From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus, 31

We’re lemmings:

Group thinking, sense of belonging, conformism, herd instinct, you name it… our judgment and opinions are those of a gregarious fish: nailed to the centre of the school of fish, whatever and regardless. What determines our evaluations is not the focal point of truth, but the focal point of the school; we favour the centre of the school over the centre of truth as if we feared predatory fishes lurking around the school.

To put it in the right perspective, one may want to review not only the term “groupthink”, but the term “Abilene paradox” as well…
Significantly, Orwell first warned us about the horrors of “groupthink” in his 1984, and then later on researchers detailed them: the compulsion to conformity, not only instinctive but even worse rationalised, produces damaging decisions and actions, sacrifice of critical thinking, active suppression of alternative and dissenting viewpoints, the idea of an “outside” and the isolation from it, the overrating of the group’s decisions and the underrating and dehumanisation of the “outside”, with anything that this may involve.
But things can get even worse than that: in an anecdote taking place in that city, the “Abilene paradox” describes how a group of individuals agrees on collective decisions and actions against both the preferences and best interests of all as a consequence of the fact that, due to lack of communication, everybody thinks that those decisions and actions are wrong but is convinced that everybody else agrees with them. At which point, “groupthink” does the rest.

Thus just as gregarious fishes can be fooled and driven into the fishing net en masse by shadow play, so are we by the mainstream media casting around us the semblance of a non−existent school of fish made up to push our opinions where they want them. In fact, mainstream media exploit this by presenting a false unanimity favourable to the positions they want us to accept as “mainstream”.