It's a truism of American culture that any group of people is somehow stupider, meaner, and more hurtful than any of its individual members. Yet our lived daily experience is that often our most rewarding, beneficial, and joyful experiences come when being a member of a group.

I mean, we are a group right here and right now in this thread and I assume everyone participating still feels it is a net positive for them to do so. The idea that all groups become bureaucracies, mobs, or totalitarian regimes is this weird extreme perversion of American values. Call it toxic individuality.

I think a value-free and more accurate observation is that emergent properties exist: a group can have observed properties that are counter to the intentions of any of its individual members. The aggregation process itself can be dynamic, iterative, and complex in ways that break a simple coupling between invidual intent and total outcome.

This can be bad, when otherwise sane reasonable people get riled up in a mob. Or it can be good, when a choir's tone sounds more in key than any of its individual singers. It's highly dependent on both the individual members and the communication structure of the group.

Using the combined tone of a group of singers as a counterexample seems like quite a stretch. Again -- the original quote: "... the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche." He talks specifically about the emerging psyche, not some arbitrary emergent property of a group.

Can you name one organization that became MORE ethical / smarter / nicer the larger it got?

No, I don't, and I think some of the other people who think that are probably wrong.

- Terry Pratchett

Often, the most interesting insights come from experience and reflecting upon it. You know, old fashioned thinking.

That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed in much more than setting back the scientific method and thinking up all sorts of plausible things like "everything is made of air" and "the first humans were born inside a fish." The problem is that something can sound completely plausible, be internally logical, and also be completely wrong.

Ironically, you don't need to look farther than psychology's reproducibility crisis to see this in action. Tons of great and interesting insights that came from experience and reflection, that led to some bad studies and are completely unreproducible. In fact, they were so interesting and insightful that most people still think they're true. See: Stanford Prison Experiment, most of the stuff in Kahnemann's book, anything Freud said, Myers-Briggs, etc.

You know, making up some shit that sounds good.

... except at moving humanity forward regarding morality, understanding of society, politics, history, organization of civic life, philosophy, theater, poetry, arts, a few millenia forward, while spearheading democrachy, historiography and several other things besides, and establishing the whole basis for this "western civilization" thing...

>That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed in much more than setting back the scientific method and thinking up all sorts of plausible things like "everything is made of air" and "the first humans were born inside a fish." The problem is that something can sound completely plausible, be internally logical, and also be completely wrong.

I think an even more real problem is a lack of knowledge of history, and what exactly those pesky Greeks (and others before and after them) did, combined with a fanboy attitude towards the "scientific process" (as if it emerged wholesale somewhere around the 16th century or so).

The second sentence essentially says "This is due to the fact that that's how it is." I'm sure Jung has a larger context and basis for these claims, but this quote just struck me as super hand-wavy.

No, no, don’t worry. Jung was already dismissed as completely unscientific and not to be taken seriously while alive. Sadly, psychology as a field mostly remains in a dire state and still has to shed part of its let’s generously say less than rigorous past.