Ideological Purity and Groupthink
Since the grand redesign of the blog, the upper corners of the blog have been the home of two shiny new quote blocks. The quotes in these blocks will be changing from time to time, as a testament to some of the gems that have come from men and women a bit wiser than myself. Naturally, in order to put new quotes up, I either have to write (or obtain from the web) a quote aggregator script, or I have to manually hunt down the quotes and put them up myself. I prefer doing the latter, as I can use it as an excuse to learn something new every time I do it.
One quote I found, by Gen. George S. Patton, struck home with me, as that very idea has been something that has been bothering me for sometime, and has led to some of my recent frustration with the blogosphere. Gen. Patton says:
If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn’t thinking.
The esteemed general has hit the nail on the head with this one sentence, and it has never been more true than it is today. It seems that the majority of people are on a quest for ideological purity. I prefer to call it by its real name: groupthink. Interestingly enough, the groupthink is developing mostly on partisan lines, and it’s getting pretty absurd.
If you don’t oppose the war in Iraq, then your a war-mongering neocon chicken hawk.
If you oppose the war, then you’re a patchouli-smelling, unkempt, latte-drinking, trust fund commie.
Et al.
I’m exaggerating in the above examples, of course, but not by much. The range of topics is likewise polarized along partisan lines, whether it’s same-sex marriage, stem cell research, freedom of speech, etc. Ideological purity Groupthink absolutism is the flavor of the day. It is seen every day in the mainstream media news outlets and in the blogosphere – the self-styled bastion of free speech. Yet the ideological purists fail to realize that they’re stifling the very thing they claim to uphold- the idea of intelligent and enlightened debate – in favor of an echo chamber.
It seems as though people, somewhere along the way, have forgotten that not everyone agrees on everything. And, sometimes those disagreements are strong. As an example, I strongly disagree with a number of my friends about a wide range of topics, yet we can overcome those differences and remain good friends. These days, however, people are abandoning their friends in order to maintain their own policy of ideological purity. Liberals are ditching their conservative friends and vice versa.
I truly hope that I’m not the only one who has observed this. And I hope I’m not the only one who thinks the concept is rather pathetic.
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