honestly TRUUUUUUE!!
This is the case with pretty much all collective entities, they’re all cut from the same cloth:
businesses, sports teams, fandoms, private clubs, political parties - they’re all manifestations of tribal instinct and one of its “”“features”“” (which, in this very synthetic habitat we’ve created for ourselves can become quite maladaptive if not toxic) is the displacement of personal accountability.
I’m saying, yes, groups are not moral but people can be moral - and I am hypothesizing THAT is why.
Parallel processing has enabled humans to do absolutely incredible things.
But it has also enabled humans to do truly heinous things too.
Bystander effect, “just following orders”, toeing the party line, passing the buck, riding the bandwagon… I think it’s not enough to teach people that only people themselves are capable of making moral judgments, but that we absolutely should also teach people that abstract gestalt entities that we become part of, that we allow to subsume us, are not.
Even the ones that aren’t outright evil are only so by the individual decisions of the people it comprises–through either luck or mindfulness–steering it away from brutal shortcuts that spend others’ lives for the sake of its own perpetuation.
It’s kind of ironic though that the people who decry “groupthink” the loudest are the ones that seem to be doing it the most. I’d sure like to think that we’ll learn to do a better job of identifying that blindspot (which such distributed collective entities exploit to enhance their own survival odds) and countering it, then teaching the next generations to look for it and counter it too.
… if we’ll even be around to see any generations that may exist after us.
piefed.social/u/QuantumStorm@lemmy.world has it right, i believe - but i’m ashamed to admit that i only know that because i had to look it up after originally hearing it from … a fanfic, of all things.
So I have stolen what was already stolen! The writer of said fic was making a direct WH40k reference
(the fanfic in question is “Shinji and Warhammer 40K” and i cannot possibly describe the appeal of it more adequately than TV Tropes did.)