Regulating Group Mind

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

What distinguishes the RGM from early comprehensions of the “group mind” by Gustave Le Bon, William MacDougall, and Sigmund Freud is that these conceptualizations confine their referent to crowds, which are volatile phenomena and not normalized in outlook, although they display RGM properties in inchoate form. Although Freud himself seeks an underlying order to crowd phenomena as prototype social orders in his Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, his explanation reverts to the ancient myth of a primal horde's murder of the clan-father as an originary collective crime that leads to social organization for mutual self-protection of the survivors (“civilization”). Freud's analysis sets a pattern in case study methodology that fails to distinguish between group organization providing cooperative life protection and group organization perverted from this function by the life-blind RGM mechanism. R. D. Laing, in stark contrast, emphasizes perversions of received group orders, most specifically the received normal order of the family as a “holocaust on the altar of conformity.” Yet Laing's illuminating dramaturgical model of “inter-generational mapping of family roles” does not provide criteria whereby to recognize a regulating disorder in this mapping of roles.

Application

The microconcept of “groupthink” associated with the work of Irving L. Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions more specifically isolates a decision-making dysfunction of a small and elite group of strategists whose plans ostentatiously fail—his principal case study being of the National Security Council's ill-fated decisions for the U.S. Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Although there are common operations at work here—a priori moral certitude of cause, stereotyping of opposition, and compulsive rationalization of disastrous consequences—the inside groupthink of a closed committee producing an operational fiasco on the world stage does not penetrate the depth of the RGM mechanism that is typically routinized within a wider social context. Only criterial diagnosis by Properties (i) through (x) enables clinical identification of this deeper lying structure of group compulsion. The secretively top-level and failed decisions that Janis and his coresearchers examine are better understood as expressions of a wider group-mind mechanism [Page 791]where blind “patriotic” identification lends support to armed aggressions against noncapitalist governments in “our backyard.” Janis's model may itself symptomatize a society-wide RGM by isolating for case study a closed elite's plans that fail to be successfully operationalized.

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