Objective:
Unlearn groupthink indoctrination that breeds insularity.
Pivot toward universality.
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines
everybody is saying, or else you say something true,
and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
—Noam Chomsky
G
etting over 900 people to abandon country and family to move to a remote compound, labor from dawn to dusk, and drink deadly Kool-Aid takes some mad persuasion. In the fall of 1978, cult leader Jim Jones did just that. His promise of paradise in the South American nation of Guyana turned out to be a concentration camp for those he’d baited into his grips. Twenty-three years after founding the Peoples Temple, a religious movement that drew over 20,000 members at its peak, the troubled leader finally snapped.
The resulting mass murder was the largest modern loss of civilian American life at one time before September 11, 2001. Over one-third of his victims were children. Jones’s perpetration of abuse and mental control over his followers remains one of the most disturbing and harrowing examples of indoctrination gone wrong.
The Jonestown brainwashing unfolded over two decades. Peoples Temple members were robbed of their money, freedom, health, identity, families, children, and lives. The resulting carnage has been mourned, studied, and debated ever since. The horrific images and accounts elicit predictable responses: “How could he?” “How could they?” “Why, I would never.”
The perfect storm was brewing at the time Jones came to power. The polarized sociopolitical landscape was rife with turmoil. He appealed to citizens who were fed up with economic, racial, and social inequities. They were sick of being disempowered and bullied. Jones capitalized, becoming a dangerous predator who went from praying for to preying on people.
Jones’s followers yearned for exile from oppressive conditions. Initially, their community served as a sanctuary. They were tucked away in a lush jungle, feeling safe from the devices of the outside world. The illusion of safety proved deadly for the victims of Jonestown. Understanding the psychology behind it—even when we think we’d never face such tragic and extreme outcomes—is critical to avoiding groupthink in our lives.
Peel Off Your Insulation
Jones’s path to power relied on getting people scared and hopeful all at once. He promised a better life. He frightened them into thinking they had to isolate themselves to find it. He conditioned them for dependence.
The communities and social structures we participate in mold us into a common way of thinking and engaging—or disengaging—with the world. Every collective—whether a religious, governmental, occupational, or social group—has its own unique way of insulating us to one extent or another. The resulting barriers make it difficult to recognize that the very ideology that seems to protect can strip us of our senses. Recognizing our isolation is the start of being able to break out from it.
The word insularity originates from the Latin for “island.” It involves staying in the bounds of your own affinity groups and associations and being detached from alternative viewpoints or ways of engaging with the world. We stay within a narrow frame of thinking. Jones wrapped his members tight in insulation. While few of us can imagine falling into such extreme ideology, we might be bound tighter than we realize.
By design, society sets us up this way. We stay with our own kind. It happens everywhere. Insulation is stuffed inside the walls of our lives. At work. School. Church. Within our social identity groups. The precise behavioral norms we’re taught to follow are often instilled at an age before we have much to say about it.
Despite gains in civil rights, most neighborhoods, schools, communities, and churches are still homogeneous. We have secular and religious schools, black and white neighborhoods, gay and straight bars, cool kids versus nerds.1 Why are we still such a weird combo of Freedom Writers meets Breakfast Club meets Mean Girls?
The persuasions we follow according to our own islands may seem inconsequential, but over time, sip by sip, they can cause us to lay down our discernment and succumb to groupthink. Not only can this compromise us psychologically, but it can prevent more integrated ways of understanding the world. Insulation needs to be peeled off. It rarely protects us the ways we’re taught it will.
Groupthink
Academic Definition
The practice of thinking or making decisions in a group. Because of responsibility to and affiliation with the group, individuals relinquish their own interests in favor of keeping peace.
Street Definition
Group think is when you go along to get along. Because you don’t want to ruffle feathers, you keep quiet and avoid bringing up controversy.
Social psychologist Irving Janis defines three characteristics of groupthink that influence behavior. First, groups tend to overestimate themselves, falling prey to “illusions of invulnerability and inherent morality.” Groupthink also produces close-mindedness and collective rationalizations of stereotypes about outsiders. Groups find ways to justify their judgments of people with whom they don’t associate. There is also pressure toward uniformity, and consequences for those who dissent.
Groupthink favors coherence, even if it means sacrificing sound reasoning for less questioning and more following. The dictate of the leader and the resulting consensus go unchallenged. You stay in line with what all of your associates do.
From a brain science perspective, fear activates our amygdalae, triggering decisions based out of raw emotion and groupthink tides. When you first study Jim Jones, you might think you could never get sucked in. While he took it to the furthest extreme, many of his approaches derived from the very same structures our own indoctrination is built on:
The Promise of Fatherly Love and Protection
Jones’s followers came to call him “Father” and “Dad,” which seems contradictory when you think of the monster he was. Calling faith-based leaders “Father” or similar variations is common practice in religious communities around the world. The glorification of heavenly and earthly fathers is as old as dirt. Hello, patriarchy.
We’re taught that we need protection, that fatherly wisdom is best. Women are told that if they didn’t have the influence of a strong father figure growing up, they’re screwed. You don’t hear much about maternal influence and protection, or the dearth of research that contradicts these long-held incorrect beliefs. Just a lotta talk about Daddy issues.
Jones isn’t the only father who has committed serious crimes against people. Countless church leaders have violated people’s trust by perpetuating abuses of all kinds. Exploitation. Sexual abuse. Outside religious realms, the patriarchy continues to be a force. The old boys’ network has been around a long time.
The Promise of Identity
Whether you are a Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, or other humans are wired for a sense of safety and belonging with people of the same ethos. Even though we might be proud of our unconventional ways and not necessarily wanting to fit in, being alone isn’t any picnic.
If you stay with the program, you will receive instant status and identity, protecting you from scrutiny. Your own authentic self will be relinquished, but you won’t have to stand up on trial to defend your essence. Following keeps you low under the scrutiny radar. No need to explain yourself constantly.
The alternative is to take your place as the black sheep in a family, at work, or in a community. When you’re not like the other sheep, you can also end up becoming a scapegoat, which is no picnic. The word scapegoat is based on biblical lore, telling the story of Aaron, who selected a strong (and perhaps opinionated) goat to cast the sins of the tribe upon, and then be banished. The displacement of anguish among the tribe provides comfort but leaves the scapegoat isolated, in danger, and faced with being a herd animal without a herd.
The emotional consequences of bearing the psychological discomfort of families and communities of origin are what I call paying generational ransom. You are atoning for everyone’s pasts, pain, misdeeds, and anxieties. Instead of those issues being addressed, you become a needed diversion from their own issues and a target of their rage. Your contrarian behavior is seen as disloyalty. You are expected to take on all the pain without any of the comforts. Few of us can bear this load, so we hold onto identity that doesn’t fit, but doesn’t expose us, either. Generational ransom is costly.
Don’t Be a Sheep or a Scapegoat
My first introduction to indoctrination came within the Baptist church I was raised in. It wasn’t Westboro breed, or Jonestown, but there were similarities. There was a lot of us-versus-them talk. The world was a dangerous place, where “those people”—the wretched sinners, the lost, the ones not like us—lived in total abomination. We were the in-group, “they” were the out, but we were told “they”—the “worldly people” were the ones after us.
I always thought it strange that our pastor frequently warned about becoming educated—that it leads to too much self-reliance and indulgence. When any organization encourages us to give up thinking, it should be a major red flag. Encouraging people not to think for themselves is a way to maintain status and power.
The logic of education-as-evil never really added up for me, but at nine, the time when my former hippie parents “converted” and church became a weekly ritual, I was too chicken to fully revolt. At school, being smart was seen as a good thing, so I went for it there. But on Sundays, we bellowed, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it for me”; memorized passages telling us to “Have faith like a child”; and sang songs like “I just want to be a sheep,” animal noise effects and all:
I just wanna be a sheep
Baa, baa, baa, baa
I just wanna be a sheep
Baa, baa, baa, baa
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
I just wanna be a sheep
Baa, baa, baa, baa. . . .
I was told to block my ears during evolution lessons and wear T-shirts that said, “No Scientist Is Going to Make a Monkey Out of Me.” I was sent to Bible camp every summer and brought to abortion rallies. The church was our community, our culture, our whole world. We were told that the rainbow was God’s exclusive promise to the Christians. Relationships with outsiders only existed with the intention of trying to get them to repent and become born again.
There were constant reinforcements to keep us baa-baa-ing. Our pastor showed a movie called A Thief in the Night that went right for my nine-year-old jugular. Back in the 1980s, it was an era when we let kids watch movies they weren’t emotionally ready for. Friday the 13th movies were third-grade rites of passage.2
So, a few weeks into our induction to church, we sat and watched a low-budget depiction of the end times we were always being warned about. It featured a doomed secular family left behind after all their God-fearing family and friends were raptured to heaven.
This was my first introduction to transference—the clinical term meaning that we can overidentify with someone’s feelings or situation because of their close proximity to our own. The little girl in the movie was right around nine—my own age, causing the kind of transference that made me shake in my chair and make a beeline for the bathroom.
She and her family tried to take on the smoking apocalypse landscape, but by the end of the movie, things looked grim. But alas, there was a way to be “saved” and ensure their ticket to heaven. All they had to do was publicly profess their love for Jesus. The trade-off? A trip to the guillotine.
The little girl clutched her red balloon in one hand and her mama’s in the other. After the dreadful chopping sound that made the whole church pee their pants, the camera cuts to gray sky. Her red balloon floats away. That was enough to keep me sheepish for a while. I didn’t sleep for weeks and raised my hand at every subsequent altar call (where you publicly profess your allegiance to God).
Even long after the movie was over, I was terrified. Fear was a mainstay. When lightning strikes, you must’ve made God mad. If you sin, you’re going to hell unless you pray a three-step prayer and make your penance. Don’t drink, dance, or dress immodestly. If you touch yourself, your hand might fall off. There is no normal behavior; it’s all a sin. Secular music was viewed as of the devil. We even had sessions at church playing records backward so that we could hear Satanic subliminal messages. No KISS for us.
The fear was powerful enough to make me put a lid on my skepticism. I became a pro at covering up, making Bernie Madoff look like an amateur. Plus, church wasn’t all bad: the promise of immortality was pretty enticing. The thought of being good and saved and experiencing the deep sense of belonging—the kind we’re wired for—kept me hooked.
I was too scared to give all this up, so I went along even into my early adult years: teaching Sunday school, sending my kids to Christian school, and running Vacation Bible School every summer. Inside I was miserable, but too afraid of lightning, guillotines, and being alone to make my move, even though R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” was becoming my underground anthem.
As my pastor had warned, education gave me the thinking skills to critically examine my religious indoctrination. The stuff I’d grown up with seemed even more strange. Like how “love your neighbor” seemed to only mean the ones who think or look or love like you—not that everyone is a neighbor and that the rainbow belongs to all of us. Characters like Adam and Eve and Noah with his ark started to resemble Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and her chocolate Reese’s eggs. There were a lot of contradictions to overcome.
Get Off the Guillotine
When I first met Nadia, I was struck by her deep brown eyes and inquisitive spirit. We were sitting next to each other at an International Conference on Critical Thinking in Washington, DC. I was deep into my research at that point; the trip was part of my attempt to untangle things.
After being paired for various discussions, we realized how much we had in common, even though a casual onlooker might not have suspected such. Nadia was raised in a conservative Muslim family in Saudi Arabia. She was in the United States pursuing her PhD and had come to the conference with just as many conflicted thoughts as I had. She was also a first-generation college student; no one from her family had ventured outside her homeland. She was deep into her own process, a little frayed from her own excavation. She was getting a lot of heat from her family for all the changing she’d done. We were both textbook scapegoats, trying to pay the ransom we thought we owed.
Her eyes filled with tears as she quoted her older sister, who was not shy about making the family’s disdain known: “She said to me, ‘What’s next? You’re going to take off your hijab and start drinking beer, or start dancing? Do you even believe the Qur’an anymore?’” Nadia told me her family saw her venturing out from their framework as betrayal. Confrontation and tension were constant. She was trying not to let the fear grip her, but the grief was written on her face. Her pain was easy to recognize; it was the same pressure I felt. Baptist guilt, like Jewish and Catholic guilt, are forces. Add Muslim guilt to the list.
When your family or community of origin pulls out the betrayal card—“We’ve done all this for you, so where’s your freakin’ loyalty?”—it’s almost a showstopper. Your anxiety tells you to retreat, to go along to get along. The last thing you want is to be disloyal to people you love—the ones who have raised you and sent you on your way. The guilt is almost unbearable when you’re accused of “not being the same person” or thinking “you’re better than us.” Nadia and I hugged in solidarity, knowing we weren’t without a herd after all.
When I got back home, I started to look over my data with a new lens. My students showed me that the church wasn’t the only culprit. They had been asked to kneel down for all types of guillotines. At home, there was enormous pressure to follow family norms. At school, they faced the grades guillotine. At every turn, there were choices to make—go along to get along, or face rejection, isolation, and even persecution when you don’t meet a defined standard. They seemed to know all about the agony of being scapegoated for going against the tide or breaking out of the mold. As Jamal put it:
Of all the emotions I remember the most growing up, the strongest is fear. It’s what I ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Anything that came out of my mouth was met with a look of disgust and concern, like there was no room to be my own person without getting hell for it. I felt like I was in constant hot water, just for being my own person, for having an opinion that wasn’t the same. I felt like my teachers and my family took it personal, like it was some big rejection or rebellion. Like I was disgracing the family name. But really, I was just trying to figure myself out, to figure life out, and I didn’t think their simple explanations were doing any justice. The biggie was coming out as gay. By the time I did, I wasn’t going to take their negative reactions—I told them if they wouldn’t accept me, then I wouldn’t come around. I wasn’t going to be a scapegoat for one more minute. Now people in my family come to me because they know I won’t judge them, but it took a lot of fighting to get there. I think they passed so much fear onto me because they were scared, too.
Like Jamal, Allison took a lot of heat for her nonconformity:
I come from a family who emphasized making money—that was our religion. It’s all they care about. All through school, I lived with constant anxiety—if I ever came home with anything besides an A, I was chastised, because it was going to mean I would end up a big failure or something. Everything in my family revolved around hard work and money; it was constantly talked about. No one was happy, but that didn’t matter. It was our image that mattered . . . what people thought. It was nonstop brainwashing, just to impress people—but for what, or with what? Something not even honest? I saw through it, and finally went beyond the things that were forced down my throat since I can even remember. I work at a nonprofit, where the money isn’t great, but the rewards of knowing I am doing something to change lives means a lot more to me than what car I drive.
Jamal and Allison chose to go beyond the indoctrination of their childhoods. They pivoted to a much broader definition of community, one that is universal. Like so many of my students, they recognized they didn’t want to give up who they were to make everyone else happy. They couldn’t hold on to everyone else’s ideals and still be healthy. They realized that being led by someone else’s superstitions and anxieties only created more for them. They wanted to have a mind of their own but also maintain connections to the world—and not just small pockets—in a dynamic way that allowed them to see common bonds even with people who at first seem different.
They pulled themselves off their guillotines—whether placed there by political, family, cultural, school, community, or social identity groups, or even professional disciplines. They broke out of fear-based messaging. It wasn’t easy, but necessary to allow them to connect with the world in ways they never could have if they stayed in their insulated bubble.
Getting away from the guillotine is a risk that takes some careful maneuvering. The security blanket that comes from religion and other organizing frameworks brings comfort but can also insulate us in unhelpful ways. Breaking out can also cause backlash. Still, the cost of laying ourselves down, resigning ourselves to toxic Kool-Aid, isn’t safe either.
When we unlearn groupthink and pivot toward universality, we begin our process of breaking out. Like my encounter with Nadia revealed, when we’re sent away from our herds, we won’t wander alone for long. We need to know that we belong to a universal herd, where we can also find protection and identity. We begin to form a universal bond that allows us to go beyond groupthink and fear. When we realize this, we open ourselves to interdependence that doesn’t rely on insulation or paying ransoms that were never ours in the first place.