Page 34 - The Social Animal

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-