> Why can't you have free individuals interacting voluntarily form a community? Why do we need social groupthink and force...?

Do we need it? I agree with most people I know that stealing from a blind beggar would be wrong, but I don't think this is just socialization and fear of being punished for wrongthink. It's something I might have at first just "believed", but then found to be something I agree with my own mind, my experiences, how I would want to be treated etc.

From an interview, translation mine:

> Kants whole morality means, that every human has to consider with every action if the maxim they are acting on could be a general law. That means.. it's pretty much the opposite of obedience! Everybody is law giver. No man has the right, according to Kant, to obey. [..] We obey in this sense, as long as we're children, because it's necessary. There obedience is very important. But this should end with age 14, 15 at the latest.

-- Hannah Arendt

This is from 1958, and most of it is still timely IMO:

> Because, what is common to both societies is the development into a managed mass society, with big bureaucracy, managing people. The Russians do it by force. We do it by persuasion. I appreciate the tremendous difference, that we can express ideas without being afraid of being killed or imprisoned. But I think the Russians might do away with the terror in twenty or thirty or years, when they are richer, and when they don't need these repressive methods so much. What we have in common is a mass men, a mass bureaucracy, and a manipulation of everyone to act smoothly, but with the illusion that he follows his own decisions and opinions.

-- Erich Fromm, http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from...

In a way the video of the interview is really depressing to me, because it's such in stark contrast to our intellectual culture today, this spirit of just letting someone speak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTu0qJG0NfU

At any rate, insofar what he says there is correct, this kinda automatically follows:

> There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

-- Hannah Arendt

It's my impression that it's not just about having the "proper" thoughts, but also aquiring them "properly", by obedience. Because someone who even marches in total lockstep today, because they fanatically agree with the correct ideas, in their own mind, might rebel tomorrow for the same reason, and may be less desirable than someone who is not fanatic, maybe even begrudgingly obedient, but obedient nonetheless.

Yet we need critical thought for many jobs, to operate and invent complex machinery, so the obedience is what makes it all work -- as long as a person applies autonomous thought to the "right" things, and completely turns it off others, for when they're just to fall in line, it's okay.

> People who are proponents of direct democracy and say that democracy is actually an ideal system, not just a least-worst with needs for checks and balances, tend to believe that of the majority of people believe something is right, then it is right--- that the number of people who want or believe something give it moral and even practical legitimacy.

I often have to think of pointers in that context... say, someone states opinion A, and you ask, why do you think that, and the reply is just a variation of "many people agree"... well, they're referencing other people. But do they know if those other people aren't just referencing other people, too, and if yes, how deep that goes? How do they know there is actually a memory location that holds more than nonsense down the chain of references, so to speak?

(I am aware of the irony of me quoting a lot.. but the way I see it, I could say it less eloquently and accurately in a lot more words, or share good quotes, among which some might find some keepers)

> Unanimity of opinion is a very ominous phenomenon, and one characteristic of our modern mass age. It destroys social and personal life, which is based on the fact that we are different by nature and by conviction. To hold different opinions and to be aware that other people think differently on the same issue shields us from Godlike certainty which stops all discussion and reduces social relationships to those of an ant heap. A unanimous public opinion tends to eliminate bodily those who differ, for mass unanimity is not the result of agreement, but an expression of fanaticism and hysteria. In contrast to agreement, unanimity does not stop at certain well-defined objects, but spreads like an infection into every related issue.

also

> Since no one is capable of forming his own opinion without the benefit of a multitude of opinions held by others, the rule of public opinion endangers even the opinion of those few who may have the strength not to share it. This is one of the reasons for the curiously sterile negativism of all opinions which oppose a popularly acclaimed tyranny. [...] public opinion, by virtue of its unanimity, provokes a unanimous opposition and thus kills true opinions everywhere.

-- Hannah Arendt

> At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

-- George Orwell, Proposed Preface to "Animal Farm"

And while this is even more of a leap, when I read the following passage I was just thunderstruck, because it seemed "vaguely important", yet I can't authoritatively put my finger on it. I won't even claim I understand half of it, I just want to show it to everyone. Since it's kinda on-topic and you like quotes too, I guess it's okay:

> From a philosophical viewpoint, the danger inherent in the new reality of mankind seems to be that this unity, based on the technical means of communication and violence, destroys all national traditions and buries the authentic origins of all human existence. This destructive process can even be considered a necessary prerequisite for ultimate understanding between men of all cultures, civilizations, races, and nations. Its result would be a shallowness that would transform man, as we have known him in five thousand years of recorded history, beyond recognition. It would be more than mere superficiality; it would be as though the whole dimension of depth, without which human thought, even on the mere level of technical invention, could not exist, would simply disappear. This leveling down would be much more radical than the leveling to the lowest common denominator; it would ultimately arrive at a denominator of which we have hardly any notion today.

> As long as one conceives of truth as separate and distinct from its expression, as something which by itself is uncommunicative and neither communicates itself to reason nor appeals to "existential" experience, it is almost impossible not to believe that this destructive process will inevitably be triggered off by the sheer automatism of technology which made the world one and, in a sense, united mankind. It looks as though the historical pasts of the-nations, in their utter diversity and disparity, in their confusing variety and bewildering strangeness for each other, are nothing but obstacles on the road to a horridly shallow unity. This, of course, is a delusion; if the dimension of depth out of which modern science and technology have developed ever were destroyed, the probability is that the new unity of mankind could not even technically survive. Everything then seems to depend upon the possibility of bringing the national pasts, in their original disparateness, into communication with each other as the only way to catch up with the global system of communication which covers the surface of the earth.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Men in Dark Times"