It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Snowtown, and Muck-Duck: How Groupthink Is Portrayed in Pop Culture

Dee and Dennis are, to quote a problematic R&B superstar, trapped in a closet.

“We’ve got to get out of here Dennis, we need a plan”.

To further clarify, Dee and Dennis Reynolds are trapped in the closet of a bedroom of a house they broke into. This is not a necessarily a new situation for this duo.

The assumed owner, we see through the slated doors, is sorting through her dresser, unaware of the intruders hiding behind her.

“I say we bum rush her and choke her out with her own belt”, Dee suggests.

Dennis then responds with what may be “the gang”‘s most self-reflective moment of clarity.

“Dee, you are escalating this shit. This is exactly what I’m talking about. We immediately escalate everything to a ten. It’s ridiculous, I mean, someone comes in with some propostorus plan or idea, and then all of a sudden everybody’s on the gas, nobody’s on the brakes, nobody’s thinking. Everybody’s just talking over each other with one idiotic idea after another, until finally, we find ourselves in a situation where we’ve broken into somebody’s house, and the homeowner is home.”

“Yes, yes”, Dee agrees.

“I’m sick of it, Dee. Okay. We can’t do this anymore. We have got to examine our process.”

William H. Whyte himself couldn’t have written a group of characters more susceptible to groupthink, than the characters of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

And this soliloquy, from the cold open of Season 7’s 9th episode “The Gang Gets Trapped”, may be the best description the show has ever put forth of its characters (collectively known as “the gang”) most critical folly: extreme and intense groupthink.

“These are the theories of lunatics” is not only Dennis’ reaction to the reasons Dee and Frank come up with for why someone – the woman whose home they’ve broken into – could possibly have ticket stubs to 14 separate Jay Leno stand-up shows, it is a meta-commentary on the entire television series and the broken minds of the characters that inhabit it.

Here’s a fun wiki I found documenting all the crimes The Gang has committed:

LIST OF CRIMES COMMITTED BY “THE GANG”

Every week on It’s Always Sunny the gang hypes each other up with one ridiculous scheme (welfare fraud) or another (hostile corporate takeover), and, as Dennis aptly summarized above, propel one another down a terrible rabbit hole-of-a-plan that inevitably goes about as wrong as it possibly could. Like the time they tried to create a bar in the back of a van and it just turned into kidnapping people, robbing them, and dropping them off outside of town.

But the original coinage of “groupthink” wouldn’t exactly describe The Gang of Paddy’s Pub.

Now a term commonly thought of as relating to a relatively small, insulated group of decision makers, Whilliam H. Whyte actually came in super hot with his take in 1952, in an article for Fortune, basically saying the entire country was under the spell of groupthink.

Seeing as “Groupthink” was written right after World War 2, which was basically right after World War 1, Whyte starts by summarizing modern life as something that has outpaced our ability to comprehend it.

in big cities-we have created a whole new social structure for ourselves, and one so complex that we’re still trying to figure out just what happened

Because of this new society, Social Engineers (a term he uses a lot) were now taking over the minds of the young generation.

On this modern man Whyte attempts to sarcastically lament, but actually just ends up regular lamenting:

And what a dismal fellow he is ! For the man we are now presented with is Social Man — completely a creature of his environment, guided almost totally by the whims and prejudices of the group, and incapable of any real self-determination of his destiny. Only through social engineeringi. e., applied groupthink–can he be saved. 

Fortune

According to Whyte, groupthink isn’t just the idea that a small group of people will make an incorrect or bad decision, it is a society-wide phenomenon heavily influenced by America’s military victory in WWII: that deference to hierarchy is now of utmost value.

This new society is, according to Whyte…

…morally-relativist to the point of amorality…

The old absolute moral values are disappearing. There is still black and white, to be sure, but it is no longer determined by fixed precepts; it is determined rather by what the group thinks is black and white — and if someone does things the way his group does, well, who is to censure him for his loyalty?

…anti-individual…

groupthinker is taught that one wins by being directed by others — and that the most important thing in the world is to be a team player.

and creates people who are supplicants, worshipers of The System.

 A FORTUNE analysis of 1935-36 plots and 1950-51 plots indicates that heroes and heroines have been growing remarkably submissive. Not only is the system they abide by-be it an Army camp, a business office, or a small-town environment-shown as more benevolent; in some cases the system itself becomes the deus ex machina that solves the problem.

Despite its far-reaching and overly broad generalizations, Whyte’s 1952 article spoke to me on some levels. Mostly the cranky old White guy levels.

As a man who finds himself growing older faster than he’d like, it felt like Whyte was writing about my own generation when writing about the kids of the 50s: he looks at the 1930s the way I look at Gen-X.

My parents did drugs to “drop out and tune in” – as an act of rebellion.

Gen-X had an enviable “fuck this” attitude that was certainly allowed by their generational privilege, but they still used that privilege (low college tuition, lower cost of living, the option to even become “slackers”) to give something of a “fuck you” to the system that created them.

My generation does Adderall to get better grades, we micro-dose to code better for our corporate overlords.

The kids of the 50s that Whyte laments as so many “system lovers” couldn’t hold a candle to my Millenial’s love of the system.

All this is to say, it’s a huge relief – an almost cathartic release – to see groupthink taken to such an absurd, hilarious extreme by the gang of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Because, as we’ll see, groupthink can be very, very not hilarious.

Second-Wave Groupthink and The Snowtown Murders

William H Whyte wasn’t doing imperical studies on groupthink. It was a thinkpiece, a synthesizing of social trends, that led to the coinage of the term groupthink.

The original use of the term was purposefully Orwellian, Whyte writing his article 4 years after Orwell’s 1984 , which was, itself, published 3 years after the fall of Nazi Germany.

And so it wouldn’t be until a couple decades later that Irving Janis would conduct the first scientific study on the theory of groupthink.

In the 70s, Irving Janis described the idea thusly:

Groupthink is a term of the same order as the words in the newspeak vocabulary George Orwell used in his dismaying world of 1984. In that context, groupthink takes on an invidious connotation. Exactly such a connotation is intended, since the term refers to a deterioration in mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgments as a result of group pressures

Janis studied political and military disasters (Bay of Pigs, the bombing of Pearl Harbor) through the lens of groupthink.

Janis’ theory posits, among other things, that without external influence, it’s easy for individuals with dissenting opinions to buckle to the need for group cohesion, allowing the group to do the political equivalent of breaking into a stranger’s home and getting trapped in a closet.

Later, post-Janis studies have suggested that the escalation of the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs Invasion were more products of the political egos of the Presidents Johnson and Kennedy, than Janis gave them credit for.

Kramer also argues that the presidents were the final decision-makers of the fiascos; while determining which course of action to take, they relied more heavily on their own construals of the situations than on any group-consenting decision presented to them

As much as the theories of groupthink can be scaled-up to nation invasions, I think examining it on the micro-level can be illuminating.

I’ve never felt more claustrophobic, more chest-tense, more afraid of being sucked into the world of a film than I did when watching Snowtown, director Justin Kurzel’s 2011 dramatization of Australia’s Snowtown murders in which 12 people were murdered. 8 of their bodies were found in barrels in an abandoned bank vault in Snowtown, Australia.

A ways into the film Kurzel does this thing, I want to call it “opening and closing the door”, where we follow a character up to a house, they knock on the door, the door is answered and for a brief second we hear screaming, we see an incomprehensible scene, we have just a moment to process everything, and WHAM the door is slammed in our face . We are left on the outside, terrified, intrigued, on unsure footing. (See also, the end of the film Catfish.)

That “opening and closing of the door”, to raise tension without explanation, is a metaphor for the entirety of Snowtown: we are introduced to a world run by a cult-leading serial-killer who manipulates others (particularly, the meek, impressionable Jamie Vlassakis) to carry out his gruesome, torturous murders.

Kurzel shows us the world of Snowtown, and then shows us the door, spitting us back out into our lives to deal with that shit.

In watching Snowtown we are helpless, trapped in Jamie’s body the same way Jamie is: being completely manipulated by a man of pure evil. We scream at him to run and get help, to do anything but remain under the spell of John Justin Bunting, whose imperative to kill whomever he deems pedophilic is the driving force behind his group’s particular brand of groupthink.

There are certainly other dynamics and psychogical forces happening in the Snowtown murders. Everything from sexual abuse to psychopathy to dynamics of power.

But the groupthink aspect may be the most relatable: a charismatic man enters an isolated community, a small world without fathers, promising protection and guidance.

Once in, Bunting is manipulative, yes. But the isolation of the group, both psychological and physical, make them prime victims for groupthink.

In their isolation from humanity, those in the group lose their humanity, and the morals of the group become the morals of the individual, dangerously unexamined.

Quick, some less-intense pop culture examples of groupthink:

• Kodak was once the leader of everything commercial camera. And then they refused to invest in digital. #groupthink.
• In the 1990s, the owners of the largest retail chain of movie theaters said they didn’t “believe in stadium seating”. They went bankrupt. #groupthink
• People (White people) thought that Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad was a good idea. Like, a lot of people. Like enough to write it, review it, approve it, and spend millions of dollars on filming and distributing it. #groupthink

Groupthink Doesn’t Really Explain It

One of the problems with using the language of a dystopian novel when naming your social phenomenon is that one day the language of that novel will fade away, will not be so present in the culture, and your social phenomena, should you have been successful in identifying it, will no longer be referential.

Your term will, one day, no longer be ironic, no longer just evoke the kind of newspeak that 1984 was satirizing, but will instead, successfully have brought the language of a dystopian novel into our society.

Groupthink, if thought of as a type of group-based morality, is responsible for some of humanities worst acts: genocides, oppression, lynchings, sacrificial murders, holocaust.

And yet, what person would ever look at all of those activities and describe them as “groupthink”?

The term lynching is evocative of the act it describes.

There’s a reason it’s called murder “and not muckduck” as Dwight Schrute so wryly observed.

If groupthink was meant to feel brutalist, it now feels underwhelming, unable to convey the nature of what it is explaining.

Yet, in that way, groupthink grossly embodies the phenomena it describes: death by bureaucracy.

The clinical deadness of the term reminds one of Hannah Arendt,

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.

Arendt as quoted on BrainPickings

Borrowing again from Arendt, groupthink is as banal a term as the evil it can be used to describe. It no longer, as Whyte perhaps intended, transcends that banality.

If groupthink as a phenomena can lead to death – be it bureaucratic or with cult-led disorganization – then groupthink as a term fits in with many Western, English terms for death.

That is to say, we do not currently talk about death in ways commensurate with the experience.

Here are some examples.

• Pass away
• Transition
• Euthanasia

And here are some examples that need context in order to understand that they’re even referencing death.

• Advanced Directive: sounds like it could literally mean anything, but is a very specific document you create while you’re lucid regarding the decisions of when and how to kill you (to legally “pull the plug”, another one of these terms) should you fall into a coma.
• Hospice: that place and period in your life where, if you’re lucky I guess, you die.
• Ethnic cleansing: are we really still using this term? “Cleansing” is the language of the people who think that what they are doing is “cleansing”. Ethnic Mass Murder is probably more accurate.
• Stigmatized property: this is what realtors call a house in which someone died.
• Excited Delirium: a crazy way to describe people dying in police custody (or, as further sanitized by the NBCI, a “pre-hospital setting”) while under – or not even under – the influence of drugs.
• Exposure: what happens when nature kills you.
• Failure to Thrive: sounds innocuous, but could also be called “the elderly losing the will to live and dying as a result”. “Failure to Thrive” conveniently removes any spiritual connection to an elderly person’s experience of losing their will to live, and any discussion of how that will is connected to our physical survival. “Elderly person”, by the way, means a person closer to death than most other people.

And just a couple of other terms that seem kind of related.

• Regulatory Capture is a nice ass, neo-liberal way to say: consultants getting rich off corruption and the murdering of regulation.
• Enhanced Interrogative Techniques
• Food Aggression is a nice ass way to say, “this dog will fight you to death, if it has to, over this food”.

The requirement of so much context for so many of these terms is in itself indicative of how far to the edges of our living lives we push death.

If we continue to use the term groupthink to explain the phenomena of groupthink, we may never shine the light on the phenomena that it needs.

And that’s what the antidote to all groupthink has in common: light.

When the light of the world woke up and saw what the CIA and JFK had done in Cuba, they recoiled, for more reasons than one.

When TV came to the American South in the 1950s and 60s, showing the world the viciousness of Jim Crow, it helped to accelerate the work of activists to bring true justice for Black Americans.

When smartphones came to cities in the 2000s and 2010s, it illuminated for White people the brutality with which our privilege is paid: with the oppression and murder of Black men by agents of the state.

I do think Whyte was correct in thinking that groupthink could occur on a national level.

White people “not that bad”-ing Black people’s stories of racism and police brutalities for generations is a prime example. The rationalizing and the dismissing, the forgetting of the unpleasant thing, is something we White people can no longer do. The reality of America is one we can no longer escape.

Just like – but mostly, not at all like – the way Charlie could no longer escape the name “dirtgrub” and so, 20 years after graduating, finds himself at his High School reunion, reverting to his old habits of huffing homemade-mustard gas until he blacks out and gets wedgied by the cool kids in the finale of an It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s season.