Groupthink by Christopher Booker

Author:Christopher Booker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472959089
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

5

The ‘Fantasy Cycle’ and the ‘Swinging Sixties’

For each age is a dream that is dying or one that is coming to birth.

A. W. E. O’Shaugnessy (1844–81)

In Irving Janis’s identification what I have called the ‘three basic rules’ of how groupthink operates there was one aspect which he didn’t include, even though it applied to every one of his own case studies. This was the five-stage pattern whereby the loss of contact with reality implicit in all forms of groupthink eventually brings about a collision with reality and its own destruction.

I was first drawn to this recurring pattern in history back in the 1960s, when I was working on my first book, The Neophiliacs (1969). This was an attempt to analyse that avalanche of change in the late Fifties and Sixties which transformed Britain, socially, morally, culturally and politically, into an almost unrecognizably different country. When I subtitled that book ‘The Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties’ I did not of course mean to equate what had happened to Britain during that time with the far greater historical upheavals we have been looking at. But when I came to look at how the events of that period unfolded, two things had struck me.

One was the extent to which so much of what characterized those hectic years had turned out to be bubbles of collective make-believe, from Anthony Eden’s doomed Suez adventure in 1956 to the hysteria Britain plunged into only a few years later, as it became obsessed with all the evanescent excitements of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. The other was how often throughout that period Britain’s collective mood had gone through striking shifts, even from one year to the next.

Although the joke that anyone who claimed to remember the Sixties couldn’t have been there was meant to convey how all memories of that seminal decade had become blurred together in a fog of drugs and deafening pop music, as I further observed in The Neophiliacs, there was actually a clear pattern to the different stages through which the period unfolded. We cannot get a proper perspective on so much of the groupthink of the twenty-first century without tracing their origins back to that remarkable spell of history now more than half a century ago. Few people under the age of 60 can have any idea just how dramatically the changes of those years shaped the modern world in which they have grown up, and created the mental universe they have come to take for granted.

As the Western world finally emerged in the mid-Fifties from the shadows of the Second World War, nothing gave people the heady sense that they were entering a future almost unimaginably different more than the sudden arrival of a new kind of material prosperity. Of course, this was underpinned by such a flood of new scientific and technological advances that arguably the human race can never again experience quite such a radical break with the past. None was quite so dramatic as the coming of the space age, when mankind for the first time reached out beyond the confines of our own planet.

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