Groupthink
29th November 2015
Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, examines one of the chief intellectual deficiencies of our time, which I have often discussed here under the title of “Aggregation Fallacy”.
A danger of collectivism of any sort – from formal collectivism such as state-imposed communism to informal and less-obvious forms of collectivism, such as gathering statistics on a nation’s “balance of trade” – is that it clouds thinking. Collectivism not only masks differences that distinguish individuals who comprise whatever group is constructed, in whatever fashion, into some collective, it also causes people too easily to attribute thought and action to the group rather than to the individuals who make-up the group.
This is illustrated daily in most of what passes for News Media these days, in which some ‘journalist’ will cherry-pick some general statistic such as the number of deaths in a certain period in a certain general group, and then draw some tendentious conclusion, typically supporting a call for government action to infringe the rights and freedoms of people that the journalist just happens to dislike. “The Rich”, “The Poor”, “Working Families”, “Gun Nuts”, and “Fundamentalists” are common whipping-boys for this sort of treatment, although this sort of thing never seems to apply to groups that the Chattering Classes favor, like Muslims or Black People or Government Employees.
Last night at dinner the discussion turned to the hideous Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado. My close and wise friend Lyle Albaugh observed that many “Progressives” tend to lump together into a fictional collective all people with some anti-government views. So when a middle-aged white male violently attacks an institution, such as Planned Parenthood, that is an icon of the “Progressive” left, left-wing commenters, along with others with left-wing sympathies, often lump all limited- and anti-government folk together into some fictional group that is feared to be especially prone to commit violence of the sort that occurred last week in Colorado. (Remember how, just after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Tucson in 2011 Paul Krugman blamed right-wing ideology for the crime?)
And, indeed, the perpetrators of crimes need not even belong, in any sense that a rational adults would recognize, to whatever group is being trotted out for the Two-Minute Hate, in order to sprinkle with magical victim-blood the objects of their disaffection.