August 30

Power of groups

After exploring power and leadership for two weeks, I am still not sure about research question, but things are developing.

This week, I am thinking about power of groups. It sounds so far from our daily life , but actually It happens everyday for everyone. It’s not that big , some tiny things like obey the traffic rule, wearing fashion clothes etc. are related to power of groups. We are influenced by it everyday, but we have never thought about it. Why we follow? There are two kinds of reasons to explain this question, we conform because of our lack of knowledge , also because we want to be liked by the group or we want to be the same as others , we don’t want to be so different. It is not always a bad thing, it also can be good. The laws of society need people to follow.

There are many historical event about power of groups and following. There is a political revolution called  the Cultural Revolution took place in China from 1966 to 1976 . It lasted for 10 years and it made China a total mess. The original purpose of it was making communist party pure and prevent capitalism taking over China again . But as time went by, it became much more complicated. People began to use power to do things for their own benefit, they used this chance to revenge their enemies. In that revolution, people must follow, people must say a saying of chairman Mao before talking to prove you are for for Mao. If you are against communist party and Mao, you will be followed and you don’t even know what will happen to you and your family. Many people didn’t want to take part in that revolution at first, but they joined it at last because of the pressure of group, they didn’t want people say they are not faithful to the communist party. In that situation, people lose their ability to think and to judge. All they think is how to make themselves safe and followed what others are doing. The world will become terrible if people don’t have ability to judge whether what they are doing is right or not. The difference between animals and human beings is humans have ability to judge , if we lose that ability ,we become animals. There is a evil living in everyone’s mind. Let’s imagine if we can not control them any more, what will happen? The same things happened in Lord of the Flies, when the evil in those kids’ mind were released, they can not be called kids anymore, they became beast.

In World War 2, people who were using their guns to kill people kill lives might not even think about what are they doing and why . They may just want to be praised by their leaders and make their career better .So they just did it. Many soldiers who took part in the war are sorry about what they have done before when they look back. It proves how strong the power of group is. When they were in the group, they don’t have ability to realize the truth or even though they know it, they just let it go because of the pressure of the group. But when they get out of the group, when they calm down to think about all the things, they regret.

All these thing tell us that before we do anything, think twice carefully. Make sure what you are going to do is right rather than just follow without thinking.Don’t think history will not repeat, there are many possibilities for it to repeat.What we need to do is try our best to prevent those mistakes by looking through and learning lessons from history.