Yes, I watched hours of the select committee interview with Dominic Cummings when I got home from work yesterday. I know. It’s sad. I could have watched a good murder, or a surreal drama about people with weird personality disorders but instead I plumped for ‘real life.’
There will be many commentators better than me who will dig into the details of what was said but my thoughts are that I watched a surreal drama about people with weird personality disorders and and attempted murder.
I think the murder will fail.
Journalists (and me) were initially very shocked. No one expected such detail, or specifics. No one expected him to say that because of the government’s actions thousands of people died that didn’t need to. That must have been very hard for anyone who is grieving someone who died from Covid, However, I think when it all shakes down and what he actually said gets written up most people will shrug their shoulders and say that he has not said anything we didn’t know and anyway we can’t trust him because we know he lies.
We knew Matt Hancock was in way over his depth but we have forgiven him because he seems to have learnt a lot. As Baroness Warsi said on HaveI Got News For You, “We learnt at nursery that as long as people who are trying their best then we are nice to them.”
We know that the Prime Minister is all the things Dom said he was and apparently that just makes him more loveable.
We know mistakes were made. We are not stupid but we just don’t want to talk about them. We don’t even want to think about them. Can this just all be over now? PLEASE!
My main thought about the interview, though, was that Dominic Cummings doesn’t understand Groupthink.
It’s strange that he has latched onto this particular theory. He mentioned it several times in the interview and has written about it on his blog. I find it odd because he is also very disparaging about what he calls ‘pseudo-scientists’ who are psychologists - precisely the people who developed his favourite theory.
I’ve written about Groupthink before. Social Psychology and theories about how people behave in groups was my favourite part of my degree. This theory has probably been watered down and condensed to be taught at GCSE now, because that’s the way of things but when Dominic Cummings has his own version of the word to pedal his own ideas, I wonder if it’s the right thing to do.
Dom is a man that hates big institutions. He hates the civil service, the BBC, the European Union, the NHS. He’s a man who probably feels a bit uncomfortable in a large group. It’s more difficult to convince a large group that you are in fact a genius, while still protesting that you are not smart in a large group because some people will see through you. Therefore, he surrounds himself with a small group of ‘experts’ who think like he does. These are the requirements for Groupthink to happen.
According to Dom, Groupthink was what he was trying to avoid. He didn’t want the huge organisation of Parliament getting their mitts on this and questioning his decisions. He didn’t want the thoughts of the large group to interfere with his plans for world Dom-ination. He thinks of large groups as ‘the blob’. He imagines that a large group is all thinking the same thing and just not understanding his genius because they aren’t able to see his new and brilliant perspective. In fact, what is happening is that individuals in the large group are able to say, “hang on, this doesn’t feel right,” and it gets looked at again. All Groupthink theorists believe that large groups are better.
The theory was developed by Irvine Janis and came from an analysis of bad governmental decisions, namely, the bombing of Pearl Harbour, the Bay of Pigs invasions and the Vietnam war. In all of those cases the decisions were made by small groups and not checked with the larger part of government.
As much as I think the government needs to be held to account for mis-handling the pandemic (especially the refusal to get proper control over our borders) I’m not sure that Mr Cummings is the right person to start that happening.
Personally, thanks to Spitting Image I can’t think of Cummings as anything other than an odd alien that we should all ignore.
No comments:
Post a Comment