It's an oxymoron to link myself with a group if I value my unique one-off-ness, if I wish to acknowledge the special symmetry of my birth, my parents and the environment into which I was born.
A group Is a blunt instrument, it's an amalgam of the myriad views and prejudice's of a collective, it's a comfort zone to withdraw into, not a sense of ones own individuality.
Why is being an individual important. Well a true individual has usually taken the time and trouble to form an opinion and what's more the courage to defend that opinion irrespective of any collateral damage of holding your view brings. Swimming against the tide is certainly more difficult than coasting with it, not flowing with public opinion can be quite bruising, segregating yourself takes courage since if your views are rubbished by the many, your opinions seem to lose currency and their value becomes limited. This is not to say they lose the value of objective analysis, rather the opposite but the weight of public opinion has an important psychological effect, 'they can't all be wrong can they', plays on our mind.
'Group think', be it religious or political, be it the mantra of the football fan or the obsession of the Vegan is a mindset to guard against, not because it's wrong but because it relies on a collective view, not necessarily one created by your own reasoning but the reasoning of others. The danger of the group is that it is susceptible to leadership which is in essence individual but not your own individuality, not your own construct based on your own life experience but based on someone else's set of assumptions.
Assumptions, ideas, beliefs are not bad in themselves in fact they can be the most revealing thing you think has happened to you. You chime in with the group and feel the security of the many which is clearly missing when you plough your own lonely furrow but at least it has the resolution and perspective of being yours. It argues from a willingness to be yourself at every step on the way, it doesn't assume you are right only that you are content to hold the view you hold since it seems to satisfy most of the background criteria on which you base your own life.
This essential criteria, this background noise is the essence of who you are. Your gender, the love and security you received when born, the space you were allowed to explore your own interests, the where-with-all which determined what you did, the environment and the prejudice within that society, and later as you released yourself from that society the norms of the new societies you were lucky or unlucky to land in, all these were the elements which made you the unique person you became and as the issues which arise and challenge you to take sides. Only your own experience is useful since the collective experience, by the fact that it's a collective, is someone else's.
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