Groupthink

Groupthink is a very well-documented psychological tendency of humans to tend to agree with each other, and hold back objections or dissent even when it is obvious to them that the group is moving strongly in a very wrong direction.

See w:groupthink

Groupthink is sometimes misleadingly referred as community values: there are no "community values". Communities are compromises of values created to achieve bodily protections. The community shares no values other than protecting its own bodies.

This is relevant to Consumerium in many ways, see what links here

One way to control groupthink is to steer it into factions that can at least have sharp differences with each other. In democracy this means dividing into political party structures that debate the actual policy while a bureaucracy implements the policy only of the ruling party.

It is doubtable that factions are a cure for the groupthink sickness. Groupthink in factions seems worse than in communities because of the need 2 sharpen differences in the competitive situation. -- T2R

It only seems worse to morons: factions are smaller than the larger group they are trying to steer, and since they are forced to accept some rules on how they compete with each other to do that steering, you have more acceptance of reciprocity and equality of factions (trying "insider vs. outsider" for unfair treatment!), and smaller groups that are at least capable of seeing how their biases fit together.