Affiliation

"I'd rather be with someone for the wrong reasons than alone for the right ones."
--Amanda Jones (Some Kind of Wonderful)

We all feel a need to belong, to be accepted. We satisfy this need in part by affiliating ourselves with various groups--religions, schools, nationality, organizations, gender, professional associations, skin color, sports teams, etc.

The downside of affiliation is that we are prone to disengage our capacity for reason and self-awareness when we are part of a group. The phenomenon goes by many tags--groupthink, herd behavior, crowd mentality, social control, etc.

When we surrender capacity for reason and self-awareness (perhaps the most important ways that we differ from the rest of the animal kingdom), we are less capable of sound judgment. We are less able to compare actual position to our internal compass and judge good from bad, truth from lies, right from wrong.

As members of groups, we might develop an institutional mentality that condones or rationalizes practices that we would never dream of sanctioning or performing on our own.

Jefferson understood the danger of affiliation. He wrote:

"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such as addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, then I would not go there at all." (Nock: 175)

The lesson is to choose your affiliations, and your involvement in them, carefully.

Reference

Nock, A.J. (1935). Our enemy, the state. Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, LTD.