, even as these organisations also exert new forms of monitoring and of control.9 The dystopian aspects of this new form of ‘care’ and this regime of constant exposure, social pressure and panoptical digital scrutiny (of staff, as well as consumers) in the great corporate empires have been satirised by various writers in recent years, including memorably by Dave Eggers in his 2013 novel The Circle.10
In fact, even as Whyte’s thesis about groupthink was first advanced, other writers and business executives were already proposing remedies and antidotes, and ways to shake up employees and get them to meet and interact far more at the proverbial water cooler. Thus, long before all the architectural and technological innovations of the later parts of the century, new practices of ‘brainstorming’ were being promoted, post-war, to galvanise businesses and bureaucracies. Brainstorming was another idea that, like groupthink, would become a notable influence, as well as a cliché. It was first popularised, if not actually dreamt up, by a pioneering American advertising executive, Alex Faickney Osborn. A striking chapter of his 1948 book Your Creative Power was entitled ‘How to organize a squad to create ideas’. Here he seemed quite carried away by the military metaphor – inviting the reader to consider ‘using the brain to storm a creative problem’, and doing so ‘in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective’.11
Brainstorming, in Osborn’s vision, was a means to encourage companies to create groups that would produce the very opposite of groupthink: arrangements could be made to get the entire workforce actively involved in productive mental labour – thinking together, not just obeying instructions or passively receiving the company codes. One person might seed an idea and so precipitate unforeseen responses in another, which would grow in the mind of a third, before being transmitted again, like a fast-moving game of ball, with diverse proposals freely ricocheting around. It was important, Osborn said, to get rid of hierarchy at such meetings, and allow people to explore any side alleys of thought they wished.
Perhaps there was some glimmering of applied psychoanalytic theory in this enthusiastic account; certainly the hope that unconscious processes could be recognised, tolerated and ultimately harnessed in business. Osborn advised that the group’s creativity had to be carefully nurtured: critical responses, or even yawns and frowns, which might suppress the free thinking of other staff in meetings, were to be actively discouraged. Premature expressions of dissatisfaction and impatient gestures suggesting a mood of negativity had to be admonished so as not to squash fledgling ideas, however half-baked they looked at first to the majority or to the senior staff. Brainstorming was all about unleashing human potential and freeing associations. He sought to encourage other companies to make use of his innovations by organising times and spaces for this loosened-up form of interaction, licensing all concerned to liberate even their most apparently crazy thoughts – since who could be sure if what some deemed crazy might not turn out to be an inspiration? In such approaches, or at least in the idealised version of such approaches, everyone’s imagination and thinking was to be valued.
Brainstorming was to be celebrated as a tool for use in the classroom, the boardroom and on the shop floor. It could be adapted in new settings, Osborn proposed; used to coax people to work with one another co-operatively, rather than merely to outdo each other in competitive or zero-sum contests for favour, bonuses or the top jobs. It was heralded as the antidote to authoritarian, top-down modes of teaching as well, a challenge to boring lecture-style courses where students were merely supposed to absorb.
In search of models of brainstorming Osborn was impressed by some past examples of commercial and academic interdisciplinarity. By the time that he was writing, leading US universities had developed a range of deliberately interdisciplinary think tanks and research institutes where the kind of brainstorming Osborn extolled was an obvious element. Above all, however, wartime examples of military or intelligence-based co-operation exemplified the process that Osborn sought to encourage. Perhaps that explains his penchant for military metaphors. During the war vast projects were developed to create new forms of armaments. A large, critical mass of experts was brought together.12 People with varied skills were tasked, in a way that Osborn admired, with solving technical and theoretical problems in science far greater than that which any individual person, or even any single discipline, could master alone. The brainstorming that went into the creation of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project (and subsequent nuclear warfare development by both the United States and the USSR), was the supreme and also most morally disquieting example of the process at work. It involved, crucially, the pooling of the talents of a group of theoretical physicists, but also mathematicians, engineers, chemists, metallurgists, electronics specialists and many others.
Such post-war business discussions were sometimes linked to metaphors of war and conquest, and located as part of an international race in which one side would ultimately win and the other would lose. Like Whyte, Osborn argued that business managers needed to think about the big national picture, rather than exclusively corporate advancement, personal greed or the pursuit of profits for profits’ sake. He emphasised the benefits that a thriving business sector could offer to assist in the collective American endeavour, and to help defeat the ideological opponents of the West. Osborn praised the imaginative vision of US automobile giants such as Chrysler in lighting up the future for all. Whyte stressed the importance of selling America to Americans and to the world, thereby refuting Soviet lies that American capitalism was a form of authoritarianism and a manifestation of cultural barbarism.13 Such authors wanted dynamic businesses to present a new vision to the American people and to export that vision of American success to other nations around the globe. In fact, in Europe and in other continents, American corporate values, and particular brands associated with the United States, were ever more pervasive.14
The idea of brainstorming was treated by Osborn as the precise opposite of centralised dictatorial Soviet thought control. He floated the idea that his country’s diplomats and politicians, as well as army generals, should henceforth prioritise brainstorming.15 The kind of group activity he had in mind was all about team members strengthening each other’s cognitive abilities and emotional range, encouraging colleagues to grow a little wilder and hence less conformist. What was needed, he said, was to unchain the human imagination. In keeping with the capitalist-vs-communist context, Osborn’s account was not just about such advantageous Western business camaraderie; he also proposed using the group’s internal rivalries to benefit the corporation. In yet another competitive metaphor, he compared the commercial effort to a race where the winner benefits from the whole team’s ‘pace-making’.16
The idea of brainstorming received a mixed press; its value, warned some later critics, could easily be overdone, and it could become in itself an example of a tired groupthink formulation. Any assumption that brainstorming is always what’s needed to think the unimaginable and to forge ahead could become a new form of managerial conformism. Sometimes, after all, as other managerial experts would insist, it was best to allow loners to labour and dream, without assuming the desirability of this constant imperative for everybody to engage with colleagues. Experimenters at Yale University in 1958 set up a test, with undergraduates divided into dozen-strong teams required to solve certain puzzles.17 They were found to do worse in groups than a control sample of students figuring out these problems alone. The value of the group might be greater or lesser depending on the composition and mood of those assembled, they concluded, as well as the nature of the problem at stake. No management technique should simply be turned into a new and unquestioned communal refrain.18
Some of these post-war debates about groupthink and brainstorming have gained a new kind of saliency in the present-day digital economy. Indeed, in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic many workers found themselves faced with new challenges of homeworking, entirely online. Millions had to grapple with the question of how best to balance solitude and group engagement, withdrawal from others and the pressure of imposed brainstorming too. A sense of irony about the injunction to network as much as possible may not be lost on workers stuck in isolation at home. Arguments about the chaining effect of the computer today, or the limitless flow of email, also have echoes of older debates about the bind of all that paperwork in offices (open plan or otherwise). An online state of alienation in the lonely crowd thus might well seem like a sequel to 1950s visions of groupthink. The internet may bring people together and enable global brainstorming on Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp or attractively named teaching platforms such as Teams or Collaborate. These are game changers and can feel uncanny: facilitating group engagement, and yet also enervating, isolating, tantalising. Online renditions of teaching and learning, playing, shopping, consuming entertainment or just simply chatting, may well feel like a pale approximation of their reallife counterparts and of a working community. On the other hand, faced as we have been with regular shutdowns and lockdowns, and the need to change our travelling habits anyway to counter climate change, such technology is ever more vital, a means for millions to stay in touch, talk, hear, engage and, indeed, brainstorm.
Although Whyte first wrote of groupthink in a light, debonair style in Fortune, he made clear the issue was urgent and that ultimately the fate of nations hinged on addressing his concerns. The Organization Man, by contrast with the earlier magazine piece, was a longer, more erudite study. In the latter, Whyte cited Weber and Durkheim, along with Dewey, William James and Freud. But the scholarship and research did not blur the stark warning Whyte wanted to offer his country: a compelling vision of an age dominated by like-minded men in their uniform suits, a system facilitated by big business, which encouraged groupthink and thus damaged minds, societies, indeed entire modern capitalist economies of which the businesses were the central part.
The lucky, affluent class, Whyte thought, were habituated to the implicit deal. They lived in ‘Little Boxes’, as a hit song had it in 1963, yet might feel superficially satisfied. That tune, sung by Pete Seeger, also popularised groupthink, as it told of the young going to university, marrying, becoming business executives, playing golf and drinking Martinis. They were far too at ease in their little boxes, the song implied, comfortable but in a psychologically impoverished state. The point was that people might end up in this condition, with no searching questioning; meek and accepting of their predictable compartments, even without re-education camps, to ensure agreement.
Whyte hoped that to offset groupthink the government would make greater investment in the humanities, so as to help sharpen minds. He thought the liberal arts, requiring a student’s immersion in great classics, logical arguments and animated debates, could offer some protection, or at least a useful basis for the kind of critical thinking the country now so sorely needed. On the other hand, he had doubts about what he saw as the abstract modes of thinking and the largely consensus-seeking models favoured by doyens of the social sciences. Too many academics had bought into the same managerial ethos, believing that adjustment and accord were necessarily the highest social goods. Moreover, sociological descriptions of normal and average views could turn too easily into prescriptions; surveys can mutate into guidelines for what people ought to think, as they look over the data.
In support of his thesis about this endless adjustment towards consensus, Whyte cited a recent poll that revealed that many of his fellow citizens regarded the task of high school to be (merely) twofold: to create jobs and to teach young people to ‘get along better with other people’, as though being employed and being congruent with others (that is to say, suitably affable) were the highest achievements. The universities were in his view often little better: they could lead students to easy forms of convergence, or to reciting fashionable ‘mumbo jumbo’, aping each other or their teachers. Whyte’s contention was that too many of his compatriots felt ashamed of standing alone, discouraged from challenging authority, including that of their university professors, or just too protective of their prospects to take any chances. He wanted his readership to recognise how easily we all switch off from thinking for ourselves or airing our criticisms, and prefer instead to be part of a crowd. You could not hide the fact that millions of lives were spent watching TV, or consuming the same movies, and that working days were spent by vast numbers inside huge factories or office blocks; a world where some – well-remunerated managers and executives, and perhaps even their entire staff – were encouraged to adjust, and then weld themselves, or maybe wed themselves, to a homogenous corporate ‘philosophy’.
Whyte was right to argue that the pressure to conform can be subtle as well as gross, indirect as well as flagrant, accidental as well as intentional. Even to monitor staff attitudes and then relay the findings back to that workforce may be an exercise in persuasion, or an invitation to behavioural compliance. The process of sharing ‘findings’, in other words, could also have harmonising effects on the human sources of that data: polls and reports might lead people to fine-tune themselves to the norm, in a business, a community or across a national population. Take the 1929 ‘Middletown’ study, the work of wife-and-husband team, sociologists Helen Merrell Lynd and Robert Staughton Lynd. Their book was based on their explorations of life in a particular city, Muncie, Indiana. The authors acknowledged that no place simply plucked off the map could be typical of everywhere, and yet they also treated this site and the attitudes they measured and studied there as representative of a large range of American communities. Muncie became ‘Middletown’, and a source of growing interest, even fascination, not only to the researchers but also to the wider population. Readers were fed reports about the attitudes of the people who lived there, the extent of their faith, the degree of their deference (or irreverence), their views of the past, the present and the future, and, in microcosm, their responses to material goods, down to relative preference for cotton or silk stockings.
That study by the Lynds, and later follow-ups, did much to foster a shared understanding of a quintessentially American way of life, or of a typical national state of mind. Where previously readers might have looked to storytellers for portraits of themselves and their fellow citizens, they now found new mirrors through polling and social science profiles. Citizens in the United States and many other countries too would find themselves awash, post-war, with information about what surveyed portions of the population really think, feel or believe. And that information can affect in turn how people think about themselves, and how self-conscious they grow about their own attitudes and manner of relating to others.
Historians today quite often single out the Lynds’ account of Middletown, alongside the regular data provided by George Gallup’s polling company, founded in 1935, and post-war reports by biologist turned sexologist Alfred Kinsey, as significant agents of social change. Papers and magazines relayed new discoveries about behaviour and beliefs: what made the headlines were often claims about what was now typical or characteristic. So, a national reading public might be at risk of attuning ever more to one another, fixated on the same questions and problems, comparing their own views and actions with others, and wondering how far their personal experiences in the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen and the workplace were ordinary and healthy, and, if not, might try to conform. To read such surveys, critics argued, was to internalise certain pressures to adjust.
A trickle of such surveys in the 1920s turned into a regular stream, then, later, a torrent of reports and summations about the state of the nation. This constant buzz of commentary about social polling data might also prove influential, or at least an unavoidable form of news that you had to engage with. So, you could learn from anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists or pollsters, what it meant, or what it ought to mean, to grow up somewhere like Indiana; and you could contrast growing up in a particular part of the West with growing up somewhere else, across the world for example, by reading articles in the media about what anthropologists had discovered of social mores in faraway places such as Samoa. An important question arose, about what this flow of news about social observations and interpersonal comparisons might do to the people observed, to how they think, bring up their children, court one another or view their careers. Selective descriptions might be used to recognise difference and diversity, or serve at other times as forms of prescription, inviting continuing self-surveillance and adjustment.
As Gary Younge remarks in an article about the Lynds’ foundational work, this ‘typical America’ was largely deemed to be white and native-born, and mostly shorn of its internal ‘foreigners’.19 Sarah Igo develops this point in her study The Averaged American. She shows how large numbers of US citizens were schooled to expect statistical surveys and observational reports to appear and to reflect their reality, clarifying the limits of human diversity and the nature of similarities.20 Sections of the population also came to understand that their opinions might well be sampled, their feedback solicited by all kinds of agencies – commercial, academic, political – on a regular basis. And their feedback was then fed back to them in the polling literature. This continuing interaction between at least some of the electorate and the pollsters was well established in the United States by the 1930s and 40s; a decade or two later it was also a feature of life in Britain and France, and many other countries too.
We saw in Part 3 Miłosz’s descriptions of the secret bargains people made with themselves to survive under Stalin. Rather than inquiring into psychology under extreme conditions, Whyte was interested (as in fact Miłosz had also been on arriving as a cultural attaché from Poland to the United States) in the way people might be very comfortable with the daily fodder they were fed in the West, acclimatised quite nicely and smoothly to some group mentality, adjusting inside their family, leisure activities, education and work. Those who benefited from the system might come to assume there was no need for nor any possibility of radical change. Whyte’s account might thus be read alongside Miłosz’s depictions of life under communism and in the West: both these writers suggested how a particular way of life might appear exit-less, but for some, the fact it was, or at least seemed so, was not a problem. For a corporate executive, that sense of inevitability about the here and now might lead to the rhetorical question, ‘what’s not to like?’. As though the company and the state now offered all that could be imagined, or desired …
For all that Whyte focused on ‘the organization man’, women in the 1950s arguably faced even greater pressure to conform – from spouses or other family, and from schools, peers, magazines, films, adverts and business organisations. Beginning in early infancy, as feminist writers were pointing out, girls were acculturated to wear pink, be given dolls, taught about motherhood, and steered towards a caring career such as nursing, where boys might be offered toy guns, and encouraged to lead. Readers today may well be more alert than their forebears to how Whyte’s own title subsumed the figure of the ‘woman’ inside the broader category of ‘man’.
Post-war, many women would explore the groupthink that sustained gender inequality, a two-tier system. They identified and challenged the expectations and prohibitions in Western societies that meant that girls were supposed to be content as ‘the second sex’ and to embody the ‘feminine mystique’. Critics of sexual and racial stereotypes in the 1950s and 60s exposed many social codes that served to sustain material inequality, to channel the way people think and to curb what they may aspire to. The civil rights movement took up and extended much of the 1950s thinking about conformism and normalisation that we’ve considered, seeking practical measures and legislative redress, and at the same time exploring socialisation through family, the legal system, education, religion, culture, sport and work. Even as popular culture could reinforce stereotypes about what it meant to be white or Black, a man or a woman, some movies, cartoons, magazines or songs could also subvert such expectations and cast a quizzical lens on those norms, showing how women and people of colour were re-conditioned en masse to domestic, secondary and decorative roles. Black people continued to face enormous pressures to assume their ultimate systemic subordination, even as civil rights were won.
It was Betty Friedan, in her best-seller The Feminine Mystique, who put the issue of women’s collective thought reform and brainwashing prominently on the map for many Americans and overseas readers. Her 1963 study analysed how women at large were ushered into their homemaking roles, and groomed to be sexualised, winsome figures in the interests of men, at heavy costs to their psychic as well as economic well-being. Friedan made direct comparison between women and those bands of ‘brainwashed’ POWs from the Korean War. Her argument was that all women, not simply some unfortunate minority, experienced heavily coercive expectations to function inside this constricting system, in effect within an invisible prison. Notwithstanding differences of race, ethnicity, class, religion, region, age, and so on, she argued that women were an undeniable social category, lumped together as a supposedly inferior sex, and effectively programmed to think (or rather to not think) alike; to assume their own destiny as being first and foremost companions to men and guardians of children, and to be persuaded to not be ‘difficult’, and saturated by a culture that invited acceptance of inferiority and ideas about ladies’ gracefulness and stereotypical forms of charm. (Friedan would later be criticised for failing to recognise that class and race, not just sex, are crucial factors in social relations and psychic experience, and that several forms of oppression can intersect, so that Black women and white women were not necessarily simply sisters-in-arms, fighting on the same terrain.)
Feminist accounts from the 1960s, such as Friedan’s, are evidently at play in a satirical novel by Ira Levin which was turned into the 1975 film The Stepford Wives, directed by Bryan Forbes. Beneath bourgeois norms, the movie reveals a hidden, surgical assault by men upon women’s brains; mind control and brainwashing, in all its raw violence, to make women into uncomplaining, doll-like eye candy. The Feminine Mystique pointed to the terrible toll on women’s mental health of living in suburban ‘prisons’; The Stepford Wives dramatised this further, reflecting a growing sense of scandal over lobotomies that had been carried out in the 1950s and 60s on those with certain conditions deemed hopelessly and incurably mentally ill. The film suggested above all that a misogynistic system had been devised to turn once lively, free-thinking people into mannequins, worked over in body and mind. It also anticipated the remarkable growth of the cosmetic surgery industry. Women, primarily, would be invited in ever larger numbers, as the century wore on and the twenty-first century began, to resculpt bodies from head to toe, and have a ‘makeover’. The decision was often presented as simply an individual consumer choice, or a mode of personal empowerment; while critics pointed instead to the desperate alienation and depression that was also instigated by idealised images, all those heavily prescriptive beauty standards, myths and forms of fashion tyranny.21
We see the women in the Stepford movie, after their covert, non-consensual brain treatment, as interchangeable members of a homogenous group, like living Barbie doll creatures, robotically moving their trolleys around the supermarket aisles. (A 1978 cult zombie film, Dawn of the Dead, would later extend this theme, in its own satirical exploration of consumerism: the shopping mall becomes the setting for a terrifying conflict between the zombies and the desperate, embattled last few human survivors.) Far from being innately secondary to men, women, as Friedan had so powerfully argued, were systematically undermined, handicapped and made to feel inadequate in a system that shored up the egos of one sex by denigrating the other. Weakness was actively projected, by men, onto women.
Debates on social conformity and groupthink were also thrown into sharp relief by perturbing psychological experiments, as well as by popular narratives and films depicting people leaving the rat race, refusing to continue as corporate employees or dutiful homemakers and taking up new paths. There were many new counterculture movements and discourses by the 1960s that invited people to ‘drop out’, seek out new forms of commune or community, or dive into a more adventurous, personal life, in active rejection of the supposedly predictable, mind-numbing, capitalist and office-based world that Whyte and others described as a mounting problem of post-war society.
Psychoanalysts tended to take a different approach, less focused on the particular post-war conjuncture, and more inclined to suggest certain universal psychological predicaments and conflicts, not least between desire and group-based morality; conflicts that constituted the human condition. Freud, at least, often suggested as much, although some of his followers took his speculations on group affiliations in new directions during and after the Second World War. They built upon his landmark 1921 study Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Some developed forms of therapy for groups adapted from Freud’s basic ideas and model of clinical work with individual patients. Pioneers of this approach, such as Wilfred Bion, considered afresh Freud’s thoughts about the formations of fantasy that exist inside the mind. These clinicians wanted to see what emerged when a number of patients are gathered together in a structured setting, and then left to respond, as they see fit, without instruction from a leader. The concept of the ‘leaderless group’ emerged.22 Unlike Freud’s more speculative studies, Bion’s exploration of group phenomena was based on his own clinical evidence. It also had more obviously direct, managerial applications. He first got involved in this form of group work as an army doctor and psychiatrist faced with the problem of treating soldiers with psychiatric symptoms in a military hospital in the English Midlands during the Second World War. His own military experience and interest in such collective experiences, however, derived from the battlefields of the First World War, where he had been a tank commander. Later, he published several bulletins and a co-written account about his methods of working with soldiers, and then continued with other therapeutic groups long afterwards. This tradition of group work was also developed by others during the 1940s and 50s, for instance by S. H. Foulkes.
These analysts gathered evidence, demonstrating what Freud had already implied: fantasies can shadow the life of groups; splits, projections and denials may operate within a gathering of people, as well as in the mind of an individual. Aims in group therapy vary, but they might be to help the constituent members become more aware of such fantasies and prevailing assumptions, to find some containment, tolerate challenge, gain insight into the unconscious processes that can be silently at work in the mind, or an aggregate of minds at some assembled gathering. In such meetings, individuals might come to note their own active or passive part in the way the group develops, to ask more searching questions about their own minds and roles, or to test previously inchoate presuppositions about other people.
Bion and other innovators around this time sought to recognise groupthink but also to facilitate more creative thinking in groups, and to invite greater self-reflexive attention. They wanted to identify and show how and why it often becomes difficult or even impossible for creative thinking to happen. Groups can provide us with the crucial foundations for thinking, they argued, yet may also become curiously sealed off, complacent, or operate in active negation of the task that has brought them together in the first place. At the most extreme end lay mass psychosis, but there were also potentially mass neuroses that might be revealed and analysed in this way, through the experiential group. For example, Bion considered how a company of people can energetically repress unwelcome information, perhaps ostracise or subtly shame an individual member for some unspoken reason, and exert pressures that weigh heavily upon everyone, even without anyone describing those pressures directly.
Combinations of professional people who are committed, in principle, to think about such issues, for instance in university departments or psychoanalytic societies, can be equally affected by such group processes. An anecdote I heard from a former candidate, who was in psychoanalytic training in the early 1960s, illustrates this point. She presented a clinical case to a seminar run by Bion, finished her account in customary fashion, and was then met with prolonged silence. It seemed a rather stony silence to her. Feeling anxious, she quickly offered to present further material, and started rifling through her notes to see what else she could provide. Here Bion intervened, and said, ‘yes, I think that is what you are supposed to feel you have to do’. He had picked up the way the group’s shared silence seemed to be operating, stirring a feeling in her, as though putting her under an implicit obligation to be the active one, while the others sat back passively and watched. After his intervention, the presenter managed to resist the temptation to supply more data, and eventually her colleagues started to think aloud about what they’d heard.
Bion once described a therapeutic group whose members seemed determined repeatedly to offer one another inane advice and bland encouragement, even though all concerned knew such responses to be useless. On another occasion, he noted how a group he had convened ignored him pointedly for three or four weeks, as though he was ‘an oracle in decay’, or a man ‘in bad odour’, until a patient began to display what the group regarded as symptoms of madness, making statements that appeared to be the product of hallucinations. As their anxiety rapidly rose, Bion found himself readmitted to the group and restored to a commanding position in what had now become, he thought, a ‘miniature theocracy’:
I was the good leader, master of the situation, fully capable of dealing with a crisis of this nature – in short, so outstandingly the right man for the job that it would have been presumption for any other member of the group to attempt to take any helpful initiative. The speed with which consternation was changed into blind complacency had to be seen to be believed.23
After the alarming situation arose, Bion postulated that for the group he had become, in effect, ‘the centre of a cult in its full power’, a kind of guru. He did intervene, both in seminars and in therapeutic groups, but often he would hold himself back, allow the group to develop. That was not to say that he switched off, but the group did not quite know what he was thinking. They would make of his silence, as of his words and his bodily presence, what they wished. Bion and other colleagues who developed the tradition of group therapy sought to be alert to the powerful play of emotions circling within such a community, and in themselves. This kind of participant-observer role for the convenor, or therapist, drew on the psychoanalytic method, and perhaps also owed something to the insider-outsider position of the anthropologist. The psychoanalysts, in short, were interested in the fantasised figures and groups that shadow the mind of the individual, and the shared role of dreams, illusions and dreads in the life of such a community. As the poet Walt Whitman had put it long before Freud said a similar thing about the ego and the group: ‘I contain multitudes.’
Group therapists following the psychoanalytic approach would try to avoid being too obtrusive; they might need to speak to hold things together, if the anxiety or aggression grew too severe, but often would seek to remain quiet for a considerable time, carefully listening and observing, allowing the process to emerge and providing a containing function with certain agreed protocols (for example, regarding meeting times and confidentiality), and, as far as possible, eschewing the directive, managerial role. Every now and then they might comment and interpret, as would a psychoanalyst with a patient in the consulting room. Whether some, such as Bion, might also revel in the guru position attributed to them is a further question. The aim, however, is to disenchant, rather than re-enchant. The therapist might note what the group is doing (or failing to do), and seek to clarify how it is proceeding (for instance, in a cult-like fashion). Or perhaps the therapist might mention some other ‘elephant in the room’. Interpretation is a difficult craft; the therapist or analyst trying to judge as best as they can when it is timely to take up issues with a patient, or in this case with a group; and then to gauge how far, if at all, that interpretation proves useful, and, moreover, what is done with that intervention once it is made. They try to be attentive to the kinds of feelings or assumptions that are projected onto them by the patient or group. Does the group respond to an intervention, and if so, how, or does it completely ignore the remark, perhaps even gang up against the therapist in order to make them feel left out? The possibilities are endless.
Bion’s 1961 book Experiences in Groups explores this idea of how so much can go on unwittingly or unconsciously. He thought there were often unconscious ‘basic assumptions’ shared implicitly within a body of people. Although each example was unique, Bion suggested that there are certain recurring formations. In the ‘leader/saviour’ version, the members gravitate around rigid beliefs and seem desperate for guidance. Sometimes the members seem to form a single uncontested mass, defined in relation to an assumed individual hero and rescuer, and/or unite solidly against some other demonised group. He looked at how groups may fight, take flight or huddle in a state of abject dependence. Groups can also become entirely engrossed in what he called pairing, where the participants concentrate upon one or more dyadic formations of individuals, perhaps fascinated by a real – or imaginary – amorous couple. Assumed ideas, fantasies, or sometimes overt conversations about a pair’s sexual relationship, for example, may generate a great deal of excitement or worry in a group. In the ‘fight/flight’ situation, the members may treat the cluster they are in as under mortal threat; as though the assembly is extremely precarious, perhaps far more so than realistically applies. The group may grow terribly anxious about its breakable, invadable state, yet seem unable to share this anxiety openly with one another (hence to alleviate it). Its members may also feel somehow naturally superior, wise, arrogant and entitled as a group, compared with some ‘out-group’.
Bion offered intriguing descriptions of the evolution of sessions, moment by moment; he vividly conveyed how the atmosphere could change suddenly, with greater or lesser degrees of a sense of hope, or sometimes descent into paranoia. He also suggested how, with a greater sense of safety and trust, different modes of thoughtful communication became possible, and the group might begin to take more responsibility for its own development.
A field of organisational consultancy work also developed post-war, in parallel with, or sometimes directly inspired by, this pioneering tradition of therapy. New opportunities for consultancy took clinicians into industry, business and education, for example through the applied services provided by organisations such as the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. Clinical and experiential literature on groups, and such applied psychoanalytic work in workplaces, was complemented by new materials furnished by social scientists, as well as by new accounts of mass gatherings, crusades and millenarian movements over the centuries provided by historians. Some considered afresh the operation of mass psychology in the most recent historical past. One notable point of departure for that was Wilhelm Reich’s 1933 study The Mass Psychology of Fascism.24 Erich Fromm, as noted, had also written powerfully in a book in 1941 about a deep-seated ‘fear of freedom’, profound feelings of loneliness and atomisation, and the mass longing to escape from personal responsibility – psychic phenomena that he thought widely prevalent in the modern age, most disastrously so in Germany from which he had fled. Different balances could be struck in individuals, groups or societies. Fromm wrote later about what might constitute the basis for what he called a ‘sane society’.
Thus, post-war ideas about group psychology and the practice of group analysis emerged alongside other historical and sociological explorations of mass phenomena. The spotlight on groupthink could also, as we have already suggested, be turned back upon the academy and upon the clinical professions themselves. For instance, some academic researchers and psychoanalysts provided insights into the nature of unconscious bonding by colleagues and students inside the training organisations of psychoanalysis itself; they invited more debate about the kinds of conformist adaptation that it might require of those who seek to train and work in the field. For an institution might house a nest of other micro-institutions, for instance cliques, or established subgroups, with certain leading figures exerting a charismatic hold.
Robert Jay Lifton, the psychiatrist who explored brainwashing and interviewed ex-POWs on their way home from the Korean War, recognised how groupthink and thought reform of various kinds might occur within the post-war US psychoanalytic organisation in which he undertook training. His concern at the power of the institution to delimit the freedom of trainees was a factor in his own decision to give up the training and change career path.25 Other critics would explore the way analytic groups and societies operated, intent upon considering to what degree the analysts (or their organisations) might pilot, even dragoon, the analysands, or more delicately influence them. Through the training of each generation of analysts, a multiplicity of coded pointers might operate, about where best to comply to or challenge authority inside the subgroup or the larger community.26 Such pointers might be reinforced further through forms of professional patronage and institutional promotion (or marginalisation).
Psychoanalysis did not follow a single path, and controversies about interpretation, or more extremely about practices of groupthink, conversion, normalisation, etc., were fiercely debated within the professional organisations, as were also the nature of the appropriate limits and ethical boundaries. Notable European psychoanalysts (most famously Jacques Lacan) levelled the charge that the profession – particularly in the United States – had lost its way by becoming a mode of treatment that promoted adaptation to a given society; others pointed to the conformism that seemed to arise in Lacan’s own groups in Paris; the powerful grip and intense charismatic authority that Lacan himself exerted as the ‘absolute master’ over the seminars he convened; the structures he created, dissolved and then recomposed.
New words were also coined by psychoanalysts to describe how people may, from infancy onwards, become too adapted to their primary group – the family – rather than maladapted, in the sense of being overly wild or transgressive. For example, Christopher Bollas (inspired in part by Donald Winnicott’s account of the false self) later wrote of a particular bad psychic outcome that he calls the ‘normotic’ character. Another analyst, Joyce McDougall, made a similar point, preferring instead the term ‘normopath’.27
In psychological development, McDougall suggested, each of us has to find some balance between conformity and resistance to that conformity. The infant’s narcissism has to be punctured; each must learn they are not the centre of the world; we all have to share resources and carers, and not act with complete disregard for others. We cannot be left, or so one hopes, entirely free as children or adults to do our own individualistic thing. Indeed, our partial realisation and adaptation to the needs of others – primary carers, siblings, community – is psychically crucial, she argued; we have to feel our way as infants, children, adolescents and adults, and, yes, we must acclimatise, up to a point, even to make a playgroup work.
Bollas and McDougall were interested, however, in exploring the pathologies that arise when this kind of acquiescence and adaptation is far more extreme: where the requirement for rote adaptation and unthinking normalisation is the overwhelming message received and internalised by the child. A baby or toddler that is excessively agreeable, too pacific, over-sweetly compliant, causing ‘no bother’, such psychoanalysts suggested, gives grounds for clinical concern. Individuals may also become, as common parlance has it, ‘chameleons’, able to adapt ‘beautifully’ and seamlessly to any milieu, and the question might then be what or whom does this perfect transformability serve, in the chameleon’s internal world. Case material and theories piled up about how we may become what someone else or a group installed within our own minds requires us to be; and about how certain people might suffer from ‘imposter syndrome’, or identify rigidly with others, unable to change mode at all.
Such propensities, as psychoanalysts continued to warn one another, could seriously hamper their own profession’s development. Some spoke out about the tendency for ‘schools’ of analysts to close in on themselves and become bastions rather than open spaces for discussion with others. Fearing such defensive groupthink, and anxiously noting circling critics of the talking cure, the American psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson warned in 1969 that there was too much ‘placidity, contentment and self-satisfaction’. He harked back to Freud’s adventurous spirit and urged that his colleagues provide, in future, better ‘breeding grounds’ for new ideas in psychoanalysis.28
So, to recap, much was written in the decades after 1945 by journalists, academics, psychologists, therapists and entertainers about the nature of groupthink. New ideas and arguments, as well as innovative experiments in social psychology and in psychoanalysis, tested older, abstract suppositions about crowd or mass psychology. Experimental set-ups were devised to explore how people deal with specific tasks, to reveal how different kinds of therapeutic frameworks and organisational structures might help or hinder realistic attitudes, problem-solving or the maintenance of self-esteem.
During the 1930s, the social psychologist Kurt Lewin developed procedures in a bid to test attitudes and capacities of individuals under different kinds of governing authority. He famously investigated how boys aged around eleven went about solving certain challenges that they were set, in groups; to see how they worked and played creatively (or otherwise) in clubs (which he arranged, and then observed). Lewin wanted to know if his young experimental subjects’ intellectual capacities differed in a laissez-faire system (that is, one involving little central direction), a democratic arrangement (in which co-operation, participation and inclusion were valued), and an authoritarian organisation (where the adults involved barked orders and gave no satisfactory explanations for their decisions to the children). He was open, I think, to considering whatever arose, although he and his research group were no doubt gratified to find that their tests supported the case for tolerance and greater democracy. Conversely, they exposed the deleterious pedagogic and intellectual consequences of a dictatorial method. Lewin had fled the Nazi regime and arrived in the United States as a refugee. He died shortly after the end of the war but his attempt to create a kind of group laboratory for people-watching in the United States long outlived him.29
Other experiments that proved influential showed how ideas about superiority and inferiority, and ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’, operate; and how ingrained prejudices shape opinion about others and the self. Experiments were designed in the United States by two Black psychologists and important advocates of racial equality, desegregation and civil rights, Mamie and Kenneth Clark, to investigate children’s self-perceptions and internalisations of racism. Their famous 1940s ‘doll tests’ suggested how children (whatever their skin colour) between the ages of three and seven were already prone to see white dolls as more valuable, attractive and smart than black dolls. The Clarks’ experiments were persuasive: they demonstrated how vicious stereotypes and implicit value systems shape the mind of the child, and in many cases, how such stereotypes might foster an ‘inferiority complex’.30
Adolescent identity and group formations were also the subject of intense scrutiny after 1945. First uses of the word ‘teenager’ can be found in dictionary entries from before the First World War; however, as a common term, it came of age during the 1940s and 50s. It also acquired new significance in the field of marketing, given the rising spending power of young people. Much interest was focused on ‘troubled teenagers’ in that boom era, an age also of growing psychologisation of everyday ills. This was a period where new kinds of discourse emerged about the psychology of adolescents, and their fraught occupation of the liminal spaces between infancy and adulthood. Notable movies such as Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), starring James Dean, or François Truffaut’s Les Quatres Cents Coups (1959), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, took up such issues, inviting debate about young people’s diverse experiences, personal struggles and peer relationships outside of the family. Such stories, exploring serious emotional difficulties in their subjects, were designed to challenge simplistic and shrill denunciations of juvenile delinquency (a post-war buzz phrase) and invite greater psychological curiosity.
Ideas about conformity and rebellion in the teenager mushroomed; a burgeoning psychological literature aimed increasingly to provide sensitive guidance to post-war parents as well as their off-spring. During the Second World War in Britain, the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had already paved the way, providing BBC radio talks aimed at helping mothers and fathers understand and nurture their infants, as well as value themselves, constantly encouraging a more psychologically minded parental approach. In France, in the 1970s, the psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto offered her own talks on radio, responding to listeners’ concerns about their parenting and their children’s welfare. In each case, the use of radio reflected an aspiration to reach out and make psychoanalytic ideas more accessible and vernacular. Winnicott was especially influential, encouraging mothers to do what came most naturally to them, if they were not too anxious or too manipulated by others. They needed to find their own ways, he suggested, rather than succumbing to conformist pressure from so-called experts.
Such clinically informed public broadcasting and popular-advice literature sought to challenge rote or regimented views from the past, and to recognise the range of emotions experienced by babies, children and their primary carers. A powerful revolt was to be encouraged by this cast of pundits and experts against the kinds of rigid and disciplinarian feeding patterns, which had hitherto been commonplace, where mothers were supposed to respond to their babies according to some pre-set drill. In the 1930s, for instance, Frederic Truby King, a New Zealand physician, had been influential not only in advocating for breastfeeding over bottle-feeding, but also in insisting on the importance of adhering to a strict and punctual feeding regime for the baby.31 After 1945, new guides and advice literature written by clinicians appeared, encouraging mothers to allow themselves to be more spontaneous, ‘in touch’, and to do what felt right, or at least to do so in light of the findings of psychoanalysis and experimental literature. In a similar vein came a series of challenges to the disciplinarian regimes to be found in so many schools, private and state-run, in Britain, and the traumatic legacies of institutionalisation, brutalisation or prematurely broken attachments. They explored, in short, the long-term damage that schooling can do, precursors to the recent spate of works on conditions such as ‘Boarding School Syndrome’.
In Britain after the Second World War, child psychotherapy established itself as a distinct association and profession, with growing public influence. In Eastern as well as in Western Europe, psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy all played many important roles. Communist governments kept a close eye on anti-conformist attitudes and the ‘degenerate’ lure of Western culture on youth, especially with the explosion of ‘decadent’ pop music in the 1960s. Suffice to say that the problem of ‘the teenage years’, and the power of peer groups, was to be explored widely, and from multiple political and moral points of view, East and West, in the second half of the twentieth century. Both sociologists and clinicians noted that adolescents marked out new group allegiances in their own ways, and struggled with their own first loves and hatreds via ‘subcultures’, gangs, fashion, popular music, drugs and politics. They might seek to escape family or state orthodoxies, in flight from the dead weight of communism or the iniquities and stresses of capitalism.
In Britain, during the 1960s and 70s, we can see how concerns about fostering individualism, while recognising the shared or even universal psychological challenges we all face in growing up, were articulated in a helpful and thoughtful, if also decidedly ‘of its time’, series of guides. These books, produced by psychoanalysts and child therapists at the Tavistock Clinic, sought to help parents, as the titles put it, ‘understand your one-year-old’, ‘your two-year-old’, etc. The guides explained that the baby, the child, the teenager had to be understood as unique, changing with each passing season. Their minds are irreducible to any other, but also caught up in the same fundamental challenges of negotiating inner worlds, as well as widening social relationships.
One of the books in this series was written to enlighten mothers and fathers about their teenagers, to see how such young people might be resisting and conforming to many different group pressures, and yet how each individual was also bound to be going through a process distinctly their own. At that stage of life, adolescents were, the authors explained, grappling with profound ‘identity’ issues. They were constantly negotiating new moves in relation to one another; they were also navigating ‘the permissive society’, learning about the problem of moving on from the primary group – the family – and coping with conflicting wishes, for instance about rebellion and conformity, in relation to sex, school, religion, work or the possibility of continuing qualifications in higher education. Youngsters were inclined, they warned, to take up portentous tones, to idealise revolutionaries, to demand that the world be changed overnight, to fit in with their new ‘radical’ group spirit, or else to swing the other way into rigid, conservative reactions against their own transgressive wishes and inner aggression.
The Tavistock guide attempted to illuminate the complex psychosocial predicaments of the teenager; to understand the depth of the emotional challenges the youngster had to manage. The issue of ‘belongingness’, the authors found, was likely to be salient and difficult. Indeed, the drama of psychic separation was inevitably going to be acute, if the teenager was to move on psychologically from the shadow of parents and siblings, and find a place in the world other than as a dependent child. This was a key developmental task of adolescence, a trajectory for every fledgling adult that could not be taken for granted. It was a pathway to be travelled by all, and at a time when the body was in a state of alarming transformation; a body with raging hormones that evoked ambivalent feelings; an emergent adult sexual body that might well precede any kind of mature psychosocial identity, and capacity for new intimate, bodily relationships with others. During these years, antisocial behaviour, the authors explained, was common, as was precocious flight into sex.32
Contemporary society, the Tavistock clinicians warned, had a great deal to answer for in its shameless exploitation of children and teenagers for naked commercial ends, and especially for creating an endless parade of seductive advertising and sexual titillation on screen and in print. The danger to youth, they added, was probably not so much from undue inflammation of sexual desires (that was inevitable), as from the continually implied or stated propaganda about how a person ought to feel and to act. They described how a boy might be made to think that unless he is sexually ‘with it’ then ‘he isn’t really alive – [but] … left out, left behind in the race to grab something out of life’. Such an account may well still ring true in the age of the internet, when explicit content, or rather a gigantic industry of pornography, is likely to be encountered and navigated, one way or another, by teenagers, and often by much younger children. In the teenage imagination, the Tavistock writers also explained, so much seems to be in constant flux, but sometimes a particular goal could also seem, to them, a matter of life or death: ‘[t]o have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and a bank balance, these are two keys to life!’33
Teenage conformity or conformist anti-conformity (the heavy pressure to rebel) was thus carefully dissected, offering new slants on the question of individuality, freedom and groupthink. But older people, even if notionally free to make their own decisions, were of course not free of conformist pressures either, so said other psychologists. Solomon Asch, for example, reported influentially his own disturbing findings in yet another set of interesting experiments during the 1950s. These suggested that a sizeable proportion of adults were extremely reluctant to trust their own perceptions and judgements, even the direct evidence of their own eyes, when the majority take a contrary view. (It should be said that many of his participants were students, so perhaps teenagers, or barely older than that, but his drift was clear: conformist pressures may operate in all of us, irrespective of age.)
Asch conducted notable investigations into group-based conformity, which would in turn influence other social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram, who, as we have seen, conducted celebrated experiments on obedience. Asch’s findings – like Milgram’s later – were felt by many to be startling and sobering. The participants in one of Asch’s experiments were told they were all equally placed in the same boat as volunteers, but unbeknownst to one of them, the others in the group were in fact acting and had been primed in advance to agree on the wrong answer to the question that Asch asked. He was interested to know if the volunteer would stick with their view or, under internal pressure to agree with the others, say the opposite to what they initially thought.
The group were shown a card with a line on it, and then a second card with three lines of clearly different lengths. They were then asked which line on card 2 matched the line on card 1. Asked to voice the answer out loud, the genuine volunteer (asked last) was far more likely to give the wrong answer – i.e. to agree with the group. Without group interference in individual judgement, Asch found the error rate was less than 1 per cent; under the influence of the rest, however, the error rate jumped up to around 35 per cent. Some people held to their personal views unabashed, but a sizeable number simply switched sides to fit in. As he mused in his 1955 report on this work in Scientific American, some of these ‘extremely yielding persons’ concluded, ‘I am wrong, they are right.’ Others ceded their own view so as ‘not to spoil your results’. Many who went along actually suspected the majority might be ‘sheep’, or victims of an optical illusion, but all the same sided with their answers rather than trust their own judgement.34
But if a group in a room could sway a person, even override their perception, understanding and reasoning powers, what of the role of the nation at large in shifting opinion and forming characters? One response to that question was provided by the historian Richard Hofstadter.
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In 1948, Hofstadter published a controversial book that explored how guiding national beliefs could determine profoundly the consciousness of the people who lived there. His study, entitled The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, suggested how dominant myths had come to prevail and to enjoy a remarkable consistency over the centuries. Indeed, he argued that a powerful vision of American purpose, even destiny, had exerted an increasingly regulating and constricting influence on the population, and especially on those who held social influence and political power. The idea of a national mission was inculcated, relayed widely across generations, and then assumed to have organically arisen in the people.
Although that ideology stressed the freedom to think and express yourself as you wished, the conception of freedom entailed a more basic and limited set of assumptions. The United States, he explained, came to be viewed by millions of its inhabitants, and much of its business class, as ‘the land of the free’. That vision was assumed, whatever the unequal realities or indeed mockeries of that freedom in practice. This concept was understood in obviously loaded and restricted ways, and as though there was no alternative to a particular widely stabilised definition – or at least no alternative notion that was of any lasting good. That vision – the imagined community, as we might now say, using the term developed by a notable writer on nationalism, Benedict Anderson – had come to be commonplace in both modern political rhetoric and modern social mentality, as though the United States simply was, rather than aspired (in part) to be, that land of the free. Hofstadter argued that this ideal of freedom also assumed a powerful commercial and financial aspect: for a society to be free, businesses must be liberated from so-called shackles, and perhaps even the whole world subjected to shared rules that facilitate maximum trade – ideally ‘free trade’, without tariffs or other barriers.
In the post-war United States, once again we need caveats before simply endorsing such an analysis; there was no national social, political or even corporate unanimity on the benefits of global free trade. The debate over ‘America first’ and economic protectionism versus global free trade is both older and certainly more enduring. All the same, Hofstadter was right to claim that, after 1945, many big-business executives as well as politicians and diplomats acted as cheerleaders for a rules-based international system of law, and promoted free enterprise and free trade as the natural human condition and as fundamental, universal freedoms. And he was surely also right to assume that millions of people shared those assumptions, that vision where unfettered commerce and corporate laissez-faire were the keys to a people’s and a nation’s economic and psychological health. The well-functioning nation was regarded by many as equivalent to a vibrant, unblocked body, or a fluent, free-circulating, well-functioning mind. Policies at home or abroad reflecting this point of view assumed the sanctity of ‘the private sector’, and granted maximum scope of action to the individual, thus treating this conception of freedom and maximum ‘openness’ as desirable without any question. In sum, Hofstadter’s book about American values suggested that this free-enterprise belief system, or vision of the so-called open society, was a dominant American ideology, although, as we have seen, fear of the overweening corporation was also deeply embedded in the nation’s history.
There have always in fact been divided views in the United States, as more generally throughout the West, about the meaning, scope, limitations and challenges of achieving liberty. The story of the nation as a society grounded in a love of freedom of thought was itself inevitably a contested narrative, one that was always confronted with the monstrous central facts of the destruction of Native American societies, the conquest of land and the constitutive role of slavery in the nation’s founding and development. Long after the formal abolition of slavery, a sutured version of reality prevailed that assumed Americans were now and always had been, as a people, essentially free.
This vision of shared freedom for all US citizens had to grapple with the never-healed wounds of the Civil War, and to somehow deal with the fact that the United States, the great anti-imperial bastion, was itself an imperial power in the world, born out of massive violence. The American ideology that Hofstadter described was never universally assumed by its own population. All the same, Hofstadter was convincing when he insisted that this was an influential and dominant representation, in which the American nation had always assumed a God-given purpose of extending individual and commercial freedom inside and beyond its own borders. He noted that such a vision slid from one conception of freedom to another: as though the right to assembly, expression, property and bearing arms were all of a piece, and psychological, religious, legal, economic and political freedoms are quintessentially American.
Hofstadter wanted to show how the United States was to accept and proselytise on behalf of a particular and constricted idea of freedom.35 At worst, this vision became a compliant mode of group-think, all about unfettered rights to pursue private businesses. Most Americans after the Second World War, he warned, as he looked on in dismay, seemed to have become increasingly passive and spectator-like figures, not really challenging anything; people, he feared, were increasingly reluctant or ill-equipped to think for themselves, even if they were not entirely brainwashed. They did not apparently see any need to question their own beliefs, even if they enjoyed agency to change themselves and their environment in theory.36
The majority in the workforce now lived, Hofstadter suggested, with the naive assumption that they enjoyed personal autonomy, able to avail themselves simply by dint of being American, in a land of endless opportunity, without ever really going back to first principles or studying the actual living conditions of so many of their compatriots. He suggested how basic assumptions were shared between citizens, not to mention between presidents and secretaries of state; even as they differed on particular policies, certain continuities existed from the birth of the Republic to the present-day administration and president. Hofstadter felt that even Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s operated within this long-standing Americanised and ultimately individualistic version of what freedom means. He showed how much was transmitted uncontested over the decades to consolidate the dominant political story of who ‘we’ truly are, and what ‘we’ revile. He would no doubt have been as astonished as anyone had he lived to witness a self-declared democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, emerging as a serious, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, contender for the Democratic presidential candidacy in 2016 and 2020.
What Hofstadter wanted to explore were the common ingredients that bound so many people together and prevented them from seeing beyond the horizon of certain myths. He understood that for them (to borrow a word from the Italian anti-fascist writer Antonio Gramsci), certain ‘hegemonic’ assumptions shaped how they perceived the nature of their lives, their realistic choices and their own aspirations for liberty. Miłosz also remarked on that point: how so many Americans seemed disinclined to demand of their government positive versions of freedom (a right to a decent job, higher education or universal healthcare) as opposed to negative freedoms (the right as individuals, or as owners of property, to be free from undue regulation, taxation, responsibility for others, etc.).
Something akin to groupthink was to be explored a few years later by Herbert Marcuse in a more politically trenchant analysis that appeared in the 1960s. Marcuse would gain an enormous following, as a critic of capitalism. In this case, the point was not, as with Whyte and his ‘organization man’, to redeem a more vibrant form of market-based system, or to strengthen corporate culture by advocating anti-conformist reforms of modern businesses, but rather to challenge the entire order of things. What was shared across such analyses was that focus on the power of group conformity in a modern society. Marcuse sought to map out the psychological and political experiences that were so commonplace in advanced industrial economies. In his book One-Dimensional Man (1964) he suggested how mass conformity might arise, where a nation’s value system was mostly just accepted, without need for debate, even though it only satisfied illusory human wants. He was alert to how capitalism might suppress sexuality, but also to how it might actually do the reverse, in using the liberation of sexual energy to distract from political liberation and ultimately promote conservative ends. Rebellion and challenge, he proposed, were so often tamed and subsumed; art too, with all its revolutionary potential, could be defanged, before you knew it, rendered harmless inside capitalism.
A set of toxic values and false needs were reinforced daily through the media and advertising. He argued that a majority in such societies were by then sufficiently well fed, clothed and housed, converted into docile voters and consumers, all ensconced, falsely content with a comfortable status quo.
Marcuse maintained that in place of politics (or, rather, as a form of unspoken politics), many citizens of developed Western industrial society – regardless of class – become narcissistically invested in their own immediate personal individual fortunes; preoccupied with keeping up with the neighbours or getting ahead, buying more material goods, knowing the latest fashion, obsessing over gossip, getting their ‘share’, ultimately thinking of little beyond their own circumscribed lives and family prospects. Sold a dream of individualism, they were caught up, he implied, in groupthink. What troubled Marcuse was how this culture and society corrupted critical intelligence and made real solidarity or opportunities for root-and-branch changes in the basic organisation of society much weaker. He presented a picture in which the existing form of the state might ultimately appear to most people as the only conceivable one. In short, as he put it on the opening page of his book, welcome to the ‘comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom [that] prevails in advanced industrial civilization’.37
Critics of varying political hues also analysed pervasive form of modern loneliness, the loss of deeper solidarities, of communities, and what was often perceived to be a crisis in family life, as people looked outwards – to the public sphere, the media, etc. Take David Riesman’s influential 1950 study, The Lonely Crowd. This book also identified the prevalence in modern society of a group psychology based around increasingly strong needs for mutual reassurance and the smoothing-out of conflicts prematurely. Citizens seemed ever more anxiously needy, Riesman thought, to be told by others that everything really and truly is going fine. Often that was – and is – what they are told to expect, or aspire to, as in the standard cheery American greeting ‘have a nice day’, a reflex exhortation however miserable the circumstances. Riesman was interested in a kind of superficial complacency, and in identifying the gains and losses, the pleasures and pains for the subject in adjusting to a community’s unspoken requirements, and in identifying the rote gestures with which we comply. Moreover, The Lonely Crowd identified a prevalent ‘other-directed’ character type. This type was sensitive to the slightest criticism, guided by shallow and immediate communal pressures and allegiances, rather than the deeper ‘internal’ voices that derived from infancy and childhood experiences of being parented. Many were now too caught up in the surface, busy and alienating social world around them, he argued, and had lost touch with their own emotional and familial depths, or any sense of real, sustaining community. And precisely because of those deprivations, or losses of early attachments, many people had lost their real roots, and were growing ever more ‘heavy on harmony’; they seemed to have few occasions for personal assertion or existential escape, or in making use of the resources of that ‘deeper’ inward sense of a self.
Such analyses thus invited discussion of selfhood: what it means to acquire personality, what is essential to our human condition, how far each subject is shaped or even constituted in the first place by forces ‘outside’. In France during the 1960s, within a different theoretical framework, combining certain ideas from Marxism and Lacanian thought, the political philosopher Louis Althusser was producing his own influential analyses of what he called ‘ideological state apparatuses’. He was intent upon showing how these operated beyond the obvious brute power of the state (police, army, etc.) to fashion the subject and sustain a particular social order. The apparatus included schools and universities; he wanted to show how we are brought into being, called (or ‘interpolated’) as subjects. Althusser sought to analyse how we are summoned, and how our very subject positions come to be installed within.38 You cannot avoid it entirely, just as you may not be able to avoid turning your head when someone shouts out suddenly ‘hey you!’. Interpolation, however, mostly happens invisibly; you do not realise you are being summoned at all. Theorists such as Althusser and Marcuse had something in common, even though their models and styles of writing were so notably different: an insistence that our identities, as people and as citizens of a nation, should never be taken for granted, treated as somehow ‘givens’. So much that we take to be natural is acquired. To read Althusser is to wonder how ‘I’ came to be in the first place: to feel more unsure of ‘myself’ as someone who always existed, a person, somehow always there prior to my being called, inscribed in a language, an order, a system.
Marcuse influenced large numbers of readers in the 1960s ‘counterculture’ and after, inviting them to find a more three-dimensional life and recognise how compliance and orthodoxy were drummed into people through social arrangements of every kind. He wrote that modern societies, such as the United States, encouraged this continuing synchronisation, so that people come, as he put it, to ‘love and hate what others love and hate’. In our working lives too we may easily accept the governing order of things, rather than test or protest presuppositions. Trade unions were not exempt from his political scorn; they often defended arrangements that were corrupt in practice, or unquestioningly assumed the current dispensation – even the military–industrial complex in which so many workers had jobs. Capital and labour then become complicit with each other in groupthink; they could end up equally committed to promoting the interests of profitable business or, for instance, the vast national defence system, and appear incapable of thinking and protesting more fundamentally about this frame of reference. The union boss and the company boss, as Marcuse described, might unite in their common lobbying of the government for a larger number of missile contracts (a bigger slice of that defence budget), without any more fundamental interrogation of the entire framework.39
Marcuse, even more than Fromm and Adorno, was to become an influential intellectual figure, indeed, for many, in the United States and elsewhere, a must-read author and political icon. All three were part of a network of critical philosophers and researchers, sympathetic to the Left. This school of thought first developed in Germany. It was based originally around an Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, founded in 1923. The grouping would come to be widely known as the Frankfurt School. A common element was the endeavour to analyse contemporary social developments, and to explore the violent forces and passions driving contemporary politics. Members of this school sought to create new tools of critical analysis, to combine elements of Marxism, psychoanalysis and social science research, and to understand what drew so many to fascism and Nazism. These researchers wanted to understand, as best they could, the sources of contemporary mass attitudes, a form of irrationality, or warped rationality, and to consider the nature of the drives, relationships and influences at work. They wondered about unconscious shared beliefs and fantasies in social movements; the forces that threatened to engulf reason, or perhaps to channel instrumentalised reason, notions of efficiency and purity, or even science, for the most destructive and crazed ends. As Jews and/or as Leftist intellectuals, they had to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s to save their own lives. In the United States they took some care, given the political climate, not to be easily branded as Marxists, let alone active revolutionary agitators, but continued their studies of the social, political and psychological determinants of fascism in Europe, and also of social conformity and the ‘authoritarian personality’ type, who might exist even in a prospering liberal democracy such as the United States.40
Theodor Adorno was especially interested in what Freud had had to say about unconscious factors that held groups together in shared identifications or unspoken pacts. Freud’s writings about identification, projection and the superego provided important ideas in his own body of work. Adorno and his close colleagues in the Frankfurt School were mindful of the political extremes, above all the fascist extremes, but also of anodyne public opinions in the often uncontested liberal ‘centre’. They went in search of the underlying beliefs that shaped those surface expressions of popular opinion and choice. Culture, they argued, was itself an industry that fashioned society, often towards conformity, as could be seen in Hollywood and its studio system.
Adorno was the main guiding intellect behind and co-author of a major study, The Authoritarian Personality. The book, first published in 1950, was based on social science research about attitudes to be found among American citizens. This work sought to get behind people’s political declarations, and to understand their implicit assumptions and views of the self, the group and society. Adorno also observed how we might identify with a political figure who condensed and displaced a number of incongruous or even antithetical ingredients. A dictator, for example, might both represent for people the acme of power and the figure who promises to tear down a structure of power, a big man and little man, a cruel tribune of law, and the mocking transgressor of the law. Authoritarian personalities, Adorno discovered, often seemed to seek a kind of psychic singularity, even as the actual leader they idealised was a composite fantasy. They felt frightened by ambiguities and complexities, and desirous of rigid rules, covetous of severe punishments for others, and ravenous for an authority to dictate what to do.41 Adorno and his colleagues sought to pinpoint the underlying tacit beliefs and group-based mindsets, and to show how emotional attitudes are often unconscious in the subject, and how implicit relationships, in the mind, shape more overt political identifications and beliefs. People who lack irony, are intolerant of doubt or prone to project all unwanted elements of the self or the group onto some scapegoated minority would find a leader and party to represent them and to valorise sadistic wishes and some internal requirement for cleanliness, hygiene or absolute ‘law and order’.
Adorno and his close ally Max Horkheimer explored political psychopathology and group psychological propensities from many angles. They were interested in, and critical of, the mass appeal of the cinema and the cult of celebrity in the United States. They saw the propensity of vast audiences to ‘fall in love’ with movie stars or of huge readerships to gawp at tittle-tattle in magazines. They viewed such tendencies as symptoms of modern alienation and ultimately of political exploitation, and were wary of the assumption that increasing social permissiveness in liberal societies would necessarily herald greater political liberation, or usher in more critical intelligence and cultural enlightenment. Rather, such trends could leave people vulnerable to yet more ersatz versions of family, or populist surrogates for that paternal figure.
From the 1930s onwards Adorno had written powerfully and controversially about popular tastes in music; so much modern entertainment, even when revisiting classical themes, or centred on classical music, seemed to him to have become debased and vulgarised. People would go to hear some virtuoso or celebrated conductor presiding over an orchestra, playing some bit of the great repertoire, but really, he thought, they might attend in secret celebration of the fact they were part of a group; as though they marvelled that they could be there at all, and enjoyed experiencing themselves in the act of consuming culture, privileged members of such an audience. As he put it witheringly:
The consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket to the Toscanini concert. He has literally ‘made’ the success which he reifies and accepts as an objective criterion, without recognizing himself in it. But he has not ‘made’ it by liking the concert, but rather by buying the ticket.42
Critics of their analyses would challenge their patrician and dismissive, or frankly snobbish, accounts of what popular culture could deliver. They accused these high-brow intellectuals of losing track of the contradictions, complexities and emotional richness to be found in mass entertainment.
Adorno and Horkheimer, however, insisted that mass culture could certainly generate supine attitudes, or achieve powerful, more-or-less drugging effects. In a celebrated and controversial chapter (four) of their 1947 work Dialectic of the Enlightenment, they condemned a system that churned out such banality; they were concerned by, even rather frowned at, people’s enjoyment of popular cinema; for instance, the performances of an actor like Mickey Rooney or of cartoons like Donald Duck. ‘By artfully sanctioning the demand for trash, the system inaugurates total harmony,’ they said. They noted the conformism of such work: in fact, both consumers and producers, they felt, ‘content[ed] themselves with the reproduction of sameness’. ‘The defrauded masses today cling to the myth of success still more ardently than the successful … They insist unwaveringly on the ideology by which they are chained. The pernicious love of the common people for the harm done to them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities.’
Grown-ups were schooled by the media; children were schooled by, of course, schools. So radical intellectuals sought to experiment with schooling too, to theorise its groupthink functions, and to seek to create in place of that apparatus a different approach. A critique of traditional schooling had generated several experimental alternative establishments during the interwar period; these were anti-authoritarian antidotes to the conventional model, including, for example, the co-educational progressive experimental boarding school created in 1926 at Dartington Hall, in the countryside of Devon. Now, again, critiques and experiments emerged, with reformers mindful of the capacity of schools to ‘brainwash’ and ‘condition’. These critiques gained new traction amid the wider swirl of 1960s protest movements.
One strand of this critique especially popular in the 1970s was spearheaded in the United States by another charismatic intellectual, Ivan Illich. He was interested in countering such modes of conformism at the very earliest stages of schooling, and insisted a whole new prescription was needed to restore creativity, respect difference, foster genuine thinking and support individual freedom in society. His proposal was to create a radical project to ‘de-school’ society, or rather to free children and adults from the illusion that most learning happens in schools, and that learning requires so much cajoling, ranking and manipulation. Illich protested against the way nurseries, schools and colleges established a series of conformist rites of passage. He regarded the US university system as the very nadir of this initiatory system, in place of open education: a conveyor belt that is dull, protracted, expensive and ultimately invites the student to buy into a national myth.
Illich wrote about the huge benefits that might follow for children and adults alike, from the replacement of formal education by new forms of conviviality and lifelong informal learning. Known already for his exposés of modernisation and for his attacks on the corrupting impact of big institutions on creativity, Illich energetically argued for new kinds of ‘learning webs’. He also railed against the dead weight of all those people deemed professionals and experts. We needed quite different educators and institutions in future, he argued: indeed, we desperately required more spontaneous formats, and more relaxed and anarchic convenors, to inspire children, students – everyone, in fact – into less deadening competition and more creative thinking and caring approaches. He believed we had to go back to first principles to think about how to think, and to play with how to play; we needed different ways to learn about how to learn; to be more curious about what it means to be curious, achieve things, explore, think and rest. There was something utopian, of course, in his vision, just as there had been in Marx a century earlier when he envisaged a society where, beyond the Revolution, you could entirely transcend narrow specialisation: hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. However, as with the other varied commentators I have charted in these pages on groupthink, Illich too offered valuable insights; indeed much of this work from the post-war decades about social conformity and the stultification of human creativity and learning still merits, I believe, our reading today.
Admittedly, Illich offered his own questionably upbeat vision of a transcendent future, free of tension and conflict. But he wanted to weaken the modern obsession with diplomas and degrees, stratification and hierarchy, for it just led people to confuse what really mattered; enough with all of these marks and grades, he said in his influential work Deschooling Society in the early 1970s. In a stream of publications, he offered such hopeful as well as bracing analyses and warnings of all that is wrong not only with schooling but also with modern medicine, healthcare, policing and welfare. In 1977, he followed up on the de-schooling proposals with an attack on what he called Disabling Professions. This, he argued, was the latest version of the terrible organisation-man type of existence that had risen to dominance. Illich took such ideas in a new direction, criticising the way working lives are engineered, a world of mundane pen-pushers and nine-to-five workers who may never really be encouraged to ask the most searching questions or to break ranks with their peers. As Whyte had already warned: ‘[w]e are not talking about mere instinctive conformity – it is, after all, a perennial failing of mankind. What we are talking about is a rationalized conformity.’ Where Whyte and Illich would have agreed was on the need to create new opportunities – everywhere – to free up the mind.
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We have seen then in this chapter how arguments developed about patterns of group acquiescence and the powers people might also have to be less amenable, or biddable, and to resist. A multiplicity of stories, experiments and analyses about submission and opposition to groupthink arose, from tales of mass brainwashing, to calls for de-schooling. Critique of groupthink in business was matched by explorations of individuality and socialisation through infancy, guides to the tribulations of adolescence, and sympathetic explanations of the dangers of peer pressure. We have noted how groupthink proved a striking if malleable term for people to think with, a buzz phrase with lasting power; it was deployed in diverse kinds of political debate. In 1971, the journal Psychology Today elaborated, glossing the word as follows: ‘concurrence-seeking’, a state that may be ‘so dominant in a cohesive in-group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action’.
But the debate on groupthink was never quite settled, and commentators piled in on both sides with examples of groups that ‘dumbed down’ people and of groups that could become genuine work alliances, or adventurous, rebellious and even mutinous, thus in defiance of hierarchy and power. Famous novels and movies of the 1950s sometimes used stark settings, as in Lord of the Flies (set on an island), The Caine Mutiny (far out at sea) and 12 Angry Men (a room where a jury are isolated to decide a man’s fate), to bring such questions about group formations to mass readerships and audiences. They were ways of highlighting the capacity of congregated people to become apathetic, obedient, despairing, casually cruel, or even murderous, with little if any individual thinking occurring; at least until a rebel appears and challenges a fast-congealing orthodoxy. We need groups to achieve social change and to help us to know who we are; and yet shadowy groups, it also appeared, act as part of the reactionary resistance to change, as though internal choruses, harsh judges or shaming communities, looking on askance, inside of our minds.
The critics we have considered seem to concur that groupthink is at its height when all concerned come to believe there is simply no alternative to a given way of operating, and share the same uncon-tested basic assumptions. Indeed, this condition, it was warned, could equally or even more alarmingly impair decision-making by those in Downing Street, or at the White House.43 In October 2021, a major report on the government’s handling of the pandemic reached for the term as it sought to explain the series of disastrous policies pursued that resulted in very high death rates that year from Covid-19 in the UK, relative to other comparable advanced industrial economies. The cross-party parliamentary committee, tasked with investigating this public health disaster, explicitly used the term groupthink to describe a key factor in all that went wrong in the government presided over by the hapless Boris Johnson.44
The word groupthink was often used as the starting point or endnote for investigations of fraught political dramas in the Cold War, where supposedly independent free-thinking elected representatives and high-ranking officials proved unwilling, or incapable, of thinking afresh and then standing up for themselves. Instead, they would parrot orthodox views, rehearse dusty guidelines, echo the will of a dominant faction, or resort to stereotypical assumptions about the psychology of the West’s opponents (for instance ‘the Russians’, or ‘the Chinese’). In various 1970s sociological and political post-mortems on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, groupthink also featured heavily, with a number of explorations of the mindset of President Kennedy and his brother (the attorney general) as they dealt with conflicting pressures and the hawkish thinking of some of the top military figures who were in the room at the time. Group-think, some argued afterwards, in celebration of JFK’s stance, could so easily have prevailed, leading to a calamitous war between the United States and the USSR. Others thought the Kennedys and later Lyndon Johnson were prisoners of groupthink all the same, timidly tied to prevailing centrist, liberal orthodoxies, when far more radical actions were needed, for instance to call a halt to the escalating war in Vietnam, or to take bolder action to challenge the entrenched racial system that operated in the United States.
Conformity among decision-makers in an administration, argued the sociologist Irving Janis, in a notable 1972 book (Victims of Group-think: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascos), can have disastrous effects on governance, and may well threaten a society’s survival. Groupthink, he showed, distorts decision-making and warps human relationships, leading to the most impoverished and unimaginative, or indeed catastrophic, policy responses in the choppy waters of international diplomacy, and, in fact, in all kinds of crisis-driven management situations. There are simply too many occasions in the real world where stereotypes won’t do.45 If politics is the art of the possible, it is important that those who enter that field have some suppleness of mind and capacity to think on their feet.
Such warnings about the future of the United States, and of the West, contrasted with many other more upbeat accounts of that period; about improving national strength, health and affluence. Electorates in Western countries such as the UK, by the end of the 1950s, had never before ‘had it so good’, Conservative prime minister Harold MacMillan famously claimed. Much was also said in favour, for instance, of ‘company towns’ that offered their workers security, and far more than a wage. Some leading firms had developed over decades, or even a whole century, a formula whereby they would provide their staff with a life package that far exceeded a simple employee–employer relationship. Company towns were once remarkable sights to behold and aroused much interest as well as praise. The ethos of such businesses was explicitly designed to shape the employees’ thought-world; in short, to be anti-revolutionary, as Frank Trentmann notes in his panoramic history of consumerism, Empire of Things. A variety of large ‘forward-looking’ businesses in twentieth-century America and Europe would thus lay on housing, health, clinics, sport and education, a programme of support for the individual and the family that came to be regarded as ‘the price of a loyal, disciplined workforce’.46
Hubs for groupthink? Perhaps. But many found much to like and value in that nurturing business operation, in which basic care of the self and the family were assured, and the company did not just treat its employees as brawn or brains. Here was an instance perhaps of the benefits of group membership, or of corporate life, for many favoured workers. The trend towards harmonious, industrial relations and a more extended version of care for workers, in some places at least, was promoted by business owners. Were such deals a way of ‘buying off’ workforces and taming industrial dissent, or a remarkable gain, a mode of welfare capitalism, with workers exerting their power to bank greater rewards, a forward march of labour? Historians since have looked at how a form of paternalism and traditional conservative values often went together with new kinds of innovative business arrangement and provision of care. The company town and welfare care model in industry has a long history. It was clearly discernible in a cluster of experiments in model villages, towns and co-operatives in the nineteenth century, and in larger industrial organisations by the eve of the twentieth century in Europe.47 Paternalistic firms, from Cadburys to Siemens, exemplified a form of capitalist welfarism.48
In 1940, an American researcher reported how, in Indiana, a company provided a cornucopia of opportunities for intense team-based collaboration, social engagement and communal leisure pursuits; its managers declared candidly that this was a way of ensuring the workers had neither the time nor the energy to be ‘subversives’.49 Critics on the Left challenged any such mood of assurance and docile contentment in this new corporate world. Liberals too, such as Whyte, noted the human price paid in a system of jobs for life, and in a society built around entirely secure, stable vast business enterprises.
To be an employee in a company town in the United States around the middle of the twentieth century – the period when Whyte was a journalist mapping examples of groupthink – could mean the provision of medical facilities; it could also include schooling for children, holiday adventures, day trips at weekends, prizes, picnics and more. Post-war Japanese industry, under American tutelage, would also foster models of team-based working and living, as exemplified in company towns, whose very names were occasionally renamed, hence ‘Toyota City’ (1959). Some anthropologists and other researchers assumed the Japanese were intrinsically prone to such collective endeavour, and to groupthink.50
The dangers of excessive welfare provision, whether provided by the state to all, or by corporations to their own staff, were discussed increasingly on the Right in both the United States and Europe after 1945. The ‘welfare state’, in places such as Britain, was said by its critics to deaden the mind and disincentivise people, as it offered too much security; so too the hide-bound paternalistic company. Such developments might result in fatal complacency, it was thought, antithetical to future dynamism and growth. This system went together, opponents thus counselled, with a mindset intent upon ‘conflict avoidance’, all too prone to groupthink. Too much care, and all the overblown bureaucracy needed in order to provide that care, could be damaging; it might ossify beliefs, stifle minds and hold back the entrepreneurial spirit; in short, insulate societies from bracing, maximal competition. Nostalgia and groupthink went together. In Britain, for example, as the century wore on, critical ‘audits’ of the nation were offered by some historians and political commentators. They suggested that a kind of collective or groupthink illusion had prevailed for decades, so that neither governments nor electorates realised (or wanted to know) how heavily the economy and society were damaged, mired in what came to be known as the politics of ‘post-war consensus’, and a financial system that was ultimately untenable. People had it too good, and had grown lazy and complacent in the process, they thought. Audits of war and peace alike suggested too much woolly thinking and too many consensual and erroneous assumptions.51 Fantasy and nostalgia can thus be seen as a form of groupthink, or perhaps even an emotional ‘group-feel’ condition, afflicting a patrician British elite as much as anyone else; this, it was said, must urgently change.
The 1960s saw challenges to the status quo from many quarters on the Right and on the Left: the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement changed the political landscape. Challenges to corporate hegemony by trade unions and uprisings across Europe by students and workers were to have many powerful effects. The 1970s brought a number of major shocks to Western economies, giving further momentum to critique of consensus politics, regarded as tepid, muddled and out of date. Such propensities to find the middle ground were dismissed contemptuously as Butskellism, a word that combined the names of moderate Tory and Labour grandees.52 The compromises made by successive governments with ‘union barons’ were increasingly heavily criticised from the Right. Combative opponents of such compromises, for instance inside the British Conservative Party, denounced the consensus-seekers as people unwilling or unable to make essential, hard choices; they wanted to challenge the widespread convergent assumptions, or illusions, of the post-war decades that had remained, for them, too long unchecked.
In the end the most effective challenge to that 1970s crisis of economics and politics came from the Right, with supportive intellectuals and front-line politicians arguing for far greater scope for ‘free enterprise’, an ‘open society’, an end to ‘red tape’; this, they claimed, would end the ‘nanny state’, the age of deadly groupthink. Led in Britain by Thatcher and in the United States by Reagan, these iconoclasts argued that what was needed was a real and decisive shake-up, and increasingly the handover of power from the state to individuals, to private industrialists and bankers – or, more often in practice, to a world of finance, credit, tax avoidance and outsourcing abroad. They made the case for the unleashing of competition and free markets, likening such processes to nature itself, red in tooth and claw (such Victorian, ‘Darwinian’ metaphors had never fully gone away). This would come, it was promised, with a far healthier form of mass psychology, acceptance that the future was, in some respects, always unknowable and not to be prescribed by an overweening state: people should not be insulated from choices by controlling government authorities, or by corporations with offers of jobs for life. Thatcher presented herself as a strong leader, able to ‘face the facts’. The party she fashioned would be more confrontational and hawkish. It would aggressively challenge the power of trade unions, promise to bring in reforms that would require people to ‘stand on their own feet’ and end craven unthinking compliance; this added a powerful psychological gloss to increasingly radical Thatcherite economic prescriptions under the banner of ‘freedom’ as the 1980s wore on.
Reagan and Thatcher drew on a long tradition. Their political revolution had its roots in the work of economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the critique of social planned economies by Ludwig von Mises, the ‘open society’ of philosopher Karl Popper, and others. Their work was always profoundly shadowed by the extremes of European politics – Nazism in Germany, Stalinism in Russia. They wanted to steer modern societies as far as possible from all that. They also agreed that capitalism advanced through ‘creative destruction’, as Joseph Schumpeter had suggested. Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom, insisted that the future was bound to be uncertain, and that too much state interference and centralised planning over people’s lives was deeply ominous. Hayek’s book intimated how easily a mixed economy model and welfare assumptions might constitute steps on the path to a modern tyrannical state. Popper argued in his influential book of the 1940s, The Open Society and its Enemies, that Plato had already opened the route towards totalitarian thought, because in The Republic he had made the case for censorship of toxic ideas in the name of collective well-being. The open society and open mind were directly comparable; open systems were a requisite for political and psychological health.53
Hayek, Popper and some of their colleagues were extremely critical of anything that interfered with individual liberty; they extended the great liberal arguments of the nineteenth century, but now situated such an account in relation to the history of fascism, Stalinism and totalitarianism. These thinkers sought new economic prescriptions and some of them, Hayek most obviously, sought to row back the post-war welfare state, wherever possible, in the name of greater individualism, lower public spending, maximisation of privatisation, and the enshrinement of the ‘free market’ cast as the antithesis of the monstrous Nazi and Stalinist states.
In fact, many commentators, with varying radical political points of view, on the Left and on the Right, seized on the idea of groupthink to argue that mindless, seemingly innocuous established consensus was the greatest danger to the future of liberal democracies, as the century wore to a close. It was a commonplace rhetorical move to imply that groupthink (or other words to the same effect) was relevant, and that this phenomenon was in dire need of overturning now.
Thus when, during the 1980s, Thatcher, by then at the helm of government, made famous the phrase ‘there is no alternative’, she implied that beliefs from yesterday simply had to change, and, moreover, that the path forward – greater individualism, private choice and market-based solutions – was self-evidently clear. Many people believed her, and urged her to go still further. The basic premise continued to hold sway for decades in her own party, and even in the leadership of the Labour Party. Thatcher took it ‘as read’ that any intelligent, clear-thinking person would be bound to share her fundamental analysis and prescriptions; these apparently brooked no possible logical contradiction; the real argument of politics, economics and history was supposedly now over – other than in some managerial details. Groupthink would be no more. Private enterprise was so obviously better than ‘stagnating’ nationalised state-run industries, she declared. Conviction politics was proposed as the antidote to weak forms of groupthink.
The individual (free-thinking) consumer, the ‘Iron Lady’ would argue, was likely to be wiser and more intelligent than the (group-thinking) state in spending all their ‘hard-earned’ money. The taxpayer, like the consumer, was often invoked as both a discerning critical and righteously angry figure, no longer prepared to see their resources ‘wasted’ by the profligate, unproductive and creaking old civil service, or those millions of state-employed workers, many of whom were unionised, who claimed to benefit the people at large. Thatcher’s endeavours were always divisive but proved popular for a time with large sections of the British electorate. (Her willingness to take the country to war in 1982, to defend the Falkland Islands from Argentina, boosted her poll numbers hugely.) There was much about the political scene, the bureaucracy, the trade unions and the state before she took power that was questionable, or indeed clearly and desperately in need of change. As even some renowned radical historians and left-wing social theorists suggested, ‘Thatcherism’ was a powerful and persuasive ideology, albeit possessed of its own contradictions, between a wish for a small state, and a concern to ensure powerful defences and law and order. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm believed the stagnating British economy needed ‘a kick in the pants’, which Thatcher certainly provided.54
The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and its satellite states at the end of the 1980s came as a huge shock to most people, who had assumed the system would endure, albeit feebly, for decades more; it surprised even Western mandarins who hated the communist realm, and pursued policies designed to weaken it. That final collapse came after a decade of heavy losses for the Red Army in Afghanistan (thanks to a Western-backed insurgency against the Soviet occupiers), and in the wake of the calamity of Chernobyl in 1986, when a nuclear reactor exploded due to covered-up design flaws, lunatic, self-serving management and the groupthink of bureaucrats and many, if not all, of the technicians and scientists. Once the Soviet empire was broken, it seemed to many neoliberals and neo-conservatives as though a new golden age had arrived. The message went out from the ‘beacon’ capitalist economies: open people everywhere to competition, celebrate the individual, get on your bike, participate in the market, buy your shares, own your house (if you could), and spread the Western order by force if necessary. Previously hard-won ‘safety nets’ were scorned; old values, conventions and laws branded as ‘stultifying’, whether in the East or the West, thrown on the bonfires, wherever possible, and enshrined in the policies of the International Monetary Fund.
Ironically Thatcher rejected consensus politics, claiming it invited degeneration, yet famously framed her politics as a matter above all else of loyalty to her, acceptance of that new consensus, the doctrine of TINA – There Is No Alternative. Admittedly, she was obliged at times to change tack, but the basic assumption was that her colleagues were either ‘one of us’, or the target of withering contempt, ‘wets’, unworthy of attention, let alone future patronage.
Naomi Klein has well described in her book The Shock Doctrine how radical neoliberal policies were rushed in, during and after the 1980s, on the back of natural disasters, or sometimes long-confected accidents-in-the-making, thanks to lack of prior investment. A notorious example was the policy response to the New Orleans floods of 2005.55 She describes how a form of ‘disaster capitalism’, inspired by thinkers such as Friedman, gained ground; policy makers, backed by wealthy lobby groups and think tanks, would swoop into afflicted zones of a country to dismantle past systems and unravel past reforms; thus to destroy public schooling in New Orleans and remake the local economy along different lines. The elderly Friedman’s ‘radical idea’, Klein explained, was that instead of spending a portion of money on the existing public system, the government would give people vouchers to spend at charter schools run by private entities. It would supposedly all be to the good and generate a new spirit of individualism and enterprise, leading to higher standards, freeing the education infrastructure from the supposed groupthink mentality and excessively conformist aims that public provision assumed. These ideas were seized on by right-wing think tanks and the Bush administration, and a rapid-fire policy response was developed, turning the city’s educational provision into an experimental laboratory. It was the valedictory note from Friedman, an economist who had enjoyed a very long career as a scourge of what he complained was a previously dominant post-war consensus.
The accusation ‘groupthink’ was deployed as easy insult back then, just as another term of abuse is commonplace today on the Far Right, and especially in conspiracy theory circles: ‘sheeple’.56
Those critics post-war, such as Whyte, who had first popularised and dissected groupthink, were surely on to something crucially important, and yet, as we have seen in the present study, a challenging word and interesting critique could itself all too easily become a form of rhetorical pressure. The anti-groupthink of today that becomes the groupthink of tomorrow – catch-all diagnoses, hackneyed slogans and corrupted ideas, serving ulterior purposes. There are books today, for instance, suggesting that scientific concern about the climate emergency is itself simply a reflection of groupthink. The very accusation groupthink may be used to foster complacency and do-nothing politics, or to shame people into accepting the ‘tonic’ effects of supposedly inevitable reforms that undermine hard-won rights and social advances.
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In sum, the story of the invention and rhetorical uses of groupthink is clearly worth revisiting – historically, politically and psychologically. Post-war arguments over the fate of the individual and the collective moved into larger debates about the future of modern societies, and about how democracy on one side, capitalism and corporate governance on the other, might need to be curbed, overthrown or renewed. This term, like ‘brainwash’, acquired a notable life of its own during and after the 1950s. It provided a starting point for explorations of many things – from the educational system to the corporate boardroom, from childhood alienation and gang culture to the prevalence of racism and sexism, from the mindset of individual voters to the leadership skills required in nuclear stand-offs between the superpowers. It was another vernacular expression that served to explore or sometimes entrench ideologies. We can see how neoliberals invoked the idea to decry the orthodoxies that prevailed beforehand.
To put it another way, this and other key terms from the Cold War highlighted here were exciting to many people because they could be used to show how uncontested values and working practices may be donned as though they are simply nature, or self-evident truth. These banners could be used then, as now, I am suggesting, for progressive or reactionary purposes: invoking the idea of group-think was a way to prompt the listener to wonder whether they might personally fit that picture and thus need to change themselves into more authentic, free-thinking people. As we will see in the following chapter, anti-groupthink slogans and symbols were also easily co-opted by the advertising industry, as it invited the customer to ‘think different’. Being different was just as saleable ultimately as the heavily marketised concern to ‘keep up with the Joneses’. Groupthink might be used as an insult, or to generate unease, and facilitate the question (a good question) – how free are you really to think your own thoughts, even in so-called lands of the free? What is your scope for thinking and acting, other than the way you do, within your own community, company or institution?
In the fractious and divisive conditions that pertain in so many countries, including the United States and the UK, in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008, or in the tumultuous uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic (and politics) that emerged in 2020, such 1950s fears about the dangers of middle-ground consensus of views may seem strange, even quite antiquated, perhaps. And yet, that earlier critique about people blandly, thoughtlessly ‘buying in’ still chimes well with concerns we have now about globalised surveillance-based capitalism, a new order of hidden persuaders, and the social media news bubbles and feedback loops that operate. The question is not only does Siri or Alexa do our bidding, or do we serve the technology, and ultimately the advertising industry that harvests the data we feed into our devices; it is also: how are we swayed by our peers? The waves of influence may seem to be directed from ‘the top’, but can also crash on us sideways, from every direction as well. Facebook, for example, can be both a vast open noticeboard for popular messages, chat, expression, and also an organising matrix that is hard to escape.
As the American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued in the early 1960s, we are not even necessarily aware that we operate our various experiments in life (or in the case of scientists, in labs) within ‘paradigms’. Certain ways of seeing, conventions of knowing, methods of posing and answering questions about our own lives, appear to make complete sense in a given community, while others simply don’t feature at all, left invisible or entirely unthinkable. Moreover, as psychologists have amply explained, all of us – in infancy, while growing up and when enjoying so-called adult maturity – learn, absorb and respond to dozens of cues, sensitive to continual steers and prompts; from our families, friends, colleagues, teachers and employers, and, of course, also from advertisers.