Violence and Groupthink

I watched the Danish film “In a Better World” last night and it got me thinking this morning about violence between individuals and between groups.  I find it interesting that when we are younger, an effective strategy for dealing with a bully is standing up to him in a forceful way.  Bullies are often insecure individuals who use power and violence to make themselves feel better, but when challenged they’ll often move along to a new target.  The film showed such a sequence in which young Christian beats the bully, Sofus, with a bicycle pump and threatens his life with a knife.  Sofus is no longer a threat to Christian or his friend Elias after this episode, and in fact Sofus makes an overture to Christian to become friends.

Such a solution on Christian’s part wouldn’t be necessary if more was done at an institutional level to address bullying and its root causes.  That’s a separate discussion, but suffice it to say that victims of bullying are often left to themselves to deal with it, and fighting back may be the only option for some.

However, when it comes to groups, a show of violence generally leads to more violence.  Why do individuals react one way and groups another?  Is there some dynamic of groupthink involved?  Perhaps it’s due to the fact that not all group members are directly affected by the violence so it becomes easy, and less personal, to continue the cycle.  I feel like that’s part of the problem with the US’s perpetual war in the Middle East.  It’s simply too easy to continue to commit “faceless” troops to the violent conflict.  And once committed, it’s not easy to extricate our forces, as there is no definitive “victory” being sought.  Stopping the conflict will only invite criticism from more members of the group who do not have a personal stake in the violence being committed, and would be a threat to one’s career.  Those in support of violent conflict have done an excellent job of using emotions to drive groupthink.  Fear of terrorism and extremist Islam (ISIL), hyper patriotism (American exceptionalism), and outright hero worship of our troops are all examples of the emotional mechanisms being used against the American public, and they have been very effective.

I did a Google search on groupthink and the violence of nation states, and the results were interesting.  The vast majority were concerned with the actions of terrorist organizations, movements like Occupy Wall Street and #BlackLivesMatter, and other communist/socialist collectivist movements.  I find it strange that there was almost no discussion of the effect of groupthink on US political leadership in the War on Terror.  It seems to me that this would be a fascinating political science research project especially with so many different group dynamics.  As a society, are we too afraid to look in the mirror and honestly assess our role as a nation in the present cycle of perpetual war? 

I do appreciate that the question of how to deal with terrorism is not an easy one.  While I think it’s important to realize how we arrived at this point from a root cause perspective, we have to deal with the present and how to move forward.  Many of those committing terrorist acts have such a different mental model of the world from our own that dialogue is nigh impossible.  Over the last week, I have been listening to “I Am Malala,” and it’s frustrating to hear about the Taliban and it’s impact on Malala’s home valley in Pakistan.  Their beliefs are so antithetical to modern Western civilization that I’m unsure of any basis for negotiation.  Both sides believe the enemy is extreme (and wrong) in its view, and both are correct.  There must be moderate voices on both sides; people who know that the cycle of violence solves nothing.

Just because both sides are extreme doesn’t mean we shouldn’t negotiate or at least continue to make attempts to do so.  The world is not a better place with more violence in this conflict so the moral thing to do is to determine a solution to end it.