In the decade I served on a school board, I learned a great deal about group dynamics. The most important lesson, I suppose, is that there are people -- most often highly neurotic people -- who deliberately create chaos. They undermine every effort to rationally deal with issues that require solutions. They violate norms like crediting the work of committees that were designated to analyze what needs to be done and offer solutions for the board to act on, dispiriting those desirous of accomplishing what must be done. They go behind the backs of board members to undercut the systematic workings of the board, and then drag out meetings that should take a few hours into the late night.

In consequence, many just cede power to them rather than endure the endless churning of conflicts, bad decision-making and stirred-up animus. Psychologist Wilfred Bion analyzed group dynamics, something I later wished I had studied beforehand. As I recall the experiment he did, it went like this (much simplified): People were divided into two groups only one of which was without a clear mission of what they were to do. The portion of the group that was charged with a particular task was able to accomplish it. The second group with no such mission defined fell prey to the various emotional drives of the participants.

In my experience, the drive for control by one member caused a significant disruption of the agreed-upon rational basis for achieving our goal and only the fact that the work the mission-oriented committee did was sound and its results beyond credible challenge carried the day. Other times, giving in to a member who insisted upon irrational deference and a chair which was too weak to stick to agreed-upon discussion protocol made meetings which should have lasted a couple hours into marathons lasting far longer and with less productive results, causing some members to decline further active participation. Surely, if you served on any board -- church, synagogue, condo, HOA, charity -- you’ve had similar experiences.

I thought of this when I read this post by Hussain Abdul-Hussain an analyst with the Foundation for the Defense of Freedom whose consistently thoughtful and knowledgeable posts I highly value:

This is why I oppose a ceasefire and support destroying Hamas: Deployment of violence by groups like Hamas (and Hezbollah) is not random, but carefully calculated. Whenever trust in peace is eroded, radicalization surges. Moderates (pro-peace) lose popular support, crazy Radicals become popular. Hezbollah understood this and often used war with Israel to shore up its support and weaken its moderate opponents, and Hamas did the same. The biggest problem for radicals like Hamas and Hezbollah is that their popularity dips during peacetime because they are ill-equipped to govern. It thus becomes in the best interest of Hamas and Hezbollah to make war a permanent feature, a lifestyle. That is why Hamas and Hezbollah will never win or lose. Their livelihood is war, which spells the death of their host nations, but guarantees their forever control of power.

You can see the same dynamic domestically -- creating chaos to gain power -- without trying very hard.

What do you imagine the BLM and Antifa riots are about? Or the "Defund the Police" movement?

Eroding trust in rational systems and behaviors creates radicals and radicalization empowers the worst elements of a society.

Without enforcement of existing rules about civil campus behavior, radical students and professors overcome the moderates on campuses. Those desirous of honest debate or who take different non-radical views leave or shut up, and the mission of the institution is corrupted and destroyed.(Even as richly endowed an institution as Harvard is feeling the financial pinch -- its refusal to deal with radicalization is costing it financially. The reputational cost is even greater.)

The same thing is true of our major media. Bari Weiss’s Free Press provides us with a clear view into the workings of the New York Times, where radical reporters have so undercut the paper’s mission as to make it the avatar of a newspaper turned into a leftist propaganda organ: 

The problem for the Times is that many of its own staffers do not want to investigate the sexual violence that occurred on October 7. They see it as a vulnerability to their own side in the information war about Gaza.

“There are a huge number of people at the Times who are activists, and it is their job to tell a particular story,” one Times reporter told The Free Press. “The precedent was set that this works. If it doesn’t work through one means, they will find another.”

So far, unlike previous management cave-in (forcing the resignation of an editor for daring to publish an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton), the brass seems to be holding the line, maybe because its previous weakness was so detrimental to the paper’s reputation. The previous weakness has empowered the radicals, however, and it’s a tossup if the paper can ever recover.

Weaponizing hate and inducing paranoid fancies of danger to gain control is now, too, a feature in too many countries including ours, as Michael Shellenberger observes: 

The US and other governments around the world are hyping hate in order to weaponize the government against their political enemies. Ever since the 2019 shooting in New Zealand, governments have been using so-called hate speech, fake news, and misinformation as justifications for censorship. In Ireland, the government is pushing hate speech legislation that would allow police to invade homes and seize phones and computers. In Canada, Justin Trudeau is pushing legislation that would allow the government to sentence individuals to life in prison for things they said. And it was recently revealed that the Biden White House worked with one of the leading groups that hype hate, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, to demand Facebook and other social media platforms to remove content and people they don't like. The Biden administration also endorsed the "Christchurch Call to Action to Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online," which governments created in 2019 to justify censorship. This focus on so-called hatred, harmful content, and extremist content is extremely dangerous. What one person thinks is extreme, another person may view as common sense. For the government to decide what is extreme is a way of labeling someone as a potential terrorist threat. We saw this clearly with the Trudeau government's suppression of the Canadian trucker protests in Ottawa, in which people's bank accounts were frozen simply for supporting the anti-vaccine mandate. The same could happen in the United States. There is no reliable connection between people's beliefs and violence. Attempting to stop violence by censoring speech is totalitarian and Orwellian. It effectively criminalizes speech and creates a whole new category of pre-crime, like that depicted in the dystopian film, Minority Report. So why are governments doing this?

I think it’s safe to say that we can expect more of this drive for power through manufactured chaos, and you’ve no real choice except to resist bullying as well as you are able.