All Together Now
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
Their faces long with disapproval, the anchors announced that the reason for the war had finally been uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and it was "groupthink," not to mention "collective groupthink." It sounds so kinky and un-American, like something that might go on in a North Korean stadium or in one of those sex clubs that Jack Ryan, the former Illinois Senate candidate, is accused of dragging his wife to. But supposedly intelligent, morally upstanding people had been indulging in it right in Langley, Va.
This is a surprise? Groupthink has become as American as apple pie and prisoner abuse; in fact, it's hard to find any thinking these days that doesn't qualify for the prefix "group." Our standardized-test-driven schools reward the right answer, not the unsettling question. Our corporate culture prides itself on individualism, but it's the "team player" with the fixed smile who gets to be employee of the month. In our political culture, the most crushing rebuke is to call someone "out of step with the American people." Zip your lips, is the universal message, and get with the program.
This summer's remake of the "Stepford Wives" doesn't have anything coherent to say about gender politics: Men are the oppressors? Women are the oppressors? Or maybe just Glenn Close? But it does play to the fantasy, more widespread than I'd realized, that if you were to rip off the face of the person sitting in the next cubicle, you'd find nothing but circuit boards underneath.
I trace the current outbreak of droidlike conformity to the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when groupthink became the official substitute for patriotism, and we began to run out of surfaces for affixing American flags. ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/opinion/15EHRE.html>
Carl
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