An excellent article by Barbara Ehrenreich and good advice for us all.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/opinion/15EHRE.html<snip>
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.
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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."