Word of the day:  Groupthink.  An Obama word! How about that, folks. Now we can learn from our President!

The meaning of ‘groupthink’ is pretty much contained in the marriage of the two words “group” and “think”, but it’s time for some ruminating.

Allow me to begin in my own words:  Groupthink is a comfort zone consensus of folks who are afraid to disagree with each other. Basically, they reach unanimity without their brains or their guts. Intuition, creativity and thinking outside the box take a serious nose dive, while one person after another follows the leader.

Lest you think President Obama coined the term, I now present the real father, Irving Janis.  This dude came up with eight interesting symptoms of the groupthink disease.

They mostly boil down to a few earnest megalomaniacs on a mission, stoking the fires of their paranoid fancies while coercing others and feeling smug.

1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
2. Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group’s assumptions.
3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, disfigured, impotent, or stupid.
5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of “disloyalty”.
6. Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
8. Mindguards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.

You know what immediately springs to my mind—the Lemming Suicide.  Now there is an example of groupthink gone awry.  Or is it?

Turns out, folks, that the Lemming mass suicide plunge over the cliff was a Myth created by Walt Disney.   Not only did Disney fake the filming, but Lemmings just don’t commit suicide—alone or in groups.  Only humans do that. (Remembering Jonestown and the UFO New Agers of Heaven’s Gate.)

As far as Jonestown goes, Jim’s followers were coerced into the kool-aid mindset.  Those poor New Age bastards were a different story, however. They got so caught up in their own powerlessness and the stars, i.e. the return of the Comet Hale-Bopp, that they killed themselves.  Everyone agreed to agree that suicide was the way, the truth, the life.  Sigh.

Back to the Lemmings. It has a better ending.

The tale of mass lemming suicide began with the Walt Disney movie, White Wilderness which was released in 1958.  Filmed in Alberta Canada, the Disney story line had some problems in it’s execution phase.

You see, folks, Alberta is not a native home to lemmings, plus it is far from the sea.

So what did those crafty Disney filmmakers do?  They bought all the lemmings they could from from the Inuit (Native Arctic) children, who apparently had a ton.

The lemming migration sequence was filmed by placing the frightened little critters on a spinning, snow-covered turntable while shooting it from all the different angles. For the death-plunge sequence, Disney operatives herded the dizzy lemmings over a small cliff into a river.  (Bastards!)

When I think about all those years I actually believed lemmings killed themselves, I want to scream. When I think about what one widely perpetuated lie does to the human psyche, I want to ruminate.

Could we have a moment of silence for all the traumatized lemmings.