Groupthink: A Study in Self Delusion

Description

Politics has always been coloured by 'groupthink'. Each political party or faction or grouping naturally has its own idea of how it sees the world more clearly than its rivals. Political decisions have ended badly because a little group of powerful men have collectively become so fixated on a single narrow view of what they hoped to achieve that they shut their minds to anything that contradicts it. Take for example the recklessly obsessive way in which George W. Bush and Tony Blair launched their invasion of Iraq in 2003; the rise of Islamic movements recently such as Al Qaeda or IS. This has shown us the power of groupthink at its ultimate extreme. So contagious was the power of that particular form of groupthink that thousands more would-be jihadists flocked to join the cause so intoxicated by the thought of randomly killing 'infidels' that they were happy to commit suicide in pursuit of their fantasy cause. Global Warming, Political Correctness (the new age of thought-crime) racism, sexism, positive discrimination, hostility to religion, the United States of Europe are all issues investigated in this book. There is even a chapter on Charles Darwin. It is only by obtaining some sort of insight into the psychology of crowds that it can be understood how powerless they are to hold any opinions other than those that are imposed upon them.

Christopher Booker is a talented author and journalist. He was the founder and first editor of Private Eye for which he still writes. He writes a regular column every Sunday in the Telegraph. His string of bestselling books include The Seven Basic Plots, The Real Global Warming Disaster, The Great Deception, The Mad Officials and The Neophiliacs.

Parts of the book will please half the population and the other half of the book will infuriate the other half of the population. That is evidence of success for the final polemical book by Christopher Booker. * The Rt Hon Frank Field *