The Divide of Belief and Identity: Groupthink, Moral Superiority, and the Crisis of Balance in Modern Society

Wherever we look, there is scarcely a single country, society or continent which is not wracked by strains, stresses and divisions which even a decade ago would have been hard to imagine.

A group of people comes to be fixated on some belief or view of the world which seems hugely important to them. They are convinced that their opinion is so self-evidently right that no sensible person could disagree with it. Most telling of all, this leads them to treat all those who differ from their beliefs with a peculiar kind of contemptuous hostility.

We are never more aware of groupthink at work than when we come up against people who hold an emphatic opinion on some controversial subject, but who, when questioned on it, turn out not really to have thought it through. They have not looked seriously at the facts or the evidence. They have simply taken their opinions or beliefs on trust, ready-made, from others. But the very fact that their opinions are not based on any real understanding of why they believe what they do only allows them to believe even more insistently and intolerantly that their views are right.

A group of people come to share a common view, opinion or belief that in some way is not based on objective reality. They may be convinced intellectually, morally, politically or even scientifically that it is right. They may be sure from all the evidence they have considered that it is so. But their belief cannot ultimately be tested in a way which could confirm it beyond doubt. It is based on a picture of the world as they imagine to be, or would like it to be. In essence, their collective view will always have in it an element of wishful thinking or make-believe.

How society had become divided between two groups of people who seemed to have wholly different and incompatible views of the world. The members of one group shared a highly moralistic mindset in respect of what was permissible for people to say, think or do. They seemed only too eager to spot anyone or anything that could be seen as having given or likely to give offense.

In the wave of political correctness which has swept the Western world in recent years, we can see striking parallels to the fanatical intolerance of those seventeenth-century Puritans. We see the same sense of collective moral superiority, and the same readiness to take offence at anyone or anything which does not conform to its own strict articles of faith.

Masculine and feminine qualities are not confined just to one sex. Men and women can have both masculine and feminine traits in their psychological make-up, irrespective of their gender. In essence those attributes which involve any element of strength, whether in a man or a woman, can be seen as ‘masculine.

A softer empathetic feeling and sensitivity towards others is seen in psychological terms as feminine. And unless strength is balanced by feeling for others it makes people, regardless of their gender, hard, insensitive to others and self-centered.

That part of our brain which tries to think logically and rationally, concerned with order, structure and facts – what is often described as left-brain thinking – is in psychological terms ‘masculine. Right-brain thinking, based on intuition and creative imagination, is psychologically ‘feminine. Again, without the life-giving balance of intuitive understanding, the rational calculations of left-brain thinking can become so boxed in on themselves as to lose touch with practical reality.

To become fully alive, mature and responsible requires masculine and feminine traits to be in balance. Men may naturally be more obviously governed by the masculine side of their psyche, but this must be balanced by that inner feminine element which Jung called the anima: the ability to feel for others and a sense of wider intuitive understanding.

Equally, a woman may well be instinctively more at home with the creative, caring and intuitive, ‘feminine part of her psyche. But this also needs the strengthening balance of the ‘masculine’ element: what Jung called the animus: that strength of mind and character which has typified strong women down the ages, just as it enabled so many women to play their own equally strong and courageous part in those testing years of the Second World War.

When men lose touch with their feminine side, their anima, they remain stuck in the state of one-sided, ‘male chauvinist insensitivity that typifies all men. But when men fail to properly develop their masculinity they can in an equally negative way become soft and ‘feminized? Without strength of character, they can become possessed by what Jung called the ‘negative anima: weak, indecisive, petulant, resentful and just as self-centered as the men who remain one-sidedly masculine.

We talk about how our emotions can be ‘played on’ or ‘manipulated. This is why we can be made to cry by a sentimental film, even though it is only presenting us with a make-believe image having no connection to our own personal situation or indeed reality of any kind. That is what we mean by sentimentality: it plays on our capacity for genuine emotions by allowing us to indulge ourselves in a counterfeit of them.

Few things more obviously make an emotional appeal to us than the image of innocent people made to suffer through no fault of their own. It is why our contemporary media are awash with such stories: interviews and pictures of those caught up in a terrorist atrocity, or a dreadful civil war, or a famine in which thousands are dying, or some other natural disaster. When such a heart-rending event hits the news, multi-million-pound charities are quick to advertise for donations, because they know it will attract a flood of money from moved members of the public.

The internet had turned ‘social media’ into ‘anti-social media, giving huge numbers of people the chance to exercise their egos, both individually and collectively, as never before, not least with the license to broadcast to the world their intolerance of other human beings with an ease previously unthinkable.

Source : Groupthink: A Study in Self Delusion by Christopher Booker

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40046148-groupthink