Presentation

Groups are understood more like a way of thinking and feeling than objective presence of human pluralities.

To start walking towards an initial approach to the mentality of groups, which is a non-authoritarian, subjective, and plural mentality, it is necessary to put our evaluative mentality on hold for as long as possible (not permanently, because it is not possible). It tends to evaluate before it perceives, in a way that it perceives only what is thought of as "fair" (Possible? True? Licit? Etc.), thus constituting the prevalence of an ethical and guilt - producing mentality, eliminating (as subjective) all the reality not appreciated by the ruling power.

This has been the mental device of authoritarianism for millenniums. That is, the unmeasured use and domination of the minority when confronted with the immense, subjugated, manipulated, and scared majority. Fear has produced guilt, and that guilt has allowed fear, thus the conservation of unmeasured use in the millenniums. To be that self-conscious, even more difficult in today's working world, we have to reason together very slowly, and to learn this very habit: to think together, which we will further refer to as collective thought, or plural subject.

This "reasoning together" can be defined as the rejection of a conception of thought as a purely individual and solitary fact, and as the construction of an idea of thought that extends beyond the individual boundaries, and that also understands the group (group thinking) and the irrationalities (emotive intelligence, or emotive language).

This way, the idea of group is closely related to the idea of well being, and it is its origin. The passing from a relation of couple to a relation of group, the passing from an individual thought to a plural and group thought, the dilatation of time and the enlargement of the temporal horizon, are evidently an exit from scarcity and a plea for abundance. Substituting the individual with the group, the well being is multiplied because there is a larger abundance of resources.

From this intuitive relation between group and abundance, wealth, and well being, derives the base of democracy itself and the non-innocent political nature of the idea of group itself. The exploration of this idea today is not sufficient and requires a big acceleration effort because it represents the doorway to group thinking, without which the transparency and the awareness of the social transformations we are living risk to remain insufficient, therefore dangerous to our own well being.

Enzo Spaltro, President of the TTG Association