The Group Trap

by Harry Browne

chapter 6: The Group Trap

excerpts from _How_I_Found_Freedom_in_an_Unfree_World_ copyright 1973 by the author, Harry Browne published by Avon Books

The Group Trap is the belief that you can accomplish more by sharing responsibilities, efforts, and rewards with others than you can by acting on your own.

It's an easy trap to fall into. It's a common expression that "in union there is strength." Just the opposite is true, however. You achieve more for yourself when your rewards are dependant upon your own efforts than upon the efforts of other people.

When you join a group effort to achieve freedom, you waste precious resources on an endeavor that has very little chance of success. In the same way, group efforts are common in businesses, marriages, and even friendships, and there too the Group Trap can cause subtle problems.

Groups are not living entities. They don't think or act; _only_ _individuals_do_. And yet, any group effort is based upon the assumption of a _group_purpose_ that overrides the individual differences of its members. It's expected that the group will act as a single unit with a unified purpose.

Only individuals think -- and each one thinks differently. Their interests and desires may overlap, but each person will continue to define his own objectives and have his own opinion concerning the best way to achieve those objectives.

Perhaps each person entering a group unconsciously assumes that it will act in unison for _his_ objectives and by _his_ methods. But every other participant probably has a similar assumption about _his_ ideas.

What they get instead will inevitably be a compromise. The individual's goals and his concept of the best methods will be automatically compromised _before_ anything happens to further his objectives.

It also means a certain amount of time and effort will have to be spent to _arrange_ the compromise -- again, before anything concrete is done to further his objectives.

On the other hand, the individual who acts alone doesn't have to alter his objectives. He can employ the means he considers best suited to the objective, and he doesn't have to waste time and effort trying to arrange a compromise with partners.

INCENTIVE

Another problem is encountered in group endeavors. When the efforts and rewards are shared, it becomes apparent that the individ- ual's own efforts will have a less significant effect upon his ultimate reward than if he were acting alone.

Suppose that the group consists of two people -- a business partnership, for instance. If the two partners have agreed to work equally hard and share the rewards 50-50, the significance of each person's efforts has been cut by 50 percent. Whatever value the individual provides to the group, he'll only receive half of its reward.

Of course, he expects to get half the value added by the other person, too; but he doesn't control the other person's effort. He controls only his own effort. So what _he_ controls will produce only a half reward.

The situation is worse if the group is larger. If one hundred people are engaged in a crusade to bring about a social change of some kind, each individual's effort adds only one percent to the whole. It's doubtful that any such endeavor is won or lost by an additional one percent of effort. Consequently, the individual's participation becomes _irrelevant_ to the outcome (contrary to "get out and vote" campaigns).

Whether he goes out to work hard or stays home in bed, the outcome will be the same. In such a situation, there's a strong incentive to stay in bed. The popular answer to such reasoning is "Yes, but what if everyone thought that way?" But he isn't everyone; he's only _him_. He isn't deciding for everyone, he's merely evaluating the signifi- cance of his own actions -- and when he works in a group, his actions don't contribute much.

Sometimes this realization will cause an individual to drop out of a group entirely. More often it will simply cause him to work _less_ -- to make small decisions here and there in favor of relaxing as opposed to overdoing it.

If the arrangement were such that everything he did had a direct bearing on his own rewards, he would have a continual incentive to extend his efforts. He'd be encouraged to work harder than he would have worked under the group arrangement.

The more directly individual rewards are tied to individual achievements, the greater incentive there is to increase one's individual effort.

JOINT EFFORTS

Joint efforts are possible. In fact, they're necessary to increase standards of living. You can't produce your own automobile from scratch -- nor can you really produce much of anything without relying upon the efforts of others. You need tools, materials, and information; and you can't produce all those things yourself.

This problem is solved by what is called the specialization of labor. When some individuals spend all their working time producing a single product, while others specialize in producing other products, the result is greater production of all products. The specialization of labor has made it possible for many more things to be available to everyone. {Note from Rick: available to everyone who can afford them. The specialization of labor is also one factor that makes jobs boring and dehumanizing.}

It's necessary to exchange with others to acquire whatever you need along the way, but you don't have to enter into sharing agree- ments of the kind described earlier. It's more efficient to _separate_ responsibilities and rewards, not share them.

The Group Trap is the assumption that greater strength can be achieved by sharing. Just the opposite happens: Individual objectives are watered down, time and effort are wasted in arranging compromises, and individual incentive is reduced. The individual becomes much less flexible and mobile, because he must deal with others before getting on with the task at hand. As Thoreau said, "The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready."

VARIATIONS

There are numerous variations of the Group Trap.

A typical example is the concept of _democracy_. If the majority vote of the group is binding upon all, the individual forfeits his ability to make decisions for himself.

Politicians love to declare that the "people have chosen for themselves at the polls." But the "people" don't have a mind; only individuals do. Those who have voted against the winner are now under the jurisdiction of someone who doesn't represent them.

Even the concept of the "majority" is often misleading. In any election, many people vote against the winner, many others abstain from voting because they realize their individual votes are irrelevant to the outcome, and others aren't even allowed to vote (but are bound by the outcome). Those who voted for the winner are usually a minority -- and even they may have voted only for the least unpleasant alternative.

Another variation of the Group Trap is the assumption that you're responsible for people who are starving in other parts of the world. You could work for the rest of your life to change that -- but your effort would never make a noticeable dent in the problem.

You're in the Group Trap, too, any time you assume that someone can speak on behalf of anyone but himself. When someone tells you that you owe something to your country, to what is he referring? Your "country" consists of more than 200 million individuals with different attitudes, desires, activities, and principles. Do you owe it to every one of them to do as each of them wants you to do? What you "owe to your country" is really what someone wants you to do to please _him_, but for which he's unwilling to make it worth your while.

In the same way, no one can speak on behalf of all Americans, Negroes, Mexicans, women, or students. The attempt to do so is an attempt to create pressure in favor of what the _speaker_ wants.

Another comment on using organization(s) to achieve libertarian ends (Alfredo Bonanno in _From_Riot_to_Insurrection_):

Anarchists have also had illusions... Even in recent times there has been much enthusiasm for the CNT's* rise from the ashes, partic- ularly from those who seem to be the most radical entrepeneurs of the new roads of reformist anarchism today.

...For a long time the anarchist movement has acted like an organization of synthesis, that is, like a political party. Not the whole of the anarchist movement, but certainly its organized forms.

Let us take the Italian FAI** for example. To this day it is an organization of sythesis. It is based on a platform, its periodic conventions are the central focus for its activity, and it looks to reality outside from the point of view of a "connecting" center, i.e. it sees itself as the synthesis between the reality outside the movement and that within the specific anarchist movement.

...Well, this mentality has faded. Not only among younger com- rades who want an open and informal relationship with the movement, but, more important, it has faded in social reality itself. If industrial conditions of production made the syndicalist struggle reasonable, as it did the marxist methods and those of the libertarian organizations of synthesis, today, in a post-industrial perspective, in a reality that has changed profoundly, the only possible strategy for anarchists is an informal one.

...The party of Marxism is dead. That of the anarchists too. What is dead is the static anarchism of the traditional organizations, based on demanding better conditions, and having quantitative goals.

* CNT = Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo(Spanish anarcho-syndicalist political party)

** FAI = Federazione Anarchica Italiana