Unwisdom of Crowds

“Individuality, like civilization itself, is such a hard-won, fragile thing.” David Rieff says comradeship, while often healthy, can have terrible moral consequences in large groups. “Toward the end of Defying Hitler, his extraordinary memoir of the rise of Nazism in Germany, Sebastian Haffner describes how the Nazis had ‘made all Germans everywhere into comrades.’ This, he argued, had been a moral catastrophe. … The lesson, whether about geopolitics or daily life, should be clear: if what you are thinking could just as easily be expressed in a slogan, and shouted out or held aloft on a banner by a crowd, then you are probably not thinking at all.”