‘Echo chamber’ led to Charlottesville rally

Not many people remember an ABC after-school special titled “The Wave.” Heck, not many people these days remember after-school specials at all.

The 1981 television movie dramatized a California high school experiment that organized history students into a collective called the Third Wave to demonstrate how German citizens during the Nazi regime were able to fall in line with fascist ideals and have a purposeful ignorance of the Holocaust occurring in multiple locations.

In the classroom experiment, or at least the televised version of such, the students not only embrace their newfound community, they took it to the extremes of bullying others into adherence to the organization’s principles and actions.

Finding strength through community of similar attributes and thinking is not inherently evil or even necessarily misguided. But when that community is comprised in equal parts of ignorance, misinformation and disaffection, it seems a short slide into hatred and violence, as shown a year ago in Charlottesville, Va.

In a dreadful bit of political theater gone even further awry, around 500 so-called Unite the Right protesters gathered in the hometown of the University of Virginia and two U.S. founding fathers. The gathering reportedly drew twice as many people as a counterprotest and culminated in violence that killed one person and injured 28.

As a population, we tend to put undue significance on anniversaries, but the remnants of Unite the Right plan rallies this weekend in D.C. and, yes, Charlottesville. We’ve barely had a chance to digest the events of the prior year.

Alas, history is littered with examples of similar malevolent groupthink that surely served as pied piper to these rats of Charlottesville, the most common of which are Nazi Germany and the mass suicides of Jonestown. Groupthink can easily lead to a related phenomenon known as “groupshift,” in which members of a group are guided toward more extremist positions and actions than they previously held.

In the case of the Unite the Right members (whose name alone is offensive to a mainstream conservative who does not hold such radical misbeliefs), it’s members’ fervor was likely ignited within an echo chamber of horrors that magnified individuals’ misplaced feelings of persecution and disassociation in the midst of a political structure that no longer overtly reward for simply being white and male. And that led directly to violence.

Unfortunately, groupthink and the “lemming effect” is by no means limited to white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The rejection of individualism is tantamount to a requirement for many organizations. When people of like mind come together, there’s a human tendency to maintain consensus of thought, even going so far as purposely ignoring outside information. Try to tell a manager at Whole Foods that pesticide use has reduced famine across the world, you’ll find yourself dismissed entirely, if not defenestrated. Admit to a group of college-educated, middle-class white people that you don’t listen to NPR, you’ll be ridiculed for your ignorance.

But at least those types of insular thinking and opinion rarely lead to violence like last year’s protests in Charlottesville. Blind faith in any organization or idea, though, is unsound practice. Collectivism of this type can only be quelled by an environment of individualism. A milieu of idiosyncrasy leads to diversity in thought (if not the more superficial diversity we so often celebrate in modern society).

Of course, in an ideal world, we’d celebrate peculiarity. We’d honor those who educate us though dialectic, not just preach a well-honed message. We’d embrace unfamiliar concepts that make us look at the world around us through the eyes of others.

But we tend to stick to our own. We join fraternities and sororities. We attend political conventions where everyone sticks to the party line. We watch Fox News or MSNBC to confirm our beliefs. We bury our noses in Facebook and Twitter, unfollowing or unfriending those with whom we disagree and who dare express it.

We often are frighteningly not far removed from the angry people who gathered with those who looked and felt just like them, grasping at the statue of a faded Confederate general who would have likely disregarded them as whiners.

Reynolds is a writer living in Houston.