[Mb-civic] NYTimes Op-Ed: All Together Now

[Ian]

Very cogent...

Peace.

--------------

All Together Now

July 15, 2004
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.
Bill Maher lost his job for pointing out that, whatever else they were, the
9/11 terrorists weren't cowards, prompting Ari Fleischer to warn (though he
has since backed down) that Americans "need to watch what they say." Never
mind that Sun Tzu says, somewhere in his oeuvre, that while it's soothing to
underestimate the enemy, it's often fatal, too.

 And what was that group thinking in Abu Ghraib? Yes, the accused guards
seem to have been encouraged to soften up their charges for interrogation,
just as the operatives at Langley were pelted with White House demands for
some plausible casus belli. But the alarming thing is how few soldiers
demurred, and how many got caught up in the fun of it.

 Societies throughout history have recognized the hazards of groupthink and
made arrangements to guard against it. The shaman, the wise woman and
similar figures all represent institutionalized outlets for alternative
points of view. In the European carnival tradition, a "king of fools" was
permitted to mock the authorities, at least for a day or two. In some
cultures, people resorted to vision quests or hallucinogens - anything to
get out of the box. Because, while the capacity for groupthink is an
endearing part of our legacy as social animals, it's also a common
precondition for self-destruction. One thousand coalition soldiers have died
because the C.I.A. was so eager to go along with the emperor's delusion that
he was actually wearing clothes.

 Instead of honoring groupthink resisters, we subject them to insult and
abuse. Sgt. Samuel Provance III has been shunned by fellow soldiers since
speaking out against the torture at Abu Ghraib, in addition to losing his
security clearance and being faced with a possible court-martial. A fellow
Abu Ghraib whistle-blower, Specialist Joseph Darby, was praised by the
brass, but has had to move to an undisclosed location to avoid grass-roots
retaliation.

 The list goes on. Sibel Edmonds lost her job at the F.B.I. for complaining
about mistranslations of terror-related documents from the Arabic. Jesselyn
Radack was driven out of her post at the Justice Department for objecting to
the treatment of John Walker Lindh, then harassed by John Ashcroft's
enforcers at her next job. As Fred Alford, a political scientist who studies
the fate of whistle-blowers, puts it: "We need to understand in this `land
of the free and home of the brave' that most people are scared to death.
About 50 percent of all whistle-blowers lose their jobs, about half of those
lose their homes, and half of those people lose their families."

 This nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair
chance of being destroyed by them.