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  • Groupthink

  • A Study in Self Delusion
  • By: Christopher Booker
  • Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
  • Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
  • 2.3 out of 5 stars (3 ratings)

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Groupthink

By: Christopher Booker
Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
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Publisher's Summary

In Groupthink, his final book, the late, eminent journalist and best-selling author Christopher Booker seeks to identify the hidden key to understanding much that is disturbing about the world today.

With reference to the ideas of a Yale professor who first identified the theory and to the writings of George Orwell from whose ‘newspeak’ the word was adapted, Booker sheds new light on the remarkable – and worrying – effects of ‘groupthink’ and its influence on our society. 

Booker defines the three rules of groupthink: the adoption of a common view or belief not based on objective reality; the establishment of a consensus of right-minded people, an ‘in group’; and the need to treat the views of anyone who questions the belief as wholly unacceptable. He shows how various interest groups, journalists and even governments in the 21st century have subscribed to this way of thinking, with deeply disturbing results. 

As Booker shows, such behaviour has led to a culture of fear, heralded by countless examples throughout history, from Revolutionary Russia to Napoleonic France and Hitler’s Germany. In the present moment it has caused countless errors in judgment and the division of society into highly polarised, oppositional factions. From the behaviour of the controversial Rhodes Must Fall movement to the sacking of James Damore of Google, society’s attitudes towards gender equality, the Iraq war and the ‘European Dream’, careers and lives have been lost as those in the ‘in-group’ police society with their new form of puritanism. 

As Booker argues, only by examining its underlying causes can we understand the sinister power of groupthink which permeates all aspects of our lives.

©2018 Christopher Booker (P)2019 Audible, Ltd

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Fine if you are a conservative

Booker’s critique of the Left is justified to a point, but he does not focus on just the Left’s follies. Instead he condemns all. He does take the same lens to the right.

His critiques of global warming etc will be deeply attractive to like-minded conservatives. In what might be thought paradoxical, Booker becomes the north pole of a peculiar form of groupthink - rendering the tone of this book rather silly.

There are times when Booker acknowledges groupthink manifests on the right and the left. But these times are brief, and he seems to assert the protected nature of the right’s groupthink as morally and intellectually superior. But the case is weak and unbalanced.

I was thankful I endured all but the last 2 hours, because as a leftist, I should face criticism - and some of it was absolutely justified. But Booker was manifestly unwilling to apply self-criticism to his own position. That failing renders the exercise of being aware of groupthink and its dangers pointless - if all it becomes is an exercise in conceit.

But like-minded readers will lap up this conceit, without critical awareness of their own engagement in groupthink.

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