We Are One

To belong to a group and to be accepted, is the greatest desire we all have. Through out human history, this basic human desire has proved to be devastative. All the wars that have been fought, all the genocides that have ever occurred, involved normal human beings who were turned into mere puppets, incapable of individual thoughts and actions.

The experiments done by Asch and Milgram show that individuals in a focused group conform to the thoughts and the mentality of the entire group, even if they may have conflicting viewpoints. When people are part of a group, for example, of an armed militia, they portray the group and not they themselves as individuals. The judgment of the people involved isn’t changed. What is changed is their perception of a situation. They see the situation through the eyes of the group, not their own. So, all their acts are justified and ratified. That is why even normal people perform inhuman acts. Even the heinous act of killing another human being is justified and even glorious. Their own death is considered a rightly deserved prize of credit and martyrdom. The thoughts they portray, the actions they perform are not their own but of their group.

The main question is “how are normal people capable of doing such heinous acts?” The answer to that is their “collective group mentality” and the social pressure they face. These factors mould them as a part of a group and their individuality and their idiosyncrasies are lost. So, they are part of a group, they are the group, not individuals. The justification of all their actions by distribution of guilt or even absence of it has fuelled all the acts of death and destruction and is responsible for them.