Page 34 - The Social Animal
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16 The Social Animal


           in making group decisions. Consider the following examples: In his
           memoirs, Albert Speer, one of Adolf Hitler’s top advisers, describes
           the circle around Hitler as one of total conformity—deviation was not
           permitted. In such an atmosphere, even the most barbarous activities
           seemed reasonable because the absence of dissent, which conveyed the
           illusion of unanimity, prevented any individual from entertaining the
           possibility that other options might exist.

               In normal circumstances people who turn their backs on real-
               ity are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those
               around them. In the Third Reich there were not such correc-
               tives. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in
               a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed
               picture of a fantastical dream world which no longer bore any
               relationship to the grim outside world. In those mirrors I could
               see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over. 4

           A more familiar but perhaps less dramatic example concerns some of
           the men involved with former president Richard Nixon and his “palace
           guard” in the Watergate cover-up. Here, men in high government of-
           fice—many of whom were attorneys—perjured themselves, destroyed
           evidence, and offered bribes without an apparent second thought.This
           was due, at least in part, to the closed circle of single-mindedness that
           surrounded the president in the early 1970s. This single-mindedness
           made deviation virtually unthinkable until after the circle had been
           broken. Once the circle was broken, several people (for example, Jeb
           Stuart Magruder, Richard Kleindienst, and Patrick Grey) seemed to
           view their illegal behavior with astonishment, as if it were performed
           during some sort of bad dream. John Dean put it this way:

               Anyway, when you picked up the newspaper in the morning
               and read the new cover story that had replaced yesterday’s cover
               story, you began to believe that today’s news was the truth.This
               process created an atmosphere of unreality in the White House
               that prevailed to the very end. If you said it often enough, it
               would become true. When the press learned of the wiretaps on
               newsmen and White House staffers, for example, and flat de-
               nials failed, it was claimed that this was a national security mat-
               ter. I’m sure many people believed that the taps were for
               national security; they weren’t. That was concocted as a justifi-
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