groupthink
and students alike, repeated one another’s claims until so many people make the same claims that everybody believes them. Such conformity can be psychologically overpowering, but it does not promise to yield the truth or to communicate anything significant. David Sacks and Peter Thiel, The Diversity Myth (1995)2
It might seem odd to begin this book with a chapter on political correctness. But to anyone old enough to remember the days before it crept up on us all, it is one of the oddest things to have happened in our lifetime. In fact, the evolution of political correctness over the decades is a perfect case study in the workings of groupthink. And in one way or another the mentality behind it is relevant to all the other examples we shall be looking at. By way of a prelude, we start with a handful of episodes which happened to be making news around the autumn of 2017, when I began writing this book, because they typify the strangely surreal world political correctness has led us into. In October 2017 it was reported that, in the Leicestershire town of Loughborough, the local council had warned a market trader that, following a complaint from an anonymous member of the public, she must stop selling ‘offensive’ items on her stall. These turned out to be pottery mugs decorated with pictures of twelfth-century monks, the Knights Templar, who at the time of the Crusades had gone out to the Holy Land to protect Christian pilgrims going to Jerusalem from being slaughtered by the Saracens. Because these monks had murdered Muslims, claimed the complainant, any Muslim passing the trader’s stall might be offended. When the stallholder ignored this warning on the grounds that it seemed ridiculous, the council withdrew her licence to trade anywhere in the town.3
David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel (1995/1998), The Diversity Myth: Multi-culturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus. Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute. 3 Richard Littlejohn, ‘Right-on crusade that makes mugs of us all’, Daily Mail, 13 October 2017. 2
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