“The climb upward out of the cave into the upper world is the ascent of the mind into the domain of true knowledge.”
Plato – The Republic
In Plato’s myth of the cave, a group of chained prisoners sit facing the back of the cave wall, unable to move or turn their heads. A fire burns near the entrance of the cave, and objects and people passing in front of the fire cast shadows on the cave wall. The prisoners see the shadows on the wall and believe the shadows to be real objects, since shadows are all they ever see. If one of them somehow escapes from the cave, and sees things as they are in the clear light of day, and then returns to inform the other cave dwellers that what they have been seeing are merely shadows, not reality, the imprisoned cave dwellers refuse to believe that they have been deceived. Instead, they dismiss the returning dissenter as an outcast.
Irving Janis, a social psychologist, coined the word groupthink in the 1970s to describe the behaviour of politicians who made decisions which showed how completely out of touch they were with ground reality. Practitioners of groupthink, according to Janis, such as politicians, suffer from the “illusion of (their) group’s invulnerability”; “collective rationalisation” that discounts any outside information that might conflict with the group’s assumptions; and hold “stereotypes” of outsiders and critics as weak, stupid, or evil. Janis was describing the behaviour of Plato’s cave dwellers. Janis warned that groupthinking led to “a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgement that results from in-group pressures.” Don’t these symptoms of groupthink sound sinisterly familiar and remind you of our political leaders’ and their followers’ behaviour patterns? Janis further elaborates: “Groupthinkers often suffer from overconfidence and hold an unquestioned belief in the group’s competence and morality.” Overweening certainty regarding their ill-planned decisions and policies is something we see so frequently in our political leadership that it no longer seems abnormal.
Dissent by group members is discouraged and may even lead to expulsion from the group. The most frightening symptom of groupthink seems to be that, “group members may not even question ethically dubious decisions and actions” taken by their leaders. Not questioning morally dubious decisions and actions of the group leadership---sounds familiar?
Groupthinkers of our era are like Plato’s cave dwellers. Their bodies are not chained, but their minds are. Unable to ascend into the “domain of true knowledge,” they are resigned to accepting shadowy half-truths as absolute truths. Blind faith in any political leader is the worst example of groupthink. But groupthink is a highly effective political tool. Populist politicians use it as a catch-net. Once individuals are trapped into giving up thinking for themselves, they turn into committed groupthinkers, they are ready to be intellectually numbed and indoctrinated into groupthink. The modern groupthinker, much like Plato's cave dwellers, becomes satiated with a steady feed of shadowy half-truths or blatant untruths. Cyber-connectivity makes the groupfeeding process highly efficient and easy. One click is all it takes to deliver a doses of groupthink 24/7 nationally and internationally through various social media platforms.
Four types of social media users
Broadly speaking, there are four personality types among social media consumers: Leaders, Likers, Lurkers, and Loners.
Leaders are at the pinnacle of the groupthink pyramid. Leaders create content to broadcast their brand of groupthink. Because they’re highly vocal and/or charismatic, Leaders have the power to accumulate large numbers of Likers. Leaders depend on Likers. Likers are the makers or breakers of a Leader’s success. Likers are social media catalysts, speeding up the dissemination of the Leader’s groupfeed content with many many others in their sphere of influence. Lurkers, as the name suggests, lurk in cyberspace, observing and consuming content, but never commenting or engaging with Likers or Leaders. Loners are the last and least tractable group. These obstinate people refuse to have anything to do with social media. Of the four personality types, Likers are most important in the chain. Likers sway and can turn around Lurkers. Likers can locate loners and lure them into their fold.
But Likers can’t lure all Lurkers and Loners all of the time. Some daredevils refuse to be lured by the dominant narrative of Likers and Leaders. They are like the cavedweller who escapes from the cave and realizes that shadows are not reality, and returns to tell others. If they want to go on living in the cave, they must give up this nonsense of figuring out what’s real and what’s not. They can’t voice doubt and question the cave leader’s groupthink ideology. These individuals, the questioning Lurkers, face grave risks if they resist, if they voice their doubts and dissent: ouster, defamation, financial and emotional ruin.
Lurkers must never openly express dissent. They have the option of getting coerced into groupthink. Or get thrown out of the group. Dissenting Lurkers may seek asylum in foreign lands and if they are lucky, they never return to Groupthinkers’ caveland. But the cumulative damage to all cave dwellers with each departing dissenter is this: chances of freeing cave dwellers from the magic of Groupthink dwindles exponentially with each departure.
Some non-dissenting Lurkers stay on in the cave, cowered into obeisance when they see the fate of other dissenters. They shut up, silently consuming the daily dose of idiocy doled out by Leaders and magnified by Likers, meanwhile silently nourishing dreams of leaving the cave; some are too feeble, some too afraid. So they stay on. They live a life of unextinguashible anguish, unable to come to terms with the everyday peddling of untruths. Their conscience beset by mental inertia, they begin to doubt their own sanity as they watch other brainwashed, perfectly at-ease, happy cave dwellers. Silenced dissenters are a pitiable lot, neither-here-nor-there. They neither accept the reigning cave culture nor do they have the motivation to end their own ambivalence.
Iqbal and the doctrine of Khudi
In my weekly poetry reading group, we were reading Iqbal’s poetry and discussing his doctrine of khudi. While reading the long poem, Saqinama (Book of the wine server), it occurred to me that investing in one’s khudi can be a concrete antidote to Groupthink. Iqbal’s poetry was meant to inspire somnolent Muslim males of the subcontinent, but I will assume that khudi can be the goal of any well-examined life, regardless of gender. Khudi or I-ness is a dynamic, hard-earned sense of selfhood: the attainment of self-realization through self-enquiry. In the Saqinama , Iqbal states that the primary purpose of life is not just to earn a comfortable, demure existence. A well-examined life’s purpose is to constantly question one’s place and purpose in the universe:
Ye hai maqsad-e-gardish-e-rozgar
Ke teri khudi tujh pe ho ashkar
The purpose of your worldly struggles
Is to manifest your own khudi
The seeker of khudi can’t prioritise the humdrum affairs of material existence as an end-goal. They are merely means to the higher goal of self-realization. Iqbal’s khudi has three main components: self-knowledge, God-knowledge, and knowledge of the cosmos. This knowledge is not static: it evolves and is constantly shaped by the knower’s state of knowledge.
Iqbal makes it clear that attaining khudi is not a passive process. Khudi has to be earned. It requires impassioned effort or khun-e-jigar (literal meaning: liver-blood. The liver is the seat of courage and patience). A self-centered selfhood is narrow individualism whereas khudi is awakened individuation. It develops through life-long diligence and dedication, introspection, working hard, inquiring into one’s place and purpose in the cosmos:
Naqsh hain sab natamam khun-e-jigar ke baghair
Naghma hai sauda-e-khaam khun-e-jigar ke baghair
Your portraits are incomplete, lifeless caricatures, devoid of khun-e-jigar
Your songs are immature and undeveloped, devoid of khun-e-jigar
Har ek maqam se aage maqam hai tera
Hayat e zauq safar ke siwa kuch aur nahi
Ahead of every destination lies your destination
The joyous life is one of continuous exploration
Iqbal exhorts seekers of truth to undertake a life-long journey (both in the inner and outer world) fuelled by a creative and impassioned restlessness that keeps the seeker constantly on the move. Iqbal warns against intellectual stagnation or self-satisfied smugness:
Fareb-e-nazr hai sukoon-o-sabaat
Tarapta hai har zarra-e-kainaat
Safar zindagi ke liye barg-o-saz
Safar hai haqeeqat, hizr hai majaz
Inaction and permanence are deception,
Every atom in the universe is in motion
Movement is the life-blood of all that exists
Movement is Truth, motionlessness merely illusion
Iqbal sees constant change and imperamanence in all of Nature. Yet paradoxically, Iqbal also lays great emphasis on khudi-seeker’s need for solitude. There can be no inner freedom without inner solitude.
A few decades after Iqbal, a few thousand miles from Iqbal’s homeland, the American writer-monk-activist, Thomas Merton echoed Iqbal when he wrote: “A certain introversion and detachment are necessary in order to re-establish the proper conditions for the “awakening” of what is inmost in ourselves….” What is inmost in us and most adamantly resistant to awakening is our innermost self or khudi.
Khudi jalwa-e-bud-mast-o-khalwat-pasand
Samandar hai ek boond pani me bund
Khudi is intoxicated ecstasy, yet it is seclusion-loving
Khudi is a vast ocean concealed in a mere droplet
A noise and online-interaction-filled days, the staple diet of most social media-fed groupthinkers, cannot awaken the shy, inmost authentic self. Neither does all that noise provide the secluded mental space necessary for our khudi to emerge. The best in us is tethered to mindless surface tasks, notifications from various social media platforms keep our monkey minds hopping from tab to tab. Having given up the solitude of our days and nights, our better hours are wasted scrolling through stuff we don’t really need to scroll through. A deadening of intellect, a dulling of intuitive powers, and death of the imagination is inevitable. The vast ocean contained in the droplet of inmost selfhood recedes.
The groupthink edifice stands and thrives on the deathbed of the autonomous, self-examining selves. Likes win us more likes, turning us into addicted Likers, but this high demands a high price: blind conformity to groupspeak. Compulsive Likers give up their innermost pearls: capacities for independent reasoning. Who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing? Where am I going? These questions can’t be answered with like-comment-share kind of quickness. These pearls need to be constantly held and turned around inside us slowly. But what if they are buried under the debris of rapid-fire likes, comments and shares? What if you find yourself wondering how you ended up in some ideologue’s groupthink cave, taking passing shadows on the wall as Reality?
Maybe it’s time to exit the cave, with Iqbal as your escort:
Apne mann me doob kar pa ja suragh-e-zindagi
Tu mera na bunta, na bun, apna to bun
Dive into your self’s ocean to unearth life’s treasures
You may reject my truth, but at least be true to your own self
Nighat Majid is a psychologist, writer and freelance contributor. All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer