Written by one of Britain's leading newspaper columnists Christopher Booker, the report is based on research by Professor Irving Janis, the American psychologist who is famous for his theory of "Groupthink". But as Booker explains, Janis never looked at the application of his theory outside the policy areas he was interested in:
"Janis's focus was on decision-making in the foreign policy arena. However, as soon as you look, you see that his ideas apply elsewhere. The climate debate is a case in point - all of the characteristic 'rules' of groupthink are there: warmist ideas can't be tested against reality, and so to ensure they are upheld as the truth, they have to be elevated into a 'consensus' and anyone who challenges them must be crushed. These are precisely the features that Janis used to define Groupthink."So just as Groupthink led to the policy disasters of Pearl Harbour, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam war, attempts to suppress serious debate of climate science and the policies that are being promoted as solutions are leading to irrational behaviour, costly policy blunders and corruption on an unprecedented scale. This will only end when groupthink eventually bumps up against reality.
As Booker puts it in his conclusions:
"Every South Sea Bubble ends in a crash. Every form of Groupthink eventually has its day. This is invariably what happens when human beings get carried along by the crowd, simply because they have lost the urge or ability to think for themselves."Christopher Booker: Global Warming - A Case Study in Groupthink (pdf)
The book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes is available on Amazon (out of print, but used editions are available)
This is the true nature of powerlessness as a strategy, masked in complaint.
Likewise the intent to teach false witness to others as a means to gain power for themselves can only deliver its followers to a false power at cost of a true appreciation of anything and therefore loses everything to a lie that compels allegiance under penalty of pain and loss.
To those who seek and are given support in corrupted self-power, there is no truth but power, and so beliefs otherwise are masks by which to manipulate.
Thinking in the current sense, is the maintenance of the 'Matrix' of a world arising from mind-capture, and as such is more a network of filters and blocks to true thought or communication. Because the very sense of self and world we live, this day and each day, is an embodiment of the nature of the communication we accept true by acting as if it is.
The nature of mind-capture as a dissociation from the true of Self, is a split or fragmentation from the felt qualities of wholeness of being. There are personal and collective levels and symbols of this in the archetypes of our separation trauma.
Not only did such catastrophic experience set the attempt to escape terror, but redefined 'power' that makes and destroys in such terms, so as to overlay the God-is-being with 'God wrath' as punishment for 'guilt'.
The thinking of the world - and its development as 'power over life' is a masking persona over hiding or evading fear and pain of loss. And so those who fear to lose what they believe they have, are driven to offset or escape such loss by inducing others to take it - and this underlies a corrupt financial, political and social system of manipulation or power struggle via deceit.
The capacity to think is at root a receptive acceptance and recognition that then automatically goes forth as the world we give, live and share. The illusion of self as power over thought, is itself the idea of separation for All That Is - in a wish to private creation. The power that aligns, sustains and guides thinking as a conscious co-creation is desire. As we give focus and acceptance, so do we give value and set the measure of our desire. Fixation in fascinations of horror and the excitement of conflicted drama operate a 'mind-capture' not unlike looking into the eyes of the serpent or gorgon, and love of such illusory reflected power like Narcissus.
In order to free our gaze - indeed our minding from such a 'mind-capture' we have to consciously look at the thing we hate, fear, hold shame or deny, but only to then look beyond its framing of thought.
If you follow writing this in thought, it will still only be the invitation to release it to the felt qualities and nature of true being. Not because it or anyone claims it to be true - but because it is you, lives you and yet is all that the 'separated sense of self' denies in order to seem to survive. This includes your heart's true witness. For surely if you came out from masking 'identity' you would be defenceless, exposed and destroyed! Yet the mask is always disintegrating of its appearing to be true and so Life has to be ever sacrificed to the defending and remaking of the mask. In order to 'come out' one simply refuses to persist in habit of giving to Caesar what belongs to God-is-being - and being does not require a label to be All That Is - as it Is (including awareness as Is). What happens if your habit thinking is no longer allowed to run un-felt?
You meet the guardians of the threshhold.
Do you desire to live in the true of what life is the being of?
Or to escape in thought-substitution?
The latter seems the devil you know and the former, the unknown into which a negatively defined mind projects.
The human conditioning is a split off mind and a denied and distorted desire.
Heart and mind are one in true purpose. The qualities of being are tangibly known and shared in alignment in being. Beware of substitutes by not thinking as if for yourself, but listening within while engaged in relationship with our world, with each other.
Let the manipulator reveal the pathways within our own mind that we can thus release from our 'thinking' so as not to be baited into reaction by which to be 'captured' in diversion and division.