Sleepwalkers With Nuclear Weapons

The Groupthink Machine

How Irving Janis Decoded Elite Stupidity

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy assembled the most brilliant advisory team in American history. These were not idiots. Harvard graduates, Rhodes Scholars, seasoned diplomats, military strategists with decades of experience. And they unanimously approved what Janis himself would later call a “stupid, patchwork plan” to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The result was one of the most embarrassing foreign policy disasters in American history.

Yale psychologist Irving Janis spent years trying to understand how this happened. His answer, published in 1972’s Victims of Groupthink, gave us a word that should be tattooed on the forehead of every policymaker on earth: groupthink.

“I use the term groupthink as a quick and easy way to refer to the mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive ingroup that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action.”

Translation for the rest of us: when everyone in the room agrees with each other too much, they stop thinking. Not because they’re stupid. Because they’re human.

The Eight Symptoms That Should Keep You Up at Night

Janis didn’t just name the disease. He dissected it. He identified eight symptoms that appear with terrifying consistency across every catastrophic group decision from Pearl Harbor to Vietnam to Watergate.

The Bay of Pigs to Cuban Missile Crisis: A Study in Learning

Here’s the plot twist that should give everyone hope: Kennedy learned. After the Bay of Pigs humiliation, he completely restructured how his team made decisions. He invited outside experts. He held informal meetings. He formed subgroups. He sometimes left the room entirely so his presence wouldn’t influence the discussion.

Eighteen months later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis—arguably the closest humanity has ever come to nuclear annihilation—his reformed process produced brilliant, calibrated decision-making. Janis found zero symptoms of groupthink. Kennedy’s team saved the world precisely because they’d learned from their worst mistake.

Calling White Black

Asch’s Conformity Experiments & Why Smart People Lie

Solomon Asch wanted to prove something reassuring about human nature. In 1951, this Polish-American psychologist at Swarthmore College set up what he thought would be a slam-dunk demonstration that rational people resist social pressure when the truth is obvious. Instead, he accidentally proved the opposite and spent the rest of his career disturbed by what he found.

The setup was diabolically simple. Show people two cards. One has a single line on it. The other has three lines of obviously different lengths. Ask them which line matches. A child could get this right. And in the control group, with no social pressure, the error rate was less than 0.7%. Basically nobody got it wrong.

But here’s the twist: Asch planted seven actors in each group. These confederates were instructed to unanimously give the wrong answer on 12 of 18 trials. The real subject always answered last or second-to-last, after hearing everyone else confidently state an answer that was clearly, obviously, mathematically wrong.

“The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern.”

They Knew They Were Lying

Post-experiment interviews revealed the most disturbing part: most conformers knew their answers were wrong. They weren’t confused. They weren’t persuaded. They just didn’t want to be the weirdo who disagreed with everyone else. They prioritized social harmony over observable reality.

Psychologists identified two mechanisms at work. Normative influence: conforming to be liked and accepted, even while privately disagreeing. And informational influence: assuming the group must know something you don’t, especially when the situation is ambiguous. The second one gets exponentially more dangerous in complex domains like foreign policy, where the “answer” isn’t printed on a card.

The One Finding That Should Change Everything

A 2023 replication study confirmed the effect remains robust: 33% error rate in the standard condition, 38% for political opinions. Human psychology hasn’t evolved in seventy years. We’re still the same conforming primates we’ve always been.

Just Following Orders

Milgram’s Obedience Studies & the Banality of Evil

In 1961, while Adolf Eichmann sat in a bulletproof glass booth in Jerusalem claiming he was “just following orders,” Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram was asking the most dangerous question in social psychology: would ordinary Americans do the same thing?

He expected the answer to be no. He surveyed psychiatrists beforehand. They predicted that at most 1–3% of subjects would administer the maximum shock. Americans, after all, were different. Exceptional. We would never blindly follow immoral orders.

These were not sadists. They sweated. They trembled. They laughed nervously. They begged the experimenter to stop. But when the man in the lab coat said “The experiment requires that you continue,” they continued. They pressed the button while another human being (an actor, but they didn’t know that) screamed in agony, pounded on the wall, and eventually went silent.

“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”

The Variations Tell the Real Story

Milgram didn’t stop at one experiment. He ran variations to find what would break the obedience.

A 2012 French television replication dressed up as a game show achieved 81% obedience—even higher than Milgram’s original 65%. The 21st century didn’t make us better. If anything, the authority structures got more diffuse and harder to identify, making them harder to resist.

Agency Theory: The Mechanism of Moral Abdication

Milgram’s explanation was elegant and terrifying: people obey when they believe the authority will take responsibility for consequences. They enter what he called an “agentic state”—they stop seeing themselves as moral actors and start seeing themselves as instruments of someone else’s will. The bureaucrat who processes the paperwork. The analyst who writes the memo. The diplomat who transmits the talking points. None of them feel personally responsible for the policy. They’re just following the process.

The Mob Inside

Deindividuation & the Death of Personal Accountability

In 1895, French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind and freaked everyone out. His core insight: anonymity plus collective emotion equals the dissolution of individual moral restraint. When you become part of a group—any group—your personal identity gets submerged. You stop thinking with your own brain and start thinking with the group’s brain.

Le Bon was writing about literal mobs in the streets, but the principle scales beautifully to elite institutions. Festinger, Pepitone, and Newcomb formalized the concept in 1952 as “deindividuation”—a psychological state where personal identity becomes submerged in group identity.

The Five Mechanisms of Moral Dissolution

The Sleepwalkers

How Europe Stumbled Into WWI Without Meaning To

Christopher Clark’s magisterial 2012 study The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 remains the most chilling book you can read in the current geopolitical moment. Not because it’s about 1914. Because it’s about right now.

“The protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.”

Clark’s core thesis is that no single country was solely responsible for WWI. It was a chain of decisions by different actors, by no means inevitable, where each power acted rationally within their subjective logic but failed to grasp the immensity of consequences. Every leader thought they were being prudent. Every general staff believed their plans were sound. Every diplomat thought the crisis could be “localized.”

The Austrian Hedgehog Syndrome

Clark’s description of Austrian decision-making should be required reading for every national security advisor on the planet: the Austrians “resembled hedgehogs scurrying across a highway with their eyes averted from the rushing traffic.” They glimpsed the possibility of Russian mobilization and general European war but—and this is the critical part—they never integrated it into their actual decision-making process. They saw the oncoming truck. They chose not to think about it.

The German Contribution: Blithe Confidence

Germany’s role was defined by what Clark calls “blithe confidence in the feasibility of localisation.” They supported Austria-Hungary while assuming the resulting war could be kept small and contained. They misjudged Austria’s chances of a quick war with Serbia. They discounted Belgian resistance. They believed Britain would stay neutral. And above all—like every other power—they showed no real grasp of the immensity of the war they were about to unleash.

The Contemporary Parallel That Clark Himself Drew

In a 2014 interview, Clark noted the parallel: all leaders feared a catastrophic outcome, but that shared fear wasn’t enough to force collaboration. None of the individuals who brought about WWI actually wanted war. Certainly none wanted the war that actually happened. Yet they got it anyway, because the structures they operated within—the alliances, the mobilization timetables, the assumptions about honor and credibility—had a momentum of their own.

The Blob

Washington’s Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone

In 2016, Ben Rhodes—Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor—gave the foreign policy establishment a nickname that stuck: “The Blob.” He meant the permanent DC foreign policy class committed to perpetuating its own power and reinforcing the status quo. Career officials at State and the Pentagon. Think tank analysts at CFR, Brookings, AEI. Congressional staffers. Media figures. All promoting the same basic worldview: American primacy, military interventionism, NATO expansion, regime change.

The irony? Rhodes himself was part of the Blob. Despite positioning the Obama administration as challengers to the establishment consensus, they ended up conforming at almost every turn. More troops to Afghanistan. Failed to close Guantánamo. Continued most Bush-era policies. The Blob absorbs its critics. That’s what it does.

The Revolving Door of Consensus

The mechanism is beautifully self-perpetuating. Career advancement depends on conformity. From undergraduate internships to NSC positions, access to opportunities flows through top mentors who prefer similar worldviews. Challenge the consensus? Good luck getting that Brookings fellowship. Question NATO expansion? Forget that State Department appointment. The rewards for conformity are proximity to power when your party’s in office, and lucrative consulting or think tank positions when you’re out.

WestExec Advisors, the consulting firm founded by Antony Blinken, is the perfect symbol. A revolving door between government positions and private-sector influence-peddling, where the same people cycle through the same institutions reinforcing the same assumptions decade after decade. Albright Stonebridge Group, same thing. The Center for American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute—nominally left and right, but remarkably aligned on the fundamentals of American global military dominance.

“What Biden needs is not mechanics but architects: people with the imagination and vision to create new arrangements and approaches. Unfortunately, because today’s establishment places a high priority on conformity and remaining within a safe and increasingly nostalgic consensus, these are not the sort of people who rise to positions of power.”

The 16-Hour Blindfold

One of the most underappreciated mechanisms: these people work 16-hour days. They don’t have time to question whether the entire policy heading is catastrophically wrong. They’re too busy executing. The system runs on momentum—a trillion-dollar annual enterprise that plows forward like an ocean liner. By the time anyone looks up from their desk long enough to ask “Are we sure about this?,” the ship has already turned toward the iceberg. And everyone else in the room is nodding approvingly.

The Foam Finger Problem

Dunning-Kruger at a Civilizational Scale

Here’s where it gets personal. The average American waves a big foam finger and chants “We’re Number One!” while living in a country that can’t land on the Moon anymore (despite having done it in 1969 with slide rules and less computing power than a modern phone), can’t build a hypersonic missile that works reliably, can’t produce enough artillery shells to sustain a single proxy war, and can’t build new ships fast enough to replace peacetime losses, let alone wartime ones.

This is the Dunning-Kruger effect operating at civilizational scale. In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger demonstrated that people who are bad at something systematically overestimate their competence—precisely because they lack the knowledge to recognize what they’re missing. The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member.

The Material Reality vs. The Mythology

The foam-finger crowd still operates on a mythology built during the unipolar moment of the 1990s, when America genuinely had no peer competitors. That moment is over. The material basis for dominance has been eroding for decades, and the erosion is accelerating.

As Stephen Walt wrote, every great power in history has succumbed to the hubris of believing its situation was exceptional. Athens did it. Napoleonic France did it. Imperial Japan did it. And in each case, the gap between perceived capability and actual capability produced catastrophic miscalculation.

“Most great powers have considered themselves superior to their rivals and have believed that they were advancing some greater good when they imposed their preferences on others. The British thought they were bearing the ‘white man’s burden.’ The French invoked la mission civilisatrice. Even officials of the Soviet Union genuinely believed they were leading the world toward a socialist utopia.”

The Double Standard Nobody Talks About

A retired Chinese admiral once described the US Navy in East Asia as being like a man with a criminal record wandering just outside the gates of a family home. Imagine another great power operating warships in the Caribbean, lecturing America about its behavior, and appointing itself neutral arbiter of the region. The scenario is absurd precisely because Americans can’t see their own behavior the way others see it. That’s not malice—it’s Dunning-Kruger. You can’t recognize what you don’t know you don’t know.

The exceptionalist mythology insists that the United States is the primary guardian of international law. Yet the putative rule-maker has more often broken rules and acted in ways it would never tolerate from any other nation. The invasion of Iraq. The drone assassination program. The NSA’s global surveillance apparatus. Extraordinary rendition. Each of these would be considered acts of war or crimes against sovereignty if conducted by Russia or China. But when America does it, it’s “leadership.”

Synthesis

Drunken Hubris + Groupthink + Nuclear Weapons = …

Now put it all together. Every psychological mechanism we’ve examined is operating simultaneously in the Western foreign policy establishment right now. This isn’t conspiracy theory. This is documented, peer-reviewed social science applied to observable behavior.

The Groupthink Checklist Applied to Current Western Policy

The 1914 Parallel Is Not Metaphorical

Multiple powers viewing themselves as threatened and dominated. Overinterpretation of diplomatic signals. Blithe confidence in “localization” of conflicts. No grasp of the immensity of potential war. Elites on autopilot, not scrutinizing unprecedented dangers. Each side acting “rationally” within subjective logic while sleepwalking toward catastrophe. Every single element Clark identified in 1914 is present today, with one critical difference: the powers involved now have nuclear weapons.

The architects of Cold War containment, senior defense officials, former ambassadors to Moscow—all warned in the 1990s that NATO expansion would create exactly the crisis we’re living through now. Owen Harries warned in 1996 that humiliating Russia further would be like making a wounded animal desperate. He was right. They were all right. And they were all ignored, because the Blob’s consensus said otherwise, and 75% of people in any room will call white black rather than be the one dissenter.

When intelligent, credentialed people in positions of authority all reinforce each other’s assumptions—when dissent is career suicide, when three-quarters of people conform to obviously wrong answers to avoid social disapproval, when two-thirds obey authority figures even when administering potentially lethal shocks, when group membership dissolves personal accountability—the result is not wisdom but collective insanity dressed in a three-piece suit.

And when that collective insanity is steering great powers with nuclear arsenals toward confrontation based on an inflated sense of power and moral righteousness—when the material basis for that power is eroding while the mythology remains intact—the consequences won’t be another Bay of Pigs embarrassment. They’ll be civilizational.

The Way Out

Kennedy learned after the Bay of Pigs. He reformed. He invited dissenters. He created structures that forced his team to consider alternatives. A single dissenter in Asch’s experiments reduced conformity by 75%. Reminding Milgram’s subjects of their personal responsibility eliminated obedience almost entirely. The antidotes exist.

The sleepwalkers of 1914 were watchful but unseeing. They acted within their subjective logic without grasping the horror they were building. We have no excuse. We have the research. We have the historical examples. We have the documented mechanisms. The only question is whether anyone with power will read them in time.