THE MANOR HOUSE
Groups, like people, engage in processes of self discovery. One of the less attractive aspects to this is that groups can be leaderless. When an individual is leaderless, we say the individual is insane. When a group is leaderless, we need to say that the group is also insane. Insanity occrus when the individual or the group despite self awareness has no leadership to limit behaviour. It is like a ship on a vast sea without a captain. The ship may or may not try to find shore. Those on the ship squabble interminably about what direction the ship should take or what allegiance it should have to what nation or people.
At birth, human beings are normally fortunate enough to have automatic systems in place that predispose new borns to survival within groups. A baby will cry for food, will gurgle to indicate satisfaction, will stare to show awareness and acknowledgement of others present. Groups are something else! Groups emerge from other groups as a recognition of a difference. The members of a new group form a group because they observe a difference even if this is only a difference in direction.
A new group forms as one individual heads away from the rest even if only in thought. Others may or may not follow. When an individual strikes out in a new direction, there is generally the thought by that individual that there is something, or someone, or some group, over the horizon perhaps that meets certain specific needs more closely. Groups, once formed, or individuals departing from a group may try to get others to join. The group recognizes that an environment may require a group of a sufficient size for it to survive. What we see in modern society is the gradual breakdown of the authority of larger groups as individuals recognize that they survive in smaller and smaller groups.
What defines this process is the force that enables the survival of the independent group. Remove that survival mechanism and you force small groups to retreat into large groups and the process of group formation rather than group disintegration ensues. Ever wonder why civilizations rise and fall. It may be that the dynamics of the forces that hold a group together change and the large group can no longer survive and becomes increasingly fragmented. This dynamic occurs within groups, so there are subgroups within groups and subgroups form and move. All this is because of the processes of group discovery and group awareness. What leaders do is enable the group to discover aspects about itself that distinguish it from other groups in meaningful ways.
Technology is a very important force in the creation and destruction of groups. We have seen how the birth pill has affected the family group. We will see how the test tube baby will affect the pairing of individuals of the same or different sexes into groups.