ABSTRACT
There is a scene in the film Men in Black in which Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones), inducting Agent J (Will Smith) into the agency responsible for monitoring extraterrestrial refugees in America tells him that individuals are clever but, taken together, people are stupid. In fact, it is not so much that en masse people are stupid, but that thinking in groups is extremely difficult. Britzman reminds us of Freud’s reasons why this might be so:
[P]eople are susceptible to each other . . . [and] it is more difficult to think in a group than to think alone. Part of the difficulty is that the restraint or repression one might not notice when one is alone is given free-play when with others. Anxiety is contagious, and new worries can be made in groups. Another difficulty when thinking in groups is that groups tend to think in literal extremes, in exaggerations, and through an absolute splitting of good and bad, inside and outside.
