Click on the image below to make it bigger. While it's funny at first glance, it's truth really actually frightens me.
I remember reading The Wave in junior high and being fascinated. Based on a true story, it was about a high school teacher successfully creating a movement that washed over an entire school; essentially, it was a demonstration of how atrocities such as the Holocaust happened.
Corporations, churches, really any group that share similar goals are at risk of 1) succumbing to group-think and 2) essentially becoming a "mob." History has proven this time and again. The antidote to group-think is to practice personal integrity, but this can mean suffering injustices and ostracism -- a tough choice for many people to make. What with Enron and the other corporate scandals of late, is it possible that personal integrity is becoming more scarce? Or are corporations just becoming more powerful -- possibly more like companies in the 1920's -- before government started to establish more regulations after the stock market crash? Have the lobbyists that run D.C. (particularly under the Bush administration) so completely taken over that even new legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II won't be able to stem the tide? I worry about things like this.
Switching gears a bit -- I often wonder about the power of the Internet and the web. Does the Internet help people think for themselves, or does it just as often encourage group-think? Remember Flash-mobs (a trend for a bit with cell phone users -- the cell phone being another equalizing communication device of the new millenium), where groups would mobilize and descend upon a shopping mall or whatever and cluck like chickens? Just something to ponder. I think the Internet is powerful, and I like to believe it has much more power for helping people think outside the box than to stay stuck within it -- but I think that's only true if the information it contains is freely accessible. When countries like China limit its accessibity and in fact harness it as a platform for controlling the minds of its citizens and promulgating "group-think"...well then the whole thing becomes confusing. Should companies provide their scrubbed content to countries like China? I don't have the answer.
