Q. People share many positions, at any time many may be thinking the same thought, having the same POV... so what's wrong with "groupthink?"
A. Well I'm glad you raise that point because what I'm referring to is what you might call "marching orders" to advance, invoke, or preserve a given position... What I call "groupthink" is not about sharing a certain point of view, it's about promoting it in a self-rigteous way- the flip side, the dark side, is make anyone who does NOT share that view "lost," "fallen," misguided or in some way wrong. The dark side of this is that others, just because they don't march to the same music, are rendered second-class citizens or marginalized in some way. "Orthodoxy" comes into play, and people are measured according to how they line up- or don't.
Human beings are social animals, and our queus are many- all you have to do is go downtown and see all the pants hanging around the knees of teenagers to realize what lengths people go to be "cool." I'm not angry or bitter, I'm amused actually, but when you look back over human history and see the vast mayhem that's been visited on "outgroups"- that's when this aspect of human psychology gets to be downright frightening .
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